Snowden in German Tatort

2017.04.01 by Matthias Kirschner in #fsfe #encryption #tv

This week I watched an old Tatort ("crime scene") episode from 2015. For those unfamiliar with it, Tatort is a German police procedural television series running on public TV since November 1970.

I am always very interested in what is running on computers in movies and TV shows; most of the time I am hoping for nice Free Software window managers, some programs like compilers, htop, or IRC sessions running in the background which do not make any sense at all in the context. Maybe some friends are a bit annoyed by that, as I sometimes stop the movie and rewind it so I can have a closer look. (As this point sorry to them for my habit.)

In this Tatort the detective Ms Brand is into computers, while her colleague Mr Borowski is absolutely not. After handing over the mobile phone of the headless victim with the note "that's something for you Ms Brandt, no head but a mobile phone", she connects it to her computer to analyse it.

That is when I got interested. She had a wallpaper with Edward Snowden, and the text "American Idol". But I could not identify the other icons on the screen. Afterwards I found out that in 2015 people also noticed that, but apparently nobody shared a screenshot. So I made one:

Wallpaper with Snowden and the text American Idol"

Screenshot from Tatort "Borowski und der Himmel über Kiel" at 1:17:24

If you have Free Software related screenshots of movies, please share them with me.