Are there TV Shows or Movies that actually take into account Mass Surveillance?
Are there TV Shows or Movies that actually take into account Mass Surveillance?
First time I heard about the NSA was on a Simpsons episode, the joke was that they spied on people. I also had the misfortune of reading Digital Fortress some time after that and again it depicted NSA as spying on people.
I didn’t get why people were so shocked when it turned out that NSA was spying on people.
Not exactly what you asked, but Die Hard 4, Live Free or Fie Hard, is about a fire sale.
Also the Bourne movies.
Pine Gap, TV Series 2018, Australia.
Shows fictionalized accounts of call and location tracking, and cellphone data infiltration.
That’s sort of the whole premise of The Wire, especially the 1st, 4th, and 5th seasons. The mass surveillance side is mostly shown through the cops’ perspective, and the show is now 20+ years old, but it shows an extremely realistic portrayal of how cops use surveillance to build cases against criminal organizations and career criminals.
It’s set in the early days of mass adoption of cell phones, so there are some pretty dated moments. The entire 1st season centers around monitoring a drug enterprise that uses pay phones to communicate. There’s a moment in a later season where the cops have to have text messaging and sending pictures over cell phones explained. They go into a lot of detail about what a burner phone is. It’s kind of funny in retrospect, but it was all very timely when the show originally aired.
The title “The Wire” is a reference to wire taps, ie the police getting warrants to allow them to listen to phone calls.
“Burner” phones are becoming more common in tv and movies, including the Jason Bourne movies. A phone line is mostly secure if no one knows to listen to it or who owns it.
Even assuming the NSA records everything for pattern analysis and data mining, they won’t care about most of us and can’t legally share that data with cops…. and still may not be able to identify the owner of a burner phone