SCENE: In CTU. The heat is on. Clicking, beeping, whirring all about; barely-controlled pandaemonium reigns.
BAUER: “Chloe, I need those grid maps overlaid with the week-old satellite photoes and the differentials called out, and I need ’em now…
CHLOE (irritably): “Back off! I’m running a back-streamed IP subnetwork mask through the HTU turborouter with a full set of up-ticked cryo-semantic filter to crossmatch with Division, LAPD and Homeland Security databases!”
Noises off: Stop. Silence. Everyone looks at O’Brien.
BAUER: “What on earth are you talking about?”
LOL!!
You get a gold star for inventive creativity of the absurd, Mitch.
OK, not a network engineer here, but if she’s sending a subnetwork mask it’s very likely mapped to the private in-house network address range (typically 192.168.x.x for class C private address space); and since it’s a reserved address block for private networks any decent firewall would block it as an invalid address – assuming the outgoing firewall even allows it through (which it shouldn’t).
I guess its a more elegant way of saying “I’m pinging homeland security with a spoofed IP address”.
By the way, I caught her on Letterman by accident. Totally vapid train wreck, it was one of those scenes where it was so gawdawefully back I couldn’t even press press the TIVO remote, my fingers were frozen in place.
(My salute to the 93rd congress and increasingly the 94th congress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiLh9rkvjac [listen to the lyrics])