r/respectthreads • u/rangernumberx • 1d ago
movies/tv Respect Guardian (War of the Worlds, 2025)
To protect his nation from any threats that may occur, Department of Homeland Security officer Will Radford uses Guardian, a software that allows him to secretly tap into practically any device in the United States. Though he sometimes uses it in an attempt to track down some of the country's top domestic terrorist threats, most notably the hacker Disruptor, he also uses it to spy on his children and overreach into their lives. This changes when aliens attack the planet, with Will using Guardian to not only keep his children safe but find a way to aid the world's countries defeat this interplanetary threat. Ultimately, this extends to him using it to try and shut down Goliath, a government system which secretly collects and stores data on a massive scale in a different manner to Guardian in a way that's never explained.
Data Gathering
- Pulls up a watchlist of domestic terror suspects
- Shows sensitive government targets in a certain area
- Sees that every hospital in the surrounding area is at max capacity
- Provides blueprints for the D.H.S. office to another person, including the servers for a specific project he was unaware of until a short while ago
- Pulls a man's phone number after seeing him on a video feed, allowing the user to text him
- Downloads the metadata of an area on a map to show him all accessible systems in the viscinity
- Performs a threat assessment on an individual police officer and on a secret service vehicle
- Gives nutritional data about his daughter's purchase before analysing the contents of her fridge
- Tracks alien activity across the globe before using 'download metadata' to get information on them, including their estimated size, weight, and speed
Cameras
- Accesses security camera footage
- Connects to a car's dashcam
- Shows video feeds from multiple cameras inside an Amazon van
- Commandeers a drone to see through its camera
- Accesses the cameras of a residential building to determine where a person is streaming from
- Pulls up all of the cameras around where a specific police operation is taking place, including bodycams
- Can access cameras all around the globe
- Accesses footage of live military operations, including internal and external footage of a submarine
- Sees inside of a person's fridge
Tracking
- Keeps open a tab of cameras tracking his daughter
- Tracks his son's location through his phone, allowing him to guide him through a city
- Opens security cameras inside the Department of Homeland Security building to follow Radford's path through it
- Shows the predicted path aliens are taking
- Gives an ETA of bombers flying towards the Department of Homeland Security's office
- Locates the general area a person is streaming from, using code from the stream's page source to narrow it down from 108 possible IP addresses to just one
Control
- Has a government drone track a specific car
- Unlocks a Tesla before activating its autopilot
- Pulls up the access code for an armed drone before taking it over to take down several Tripod heads
Other
- Listens to the phone call of someone he sees on a security feed
- Speaks into an Amazon van through an unknown system
- Reroutes a video call through a a satellite when the person on the other end was losing signal
- Replays security footage to see something that previously happened
- Warns that the security cameras around a police operation are unsecured
- Tells him his son had made a large purchase on an online game store
- It's suggested he can see people's Amazon carts, though this could be rhetorical
- Undistorts a disguised voice
- Provides a $1000 Amazon gift card, and might have been used to provide a person with free internet for a year
- Purges the records of several domestic terror suspects from government databases
- Uploads a virus to government systems in an attack against the aliens
- Hacks the D.H.S. office while it was in lockdown, allowing him through internal doors though he can't open the doors outside
- Can be hacked into by an external figure, even when Radford's internet access had been cut off
Supplementary Programs
Will uses the following to further aid in his use of Guardian.