Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow

Set is modern day San Francisco, a terrorist attack has bombed and destroyed the Bay Bridge and the cross bay BART tunnel. Somehow mixed up in this, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a group of high school friends get picked up by the Department of Homeland Security and taken to a secret prision for interrogation. To be released, they are forced to sign non-disclosure documents under threat of further imprisonment. Unfortunately for the DHS, these high school kids are technologically literate hackers. And they take offense at illegal arrest and interrogation. So they start a guerrilla war against DHS, who fights back with all the power of the US Government and the newly expanded Patriot Act (refered to here as Patriot II), all under the guise of preventing terrorism. The bigger issues here remind me of the privacy issues raised in The Circle. In that case, it was a private company overstepping, here is is government. In both cases, I see how the fictional stories are not too far removed from reality, and there are not too many steps to get from here to there. What I wonder, who will be m1k3y in the real world? How do I (not a hacker) fight the small encroachments on privacy and civil liberty that either governments or corporations incrementally take "without notice".

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