Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Tor Books, April 2008
ISBN: 0765319853
Imagine you’re a bright 17-year-old who’s bored by school and has an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide.
Now imagine you get caught up in a DHS sweep following a terrorist attack on your hometown and the DHS decides to start treating you like a terrorist.
Now imagine that when they finally release you, you find that your hometown has turned into a police state. The DHS is treating everyone like a potential terrorist, but they continue to take a special interest in you.
What do you do?
Well, if you’re Marcus Yallow, the hacker hero of Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel Little Brother, you fight back the only two ways you know how. Hard. And by hacking your way to freedom.
Marcus is a hacker. Not in the sense that the media uses the word — as someone who breaks into computer systems to commit crimes — but in the way hackers use the word: Someone who comes up with clever and imaginative solutions to problems. His problem, at the beginning of the novel, is that he goes to a school where security cameras, locked-down computer systems and petty bureaucrats combine to give the school the atmosphere of a minimum security detention facility. Marcus is mostly bored with school, but finds intellectual challenge in activities like outwitting the gait-recognition software the cameras feed to and hacking his school-issued laptop to run forbidden software without the authorities’ knowledge or consent. He uses his skills at social and technological engineering to sneak out of school so he can hang out with friends from other schools around his neighborhood in San Francisco.
On one such excursion he and his friends get caught in the crush when someone blows up the Bay Area Bridge and collapses the BART tunnel underneath San Francisco Bay. One of his friends is wounded in the aftermath, and in trying to get him medical help they run afoul of a group of Homeland Security operatives. Remember that anti-authoritarian streak? Marcus is singled for special attention because he doesn’t feel like the answers to the questions he’s being asked are anyone’s business but his. In return Homeland Security treats him like you’d expect, makes him sign some papers saying he’s been treated fairly (shades of an old Cheech and Chong skit), warns him not to tell anyone what happened, and impresses on him that they will be watching him, and if he steps out of line . . . well, you know, things could happen.
When they finally release Marcus his wounded friend is nowhere to be found. Marcus is humiliated and angry, and decides to fight back, find his friend and take his rights as an American citizen back — and everyone else’s, if possible.
On its most basic level this is an enjoyable story about teenage rebellion put to constructive use, and a David-and-Goliath story of one kid’s fight against impossible odds. Being a geek and a hacker myself, everything Doctorow has Marcus doing at least sounds like it could easily be done with technology that exists today. For instance, at one point Marcus creates a tool to detect hidden cameras using a toilet paper roll, a nine-volt battery and a set of very bright LEDs. Using the description Doctorow gives and some cheap LEDs from Radio Shack, any kid reading this book could easily duplicate this detector.
Dig down under the surface, though — and it’s not all that far under the surface, when you get right down to it — and you find Doctorow is making another statement: Hey, kid. Yeah you, reading the book. You could be doing these things too. Right here, right now, in the America you’re living in today. Doctorow is a prolific writer on subjects like technology, copyright and privacy. He spent time as European director of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. He knows his stuff. Some of what he proposes in Little Brother is possible today, like the camera detector; some is just waiting to happen, like the network of hacked Xboxes Marcus creates to ensure a channel for private communication.
What Doctorow has done here is first, to spin a good yarn that isn’t all that much of a stretch to imagine in today’s America, and second, to give kids (and adults who have the good sense to read young adult fiction) some ideas of how to take their privacy and civil rights back. Getting them to question authority and do so in a way that won’t get them sent to Gitmo. Learning that being smart can be cool. You know. Dangerous stuff.
Do yourself a favor. Get this book and read it. If nothing else it’ll be a pleasant day or so of watching a high school kid outwit the Powers That Be. But think about some of the ideas Doctorow puts forward. Then, if there’s a young adult in your life (say, anywhere in middle or high school), give them a copy of Little Brother and sit back and watch. And be ready to answer questions like “Could this happen here?” and “Where can I learn to program a computer?”
Now, while I would encourage you to buy the dead-tree version of the book — and if you use the Powell’s box on the left side of your screen, Booman Tribune gets a piece of the action — you should know that Doctorow is a firm believer in the Creative Commons movement and has put Little Brother online as a free download. He encourages people to kick the tires, read it online, and if they like it, tell their friends and buy the book. He seems to be making money as a writer, so I’d say this approach is working for him. So I’m telling my friends <grin>. Go read the book. And then think about ways to hack the system.