Little Brother by Cory Doctorw

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Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow

One of the books that I read this past week was Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother.  In it, Marcus Yallow and three of his best friends, Jolu, Daryl, and Van are skipping school to play their favorite Alternative Reality Game (ARG) the afternoon a terrorist attack destroys the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.  The four are detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and treated as suspect in the bombing.  Marcus resists giving his captors passwords to his phone and email, and they immediately respond by increasing their pressure tactics on him.  Marcus eventually cracks, giving up his passwords and phone passkey, and three of them are released.  Daryl, however, is not.  For the bulk of the novel, Marcus is unsure if Daryl is still detained, but he vows to bring down the DHS and bring their torture tactics to light.  Once home, he doesn’t tell his parents about the DHS detention, and he discovers his laptop has been bugged.  He then decides to hack a free Xbox Universal with a freeware OS, ParanoidLinux, and begins to distribute DVDs to help other do the same.  This becomes the Xnet, one of the last truly secure networks.  Marcus and the Xnetters constantly find ways to disrupt and undermine DHS’s escalating surveillance and monitoring tactics. Marcus’ hope is that by adding sand in the ointment, the general population will realize that DHS’s tactics aren’t making San Francisco any safer, they are simply repealing civil liberties for the sake of security theater.  Through Jolu, Marcus meets Ange Carvelli, a fellow Xnetter and love interest. The two decide to stage a press release within one of the MMORPGs in Xnet, but the efforts seem to backfire as the press takes large parts of his and others’ explanations for their actions out of context. After discovering that Daryl is very much alive and still in the hands of the DHS, Marcus Marcus then decides to come clean to his parents about his DHS detention, and his mother seeks out the help of an investigative reporter his parents know, Barbara Stratford.  Along with Daryl’s father, who had previously assumed his son was killed in the attacks, Marcus and his parents meet Barbara and explain everything that they know about the DHS detention facility on Treasure Island. Barbara warns that she will investigate further to corroborate his story, but it is out of his hands and she will write the story as she sees fit for The Bay Guardian.  She’ll give Marcus a warning before she goes public, but she warns there could be repercussions. Marcus is contacted by another teen working with the DHS, Masha, who tells him that he is still very much on their radar and he has only a few days before they close in.  Masha offers him the chance to escape with her if he’ll help her created an Xnet diversion.  Marcus and Ange decide to trust her and stage a Vampire-themed LARP for the Xnetters.  Marcus and Ange are separated during the confusion, and Masha practically kidnaps Marcus on her way out of town. Marcus steals her phone and runs away. He’s eventually captured by DHS, but not before he is able to get Masha’s phone and incriminating video safely to Barbara. Once in DHS’s detainment facility, Marcus is waterboarded for his information, and he nearly gives up hope when suddenly the facility is raided by the California State Troopers under the guidance of Stratford.  Stratford warns Marcus that he’s still under arrest and it may be a few days before they can have a hearing to post him for bail, but that from here on in, it will all be done under the normal course of the judicial system, not through secret DHS prisons.  Marcus is eventually charged with a small misdemeanor for stealing Masha’s phone, and the rest of the charges are dropped.  The story ends with the news that the woman in charge of the facility was found not guilty of wrongdoing in a closed military tribunal.

The novel is in many respects a dystopian novel based on the fears of what would happen is a terrorist attack on the same scale as the 9/11 attacks were successfully pulled off in San Francisco.  The villains in this novel are not the terrorist so much as the draconian surveillance state that the DHS creates in order to prevent further attacks.  In this novel, Doctorow imagines many of the real-world ant-terrorism tactics used by DHS but turned on a hactivist teen from California, someone with which the readers can empathize.  Marcus is an intelligent, charming high school student with a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak who just happens to be at the wrong place and the wrong time. Doctorow’s novel warns of the civil liberties that have been lost on the battle for the War on Terror, real losses made more evident in this dystopian vision of what is to come if we allow unrestrained powers to the NSA, FBI, and DHS in response to terrorism threats.  Part of the immediacy of the text is that it places the anti-terrorism tactics of rendition and interrogation in the back yard of San Francisco, not in some remote country like Yemen or Syrian.  I really liked this book; the novel is part dystopia, part romance, and part hacker manifesto.  Doctorow, who is one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, laces his fiction with realistic and useful explanations of the basics of cryptography, trust webs, RFID hacking, privacy rights, and open source software, sometimes leaning a bit on the preachy side, but for the most part his explanations help further the plot of the story. I really enjoyed this novel and think it has great teen appeal, as it has a lot of quick pacing and great suspense as the story unfolds.  The technology is a little bit dated, but not so much that a current teen would find it too stale.  The ever-present smart-phone and gaming systems in current use are just the next generation or two after the ones used in this fictional world. I think this novel would be a great way to discuss practical issues such as using encryption for personal mail and data backups, preserving privacy rights in a post 9/11 world, and real world civil rights organizations like the EFF and ACLU.