391K views · Dec 11, 2015 · 1:22 · 0 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2020–2025
Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.
Why Hacker News points people here: Used as a pop-culture analogy for mass surveillance technology that now looks plausible.
“The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too”HN comment, 2024
“The Dark Knight's sonar”
Film scene of sonar-based surveillance as an analogy
Like Deja Vu ( link ), The Dark Knight's sonar ( this video ) or the series Devs. I've always thought it'd be amazing to be able to view an event from different angles via crowd-sourced videos, and that it was very doable. From an information scientist point of view, I'm glad to see it's been done.
“The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too”
Fictional surveillance tech that is plausible today
"Beautiful. Unethical. Dangerous." So says Morgan Freeman's character Lucius Fox in 2008 in The Dark Knight[0]. The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too, considering the density of WiFi/5G and research demonstrating the potential for its use as passive radar [1]. That paper metions a cooperative base station, but I am wondering if there is any value gained in knowing exactly what the traffic is (such as some of the intelligence community does) in modelling how the waves propagate and performing an even more passive observation. [0] this video [1] Samczyński et al. 2021 link
“The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day”
The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: this video
