fujinice8

In the back of my mind, she says, it's the Chinese Elevator that our government could do anything that well - which is your point, Jonathan. Your hope - you're betting on incompetence. I love the show. I live in the boondocks to know why I live there. Thanks for the program. But speaking of what can be done and some of the gee-whiz, there's a scene in which Reese early on - actually, in the first episode - and he said - that happens a few times. He kind of hijacks another person's cell phone. He can hear everything that's on the phone, and he can hear everything that happens in the room where the phone might be resting at any particular moment. And he basically has control over it. So is that make believe, or is that doable now? NOLAN: Well, that's - if your phone - if you look at your phone and it's newer than six or seven years old, if it was made since 2005, the government compelled the manufacturers and the carriers to set aside enough bandwidth and the capability to turn on that microphone.
So if your phone is new and - you know, it was built in the last couple of years, and it's got power and it's within range of a cell tower, the government could be listening to you. In terms of what they do with - in the show, it's called bluejacking. And if you've kept your phone up to date, it's harder to do it these days. But it's certainly not impossible. And if you look at a couple of cases over the last couple of years with laptops and with cell phones, one with laptops where there was a school - I believe in Midwest, I think in Ohio - where they'd given the kids laptops, and surreptitiously started turning on the cameras in the laptops and watching people, watching students at home. It's a massive class action lawsuit now.
I think the idea that we're really drawn to here is that a lot of these devices that we take with us, whether it's a laptop or a cell phone, are sort of functioning as - sort of a like a Trojan horse, you know. And this is why we're sort of seeing a firmware upgrade aspect of it, because we've all got the hardware. We carry it with us everywhere. ABRAMS: For the true conspiracy theorists, I think the irony is that we're actually all paying to be monitored, you know, or to have the ability to be monitored. It's really kind of amazing. DONVAN: Julie in St. Louis, you're on TALK OF THE NATION. JULIE: Hi. This is Julie. I wanted to comment on the use of the technology as a deterrent in crime in the show, and if it exists currently. These surveillances are secretive, and people don't know about them. But if they were more public, do you think that would defer people from committing crimes in the first place by raising the cost of the crime? DONVAN: J.J., you want to take that?
ABRAMS: Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know, you know, how much you want to make people aware of, you know, how much the government will want to make people aware of what they're actually doing. And my guess is that - and funding is certainly a part of it. But I think one of the reasons that DARPA went NSA is that it was, you know, it became sort of, essentially, a black ops. And I think there's a kind of - I'm sure there's a strategy involved in that regard. And as someone who, like, I'm sure most every listener feels like they have nothing to hide, and therefore they go about their business. There is something sort of fundamentally unnerving about the notion, as public as they may make it, that we are being watched.