I just suddenly made this connection. Maybe heaps of people got there before me, but if not, here it is.
In The Incredible Hulk, though it’s the Army hunting Bruce, there’s a moment where SHIELD is very blatantly referenced, which in the past I thought was a bit of a ham-fisted way of reinforcing that Hulk was taking place in the same universe as Iron Man.
But I just realised, what they’re using? It’s Zola’s algorithm.
Though the Army and the FBI (whose logo is also present in that scene, potentially placing the actual computer at an FBI base) no doubt have their own monitoring stuff, Major Kathleen Sparr, Ross’s right hand, is using SHIELD’s proprietary algorithm to skim millions of emails to find the right phrasing, the right target. To find Bruce, and make the connection to Sterns. It has to be a pretty intelligent (or even, dare I say, sentient?) piece of coding to take what on the surface are fairly generic, common words and only return one hit, the correct hit, to point Ross and his team so precisely to Bruce and Betty’s rendezvous with Sterns. I mean, it’s not like the email says, “hey, I’m the Hulk, I’m on the run and the Army is looking for me.” There’s really not much for a standard search algorithm to work with, even if you’re smart about it and use things like Boolean terms.
Bruce was one of the people Sitwell listed on the roof as a Hydra target. Maybe he’s been one for a lot longer than we realised.
knitting in the dark 