Little Brother

Little Brother starts out like Ferris Beuller's Day Off meets an updated version of War Games. (I guess Matthew Broderick is a bit too old now to play the part or our 17 year old first-person protagonist.) Then it becomes something like a take-off of 1984 in America in the digital age. After terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge in San Francisco Congress passes the Patriot Act II, the Department of Homeland Security gets out of hand and our intrepid high school hackers take them on.

It seemed a little farfetched, but maybe not so much. After Little Brother was published, there was the Snowden disclosures, the NSA monitoring emails and eavesdropping, the Senate report on CIA torture. The obtuseness of the press was pretty easy to accept. (Les Nessman and Ted Baxter weren't too far off the mark). But I kept wondering, are there teenage hackers who really have that much IT savvy? When I was that age, digital meant something having to do with fingers and my personal electronic device was an AM transistor radio. As a former college hippie anti-establishment sympathizer, though, I identified with our hero. Right on, man.

It's a good fast-paced story, with a message of warning. It brings home the famous saying of Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." There were info-dumps (RFID, Crypto, wifinders, cracking the XBOX, etc.), but they didn't hurt the story and I suppose that if you were to check them out that they would prove true. This was my first Cory Doctorow; I've no qualms about reading another.