The Jason Bourne film franchises have some outrageous directions given to intelligence agency staff by the bosses.
For eg: display CCTV from this street in Beirut onto my screen. And it gets done within a second after few clicks.
My best submission to this thread is as follows.
The CIA realises that its files are being hacked from Rejkyavik. Immediate command. Kill the power to that building.
Please can I have your most outrageous Jason Bourne moments.
So often it’s a cliche, they bring up a “satellite feed” and it’s as sharp and clear as you’d get from a drone or low flying aircraft. And live video, not just images.
Real spy satellites cannot do this. The hard laws of physics limit the resolution of the images they can resolve - while the NRO doesn’t publish the specs, it’s possible to calculate the best possible image they could resolve with an estimate of the size of the focusing mirror and the altitude. (it’s still something like 10cm - enough to make out blurry human figures but not read license plates or newspaper headlines)
And that’s the other big problem - to get high resolution images, spy satellites have to fly low - extremely low. Orbits of a few hundred miles. So it’s impossible to get live video - the satellite has a very high ground velocity in those orbits. Again, even secret government technology cannot overcome the laws of orbital mechanics. Instead, the satellite at best can capture a still image or two before flying past.
And that’s the next limitation - these type of spy satellites are on orbits that pass over certain parts of the earth a certain number of times a day - but not just anywhere. If Jason Bourne is kicking ass in some random villa in Switzerland, there likely isn’t going to be more than 1 or 2 spy satellite passes over that area of the world at most.
Through some no doubt long and convoluted bureaucratic process, the CIA could get more spy satellite passes over a particular area of interest ordered from the NRO. And the NRO could burn some of the finite rocket fuel onboard it’s assets to get more passes.
This would take days at a minimum - again, orbital mechanics.
In the movies, they can suddenly figure out “Bourne’s not in Budapest, he’s in Paris!” and instantly bring up a spy satellite feed of Paris instead. Not possible.
Moderator Action
Since this is about a film series, let’s move it to CS (from IMHO).
Ah, but that ‘satellite feed’ is just a cover for Blackbird / Aurora / whatever. 
But then first they’d have to fly the jet to that random location in Europe where Bourne has resurfaced, and then you have the problem that aircraft this fast tend to have limited flight times…it sucks fuel to fly at mach 3 at high altitudes…
The most outrageous thing is finding Bourne alive but basically doing not much, then deciding to kill him. Disaster occurs.
And then repeating that, what- three, four times?
That’s what they want you to believe. 
In one of the Bourne films it seemed as if the Head Honcho Bad Guy was repeatedly ordering “I want the area sealed, nobody gets in or out etc etc” for sizable chunks or real estate. Made me wonder exactly how many CIA (or whatever) ground troops are constantly on call to literally seal off large areas with live bodies. At the drop of a hat.
nm
And another thing that makes me annoyed about the overall plot. Bourne is basically Captain America in some alternate universe pulled from the mind of Tom Clancy. He’s a super agent super soldier and just awesome.
Well, uh, why doesn’t the CIA keep producing more agents like him? Or rival foreign powers?
It’s just like the Captain America origin story. Just because the mad scientist heading up the project got shot doesn’t mean the U.S. military can’t eventually rediscover the same serum/Vitae ray treatment used to create him. And create entire divisions of soldiers as badass or better than Cap.
The reason why the U.S. government has given up on a lot of kooky cold war ideas is that they didn’t actually work. (or were batshit dangerous). If attempts to develop a truth serum actually worked like they do in a comic book, they’d be using truth serum routinely today. If the Men who Stared at Goats could fairly consistently make the goat’s heads explode, we’d have a psi corps branch of the CIA right now.
Who did you think all those other guys Bourne was fighting (not just redshirts he was taking out, I mean all the sustained fights) were? Bourne was just better than those guys. Hell, they even made a spinoff movie about another guy.
You misspelled Robert Ludlum.
The original plot was more believable, if a tad tedious. The director of this franchise must have been really disappointed it wasn’t based on some cartoon. I believe the original story could have been filmed without any CGI.
Could have been, and was:
1988 TV mini-series, starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith.
I’d watch Jaclyn Smith’s nail polish dry.
Richard Chamberlain made a nice living from TV mini-series. For a while there, he was as ubiquitous as Morgan Freeman.
In the Bourne Ultimatum the guys from the CIA rush out of their office when they think the know where Bourne is. He tricks them and walks into the office they deserted and accesses their files.
All government offices are locked and guarded and there is no way to just walk into a CIA office.
Bourne’s already established as superhuman at that point, I didn’t need another sequence of him sneaking in to buy that he could.
The extraordinary surveillance abilities of the state are part of the series’ theme.
The filmmakers probably wanted the new Jason Bourne to be to the War on Terror was James Bond was to the Cold War. Part of dealing with the War on Terror is the increase in surveillance powers and abilities of the State.
Remember how stealth helicopters used to be a stereotypical conspiracy theory? In 2011, we learned that the US had them during the Bin Laden raid. Think about all the scandals around IT-centric spying and information leaks.
Since intelligence tends to be a very secretive field, there are a lot of unknowns to fill in about what intelligence agencies could be up to. We’ve also grown accustomed to be surprised by what technology, especially information technology, can do. When you combine those two elements, there is enough to be anxious. Having immediate access to some CCTV feed or satellite image is a way to dramatize that. The real extraordinary abilities of intel agencies might be extremely important but that doesn’t mean they easy to illustrate, understand or keep entertaining.
CGI? In the Bourne Identity? Raise your hand if you actually saw these films.
That’s literally how they do it - the CIA drops a giant hat over the area. They have helicopters operating in shifts over every major city with ingeniously-folded giant hats ready to expand and deploy over any five-square-block area. They even try to regionalize it a bit to attract less attention - bowlers for London, sombreros for Mexico City, fezzes for Casablanca…