> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
You know movies aren't real life, don't you?
They're blockbuster movies about a comic book.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
A better answer is "refuse to do it without resigning". To begin with it gives you a better chance of preventing it, because maybe they back down, whereas if you do it or leave, someone does it. Then if they fire you, well, that's not really that much worse for you than resigning, but it's worse for them because now they're retaliating against someone for having ethical objections. How does that look in the media or in front of a jury? Which is all the more incentive for them to back down.
The problem with "well just do it a little bit" is that you can travel arbitrarily far in the wrong direction by taking one step at a time.
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
There's no frame story to support this. Going by the available evidence in the movie itself, it's a conventional action movie.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
"Oh, you read as well? What do your read?"
"[this book], [that book]"
"Those are all non-fiction, any fiction?"
"I don't read fiction. If I'm not going to learn anything, it's a waste of time."
"..."
And also fiction.
Frequently at the same time.
I think the trust gained there will be hard to break from people, that in my experience, genuinely do not realize what a complete 180 these companies have done. I sometimes wonder and am fearful at what type of thing would need to happen before people en masse realize it.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
But when you have Hollywood producing this Jack Bauer trash where the protagonist is doing everything that should never be done and is still painted as our hero and champion, that's rightfully criticized as propaganda.
The problem isn't when the bad guys are seen to get away with it, the problem is when the bad guys are made out to be the good guys. If they get away with it and it doesn't leave you feeling uncomfortable then it better be because the point was that they were never really the bad guys, because the alternative is to make you sympathize with the wicked.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.
Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
There is, admittedly, a precedent within the basic premise of the Batman story itself (and Frank Miller, author of the Dark Knight Returns comic is a noted right-wing libertarian) so in the case of that franchise, Nolan isn't inventing whole-cloth but it's also not something that's limited to just his Dark Knight films
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".
When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".
I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.
Scary.
For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
now that that's over, the phone is definitely more powerful surveillance technology than a ring camera
you can turn off your phone, so uh, it's not as powerful as it seems.
and practically speaking, ring cameras run out of battery all the time. and also, you can cover them.
the stupidest thing about this whole discourse is that, by participating in it in the particular way that you are, you are feeding directly into what Amazon wants, which is for their absolutely dogshit technology to be perceived as something a lot more valuable and powerful than it really is.