Once again Doctorow paints a pretty grim and believable picture of what happens when we allow our rights to privacy, autonomy and freedom of expression to be circumscribed in the name of 'safety' and 'protection.' Read this book, and then, as Jacob Applebaum says in the afterword, give it to the person that needs it most. That's quite a lot for something that's nominally a 'young adult' novel.

Or it might just help you be more sensitive to future issues that center around privacy, civil liberties, money in elections, or simply the difference between right and wrong. Or virtual machines, anonymyzing proxies, or 3D printing. It might make you finally get around to figuring out that whole Tor thing, and how the darknet works. It might make you consider starting to use TrueCrypt to protect your personal data. Or get involved in campaigning for an independent political candidate. It might make you want to go out and join and Occupy protest. This book will make you want to do something, even if its just exploring the world of privacy, encryption, and the technologies that strengthen them (and weaken them). But not for the usual reasons I call book 'good'.

Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want.

He's not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do. He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him―but he can't admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier. It's incendiary stuff―and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco―an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.Ī few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform.

Homeland cory doctorow