Hell, I don't know anything for certain.

Because you won't tell me were you're getting your information.

[Finch] When the towers came down,

you were in a Hotel in Mexico.

I was here.

I was working.

Didn't even know about the attacks until that evening.

You see Mr Reese,

until that day,

I had spent the better part of my life making myself very rich.

Suddenly, all that money didn't seem to amount to much.

After the attacks,

the Government gave itself the power

read every e-mail,

listen to every cell-phone.

But they needed something that could sort through it all.

Something that could pick up the terrorist population

out of the general

before the could act.

The public wanted to be protected.

They just didn't wanted to know how they were being protected.

So when they finally got a system that worked,

they kept it secret.

[Reese] So how do you know about it ?

[Finch] I built it.

But there was a problem with this

machine.

I had built it to prevent the next 9-11.

But, It was seeing all sorts of crimes.

So I had to teach the Machine

to divide the things it saw into two lists.

Relevent and Irrelevent.

Events that would cause massive lost of life were relevent.

Those would be passed along to the NSA or the FBI.

[Reese] And the Irrelevent information ?

[Finch] Every night at midnight the Machine

erases it.

It was only latter, that I realised my mistake.

That the Irrelevant list

was eating away at me.

[Reese] Where is the machine now ?

[Finch] What the drives, who knows ?

Government facility somewhere.

But the Machine

The Machine is everywhere.

Watching Us with ten thousand eyes.

Listening with a million hears.

[Reese] You gave yourself a way to communicate with it.

[Finch] I was building the government a tool of unimaginable Power.

I tought maybe an offswitch would come in Handy.

So I built myself a back door into it.

[Reese] To access the irrelevant list.

[Finch] Just the social security numbers.

If anyone ever found out I'd loose access.

So nine digits It's all we got.