That is something I wasn't too clear about in the ep that flashed back to John's last CIA mission. Were the Chinese truly building their own machine, independetly of the US? Was it maybe a joint project? Did they steal the tech?
There was a flashback around the middle of the season that had John and Snow illegally working on home soil (New York City). They had some guy with a bag over his head they were questioning, and either Snow or Stanton mentioned that he stole someone valuable and sold it to the Chinese.
Then when Stanton and John went to Ordos, there were hints they had been building something, and when you look at the computers closely, there's a whole pack of printouts with numbers on them. Those were Chinese SSNs. So, yeah, I'm 100% that the Chinese have their own machine and someone sold it to them.
I was in fact pretty sure that person had been Peter and that is what got Jessica killed, until we found out that she died for a whole different reason.
Also, to be truly effective for the purposes they wanted it build for, the machine needs to work globally. Which is actually what I believed it was when the show started, a global monitoring network. Only some time down the line did I put that assumption to question.
I still believe it does just that. But Finch only gets SSNs of people in New York because otherwise he'd have to start a whole network of people working for him. He just doesn't have the time for it, nor would it be safe to do that.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-26 05:36 pm (UTC)There was a flashback around the middle of the season that had John and Snow illegally working on home soil (New York City). They had some guy with a bag over his head they were questioning, and either Snow or Stanton mentioned that he stole someone valuable and sold it to the Chinese.
Then when Stanton and John went to Ordos, there were hints they had been building something, and when you look at the computers closely, there's a whole pack of printouts with numbers on them. Those were Chinese SSNs. So, yeah, I'm 100% that the Chinese have their own machine and someone sold it to them.
I was in fact pretty sure that person had been Peter and that is what got Jessica killed, until we found out that she died for a whole different reason.
Also, to be truly effective for the purposes they wanted it build for, the machine needs to work globally. Which is actually what I believed it was when the show started, a global monitoring network. Only some time down the line did I put that assumption to question.
I still believe it does just that. But Finch only gets SSNs of people in New York because otherwise he'd have to start a whole network of people working for him. He just doesn't have the time for it, nor would it be safe to do that.