HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from The Dark Knight - High Frequency Generator Scene Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

The Dark Knight - High Frequency Generator Scene

Jorge Herrera
Other
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2020–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Used as a pop-culture analogy for mass surveillance technology that now looks plausible.

Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.

“The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too” (HN, 2024)

2 citations · 1 jokes · Other

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@netsharc Nov 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Beirut Port Explosion
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.
Film scene of sonar-based surveillance as an analogy
@hangsi Apr 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight
Read more
"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]
Fictional surveillance tech that is plausible today

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close