“Increased government surveillance? What do I care? I’m innocent. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
This common rationale for being at peace with the federal government’s decision to eavesdrop on its citizens has always struck me as completely missing the point. Since 9/11, the United States’ War on Terror has meant an end to one’s innocence or guilt being what determines whether or not you’re detained. To prevent terror incidents before they happen, the government believes it needs to start jailing people before they become criminals.
In a country where habeas corpus (the right to defend one’s self against one’s accusers) has been suspended, the U.S. government’s default view is that everyone has something to hide. When a Department of Homeland Security officer points the finger at you, proving what you did or did not do won’t be the issue.
What you’ll be combating is the suspicion you might do something wrong one day or you might help someone else, and no amount of evidence can predict the future accurately. There’s always room for suspicion, whatever the facts.
Everyone on earth should be concerned about the United States government’s increased, unbridled surveillance, because as long as it lasts, we’re all potentially guilty, and they’re not going to believe otherwise until they lose interest. Worse, their techniques for figuring out where they’ll point their fingers next make it an absolute certainty that thousands more false positives (people who aren’t really guilty, but may seem so) will be detained before a single really dangerous suspect is apprehended.
Cory Doctorow’s brave new novel, Little Brother, illustrates all that more clearly and immediately than anything I’ve yet seen or read.
But far from simply detailing the dire threat to our freedoms that we face from the tyrannical misuse of technology, the book is a celebration of how that same technology can be used to preserve our privacy and enhance our liberty. In a similar spirit to Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Doctorow has written his novel as a detailed guide to understanding the government’s surveillance techniques, and he’s provided the young adult audience it’s written for with counter-measures for combating them.
The story is set in San Francisco in the near future. It begins the morning of an al Queda attack on the city. Marcus Yarrow, the book’s hero, is cutting school at the time of the attacks, and he and his friends are picked up and interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security. Because Marcus is already a computer hacker with a lack of respect for authority figures (like all good teen-rebellion stories, this one starts in the principal’s office), his encrypted cell phone and key chain full of thumb drives arouses sufficient suspicion for Marcus and his crew to get handled a bit roughly. It only gets worse for them when Marcus, zealously defending his civil rights, refuses to provide his phone’s password until he gets to see a lawyer.
Marcus and most of his friends are eventually let go from the makeshift detention camp the DHS has secretly set up on an island in the bay. The teens are returned home but told not to tell anyone, including their parents, of their week-long captivity. Marcus’ best friend, Daryl, who was wounded during the crowd hysteria after the attacks, is mysteriously not released from the camp, and he’s feared dead.
The bulk of the story comprises Marcus’ efforts to first evade the DHS’ ongoing surveillance (upon his return, he finds his laptop’s been bugged), and then expose their abuses and topple them. It’s a riveting read. While the book’s villain is our own federal government, and the central premise is digital revolution, the tone is far from fanatical or blindly passionate.
Rather, Doctorow, who, among other things, is a technology activist by trade (see sidebar for more on the author and a brief interview), is reasoned and methodical as he lays out in fascinating detail how the sciences of cryptology and computers have changed over the last 50 years. He illustrates how history has shown that the strongest, most secure systems for keeping personal information private are those encryption systems that are most publicly accessible.
He tells the story of the British mathematician and a father of computer science, Alan Turing, who had been able not only to crack the Nazis’ secret codes during the war, but also built a machine so that the Allies could encode their own messages full of misinformation. It was pivotal breakthrough in the Second World War, and a critical lesson in the development of security and encryption: as brilliant as any code might be, it’s only as powerful as the mind that created it. The flaw in the Nazis’ code was that it was secret, and so it had only been subjected to testing by the minds that conceived it.
This revelation helped change the way cryptologists (and computer scientists interested in security) worked. They began sharing their encryption techniques and encouraging other minds to try and break them. When a code was broken, a new, better one was written, improved by the lessons learned from sharing information.
And so it continues; and so the hacker was born.
The novel, however, doesn’t stop the narrative to present lectures on these topics. Doctorow skillfully weaves dozens of big, fascinating ideas into the story, and since almost everything he describes (other than the al Queda attacks and subsequent DHS crackdown) is authentic and has happened in some context, somewhere, the story feels immediate and real.
Shortly after leaving the principal’s office, Marcus checks a favorite website on his school-issue laptop, and he learns that the next stage of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) he and his friends are playing is going to be announced later that morning. (ARG: an elaborate, multimedia treasure hunt that can span continents and be played collaboratively by geographically disparate people via the Internet.) As the lesson’s going on, he instant-messages his friends in the classroom and at other schools to see if they want to cut class. If they leave right away, they could be the first ones to get the next clue in the treasure hunt.
Visiting game sites and sending instant messages on the school-issue laptop is forbidden, though, as is using any software that is not school-sanctioned. To get around this, Marcus has found a hack online that someone’s written. He’s downloaded the installers for the compromised, pirate system, burned it to DVD, and installed it. The software is invisible to the school systems, and it covers Marcus’ tracks as those wireless systems scan the laptops remotely for illegal modifications and foreign software.
While Marcus doesn’t give specifics in this case, he explains how he hides an unsanctioned copy of Firefox:
“Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. It doesn’t show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox—and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and thus invisible to the network’s snoopware.”
He goes on to explain about TOR—The Onion Router. This website allows Marcus to surf via the school’s Internet connection without being monitored or blocked by the school administration. When someone surfs the Web via this site, Web page requests are encrypted, and rather than being sent directly to the desired page, the request is bounced around via an extensive network until it finds the page. The response to the request (the page itself) is then sent back through a different, random network, making it impossible for surveillance to determine where the person is surfing.
Doctorow gives the link at the end of the book— tor.eff.org —and invites you to use it right now if you’re somewhere that monitors and restricts your access to the Web.
As well as being fascinating and potentially useful, the information Doctorow is disseminating, and his throw-down, release-all-prisoners certainty of what’s right and wrong in this gray digital age, feels more truly radical than anything I’ve read in the mass media for a long time. It makes for a thrilling read.
If there’s a drawback to the novel, it’s that—in addition to the limitations of the first-person narrative and the need to make the story’s near-future vision plausible—Doctorow’s characters are sometimes more believable than they are interesting. Marcus starts and ends the book a defiant master at using technology to overthrow authority, while his real coming of age is finding a girlfriend and losing his virginity. But reading about the digital revolution is so much more intriguing than reading about awkward teen sex that the naughty bits hardly seem necessary.
In many ways, though, the decision to write the book for a young adult audience makes it even more daring. Far from being exclusively about nerds closeted at home, fondling one another and staring into computer screens, the book is largely about the importance of community and networking. Most of the story’s key scenes involve crowds of young people illegally organizing peaceful protests. Borrowing heavily from the hippy’s approach to protest—marrying politics with the theater of the absurd—Marcus and his friends use the computer networks creatively to unite and fight in a way that is both rousing and hopeful.
It’s now been six years since the government started spending billions of our tax dollars to listen to our phones and read our emails in the interest of keeping us safe. Since there hasn’t been sufficient outrage to stem the hemorrhaging of our rights from the analog generations, Cory Doctorow’s decision to take the revolution to the young seems more than timely and appropriate.
A bio of Cory Doctorow, some relevant links, and a brief interview are available here.