 Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is, I'd argue undeniably, one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. It's a brilliant film regardless of genre and in spite of being 13 years old, it continues to be one of the most popular movies to stream. It balances Nolan's characteristically grounded realism with a classic supervillain plot driven by Heath Ledger's iconic portrayal of Batman's arch nemesis, The Joker. The Dark Knight is complex and visually stunning, but I believe it stands the test of time because its story is built on themes that get to the heart of some of the most interesting and difficult moral challenges we face as people. See, they're morals. They're code. It's a bad joke. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other. Some men aren't looking for anything logical like money. Some men just want to watch the world burn. You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. The world is cruel and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. I could easily do a series of episodes on each of these ideas, but the theme I want to focus on today is a bit more insidious, because it's not about the actions of the scarecrow, the Joker, Too Faced, or any of the other bad guys in the film. It's about what Batman is willing to do to stop them, and why something that works in the idealized context of a fantasy story doesn't work in real life. Mass surveillance. So join me as we take a deeper look at The Dark Knight and ask ourselves whether or not someone's ends can actually justify their means. On this short edition of Out of Frame. The Dark Knight is set a few years after Batman begins. Batman is now an established figure in Gotham City, quietly working with Detective Gordon to bring criminals to justice. Meanwhile, Gotham's newest district attorney, Harvey Dent, is making a name for himself successfully putting those criminals behind bars. After months of taking down mob bosses, a new figure emerges, offering the various gangs of Gotham an opportunity to rid themselves of the Batman and their enemies at City Hall. They eventually agree, and the Joker gets to work, sowing chaos, disorder, and terror everywhere he goes. He must be stopped, but how? If you're Batman, by doing what the cops can't and repeatedly breaking the law and ignoring very important standards of due process. Early in the film, Batman goes to Hong Kong to break into the office of corrupt businessman and mob banker, Lau. His goal is literally to kidnap him and bring him back to Gotham for prosecution. Notably, Batman is only able to accomplish this task with the help of a privacy violating spy device created by Lucius Fox, who is now CEO of Wayne Enterprises and the man behind much of Batman's technology. Fox's program turns the microphones and speakers on his smartphone into a sonar emitter that maps the layout of Lau's heavily secured building. This is clearly illegal, both domestically and internationally, and a morally questionable action. But we let it slide because Batman is the good guy, and Lau is the bad guy, working for even worse guys. But this sets up a major theme in the film about whether or not the ends justify the means. After all, even if it's not the right way to do things, it gets results. In the case of Lau's extraction, Batman's actions are defensible in part because they're carefully targeted, and the only one whose privacy is really being violated is Lau. But later in the film, when Batman's back is against the wall and he needs to find the Joker as quickly as possible, he reconfigures Fox's sonar app to connect to every single cell phone in Gotham, hunting for not just the layout of the building, but the voice and location of the Joker. This means that tens of millions of people who are not the target of Batman's hunt are caught in his omniscient data dragnet. Their conversations, location and personal information are being captured and recorded in order to hopefully find and identify one man. When Fox finds out about it, he reacts the way I would. That's the real question. As much as we all talk about it, people's observable choices reveal that privacy is not a particularly high priority for most of us. Sure, we might joke about how weird and creepy it is to suddenly see an ad for something we talked about in the presence of our phones, but never actually searched for online, but few of us actually take the three minutes to even look at the privacy settings on the apps and websites we frequently use. And not to be alarmist, but our devices and apps are capable of collecting tons of data about pretty much everything we do. Search histories, website cookies and social media pixels track where we go online. Our location data, browser history, emails, text messages, health and biometric data like facial features and fingerprints, even our DNA, all of the data that we use for information and convenience is being collected and stored somewhere, usually by the companies that make the products we use and give us access to their services for free. For the most part, this is all voluntary. I've said it on this series before, but I don't really worry about that kind of data collection. I mean, I'm not especially concerned about those aspects of my privacy, both because I consented to it as part of the terms of service on social media, but also because commercial interests use my data to try to serve me better content or offer me goods and services I might actually want, and I always have the power to say no. But what about when this kind of mass data collection gets used by governments against their people, theoretically in the service of stopping crime like Batman? Very different story. Most people generally seem to assume that violations of privacy by law enforcement are supported by evidence, warrants and used specifically to catch the worst criminals, stopping a psychotic killer like the Joker, foiling a terrorist plot. They don't think about the use of things like Stingray, which intercepts cell signals and collects data from every single phone that happens to be nearby. They don't think about law enforcement using a combination of 911 calls, location data and dispatch records to institute predictive policing programs that actually end up harassing kids in Tampa. They don't think about people like Michael Usry Jr., who was falsely accused of murder thanks to overzealous investigators using a tenuous partial match to DNA that his father submitted to a genealogical database. Nor do they think about people like Jorge Molina, who was also falsely accused of murder thanks to a reverse search location warrant that granted investigators access to his Google Maps history. These are just a few examples that we know about of egregious violations of privacy by state and local government using third party data to arrest or harm innocent people. And this is to say nothing of the horrifying reach of the federal government like what Edward Stone revealed nearly a decade ago. In The Dark Knight we see an eerily similar and equally egregious invasion of privacy when Batman and Lucius Fox used the modified sonar program to hunt for the Joker. But we excuse it because our heroes are righteous and true, and the villain must be caught. We make the same assumptions about the everyday violations of privacy our own governments perpetrate upon us. And while it is true that very occasionally these invasions do actually yield the capture of a dangerous criminal, the vast majority of the time that's not what's happening. So, like Lucius Fox, we have to look at these powers of privacy violation and ask, at what cost? Government at every level tends to implement new technologies in invasive ways first without asking permission or letting anyone know. And the people accessing and using these systems are frequently not the righteous heroes we want them to be. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? This shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but turns out most people aren't Bruce Wayne. As a result, it's only through diligent investigation by outside parties or high-profile screw-ups that this stuff rises to the public's attention and anybody really considers the possibility that it's a problem. But by then the damage to innocent people has already been done, and the mass surveillance powers are here to stay. They don't just self-destruct when the bad guys get caught. It takes a ton of work from concerned citizens to roll these powers back even a little bit, and right now only a few states like Utah and Montana are making any progress. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide. With a constantly expanding labyrinth of rules, codes, and criminal laws, to the extent that our own government doesn't even know how many federal crimes there are, we're quickly coming to the point where, even here in the United States, if you show the government the man, they will show you the crime. Films like The Dark Knight imagine an idealized version of unbridled police power created and controlled by the best and most morally justified among us, used wisely and specifically in order to catch the world's most dangerous villains without being abused or hurting innocent people in the process. This is the most unrealistic part of the movie. So let's just leave the idea of mass surveillance as a crime-fighting tool on the silver screen, where it belongs. Subscribe, star, get early access, special bonus content, and access to an exclusive channel in our Discord server. Lastly, as a lot of you know, YouTube has been throttling a lot of our content lately, so we've recently set up an email newsletter that will allow us to stay in touch, and hopefully will mean you never miss an episode, even if it doesn't make it into your recommendations. The links to sign up for that and everything else I mentioned are in the description below. As always, please like this video, ring that bell icon to get notifications for the channel, follow us on all the social media, and share out of frame with your friends. I'll see you next time.