Mandy Simon takes a FISA-rific view of The Dark Knight. I've just been told I have to write a Dark Knight review for the Windy this afternoon and will be stealing her insights. Her point is after the jump because it contains a spoiler.
Towards the end of the film, the Caped Crusader asks one of his trusted confidants to conduct broad and invasive surveillance on the citizens of Gotham by essentially turning every cell phone into a microphone to locate a certain and marvelously played villain. That confidant (played by Morgan Freeman who is pretty much amazing in all he is and does) initially has the correct reaction saying, “It’s not my job to spy on 30 million people.” Wow. Imagine if that happened in real life…
Well, unfortunately, like the telecoms before him, Mr. Freeman’s character reluctantly goes along with the plan saying he’ll resign and terminate the program after “this one time.”
At least he didn’t ask for immunity.
The title of this post is from what appeared to be a 60s-era Japanese live-action Batman musical that the Alamo Drafthouse played as we were waiting for TDK to start.
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Can’t wait to see the movie!
yeah, it was an extremely big brotherly part of the movie but it went along with the idea that batman works outside of the law, not within it. He is willing to to what others aren’t or can’t.
Just wait till the next Batman film, where the Riddler takes pictures of clocks while Lucius Fox reluctantly consults a Rand-McNally atlas.
In this sci-fi instance, Batman needed to use the SONAR of all 30 million residents in the aggregate to get a complete picture of the city. Compare this to telecom’s acquiescence to allow NSA to sift through the aggregate and find what they want about individual data transmissions. It’s the philosophical difference between Google Trend Watch, and an AOL data leak.
Most of us find both creepy and Orwellian, but the former is more tolerable to the general public than the latter.