Beemouse Laboratories

Le sigh…

I finally got around to reading the copy of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow that I bought when it first came out, in June, I think… and it left me all weepy and inspired.

I guess I should say first that the writing itself is not stellar, the plot being kind of blocky and awkward in some places, but it’s such an interesting, rousing, sad tale that I didn’t really care. I feel like Doctorow proselytized through his characters, all of them taking on the same tone, rather than developing their characters fully and letting them hash things out authentically. But, I imagine that when you have a very clear agenda you would like to communicate, namely, education about constitutional rights and security, it’s probably hard to strike a balance between proselytizing and letting characters speak and act naturally.

The novel is narrated in first person by a high school kid, a sassy hacker boy, who is pretty much exactly how I imagine my husband was in high school. I guess that is what endeared the book to me. It was super cute to read about kids running around being hackers, using hacker language, doing hacker things. It made me wonder what it’s like to be a teenage hacker now. Hell, I’m almost 30. (Ruh roh!) “Don’t trust anyone over 25!”

The novel started to remind me so much of 1984 that I began to be terrified of what was coming– and rightly. It’s kind of like a young adult version of 1984. It’s really horrifying, in a good way, I think– it brings home very contemporary issues in a way that young adults can relate to. For this, my brain forgives him any awkwardnesses in writing. I would give this novel to my kids (if I had any), to any young adult interested in computers, in freedom of speech, in hacking, to anyone asking “WTF is going on in my country?”, and to anyone splooging a bunch of their personal data out onto the internets via Myspace.

I also love the discussion at the end of the book on the hacker mindset, written by Bruce Schneier. He says,

So when you’re wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security sytems around you. … Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) … Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don’t, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.

Holy shit! He just suggested that children try to figure out how get weapons on airplanes! Arrest him! Oh wait, he’s a well-known security expert. What’s going on here?!

I remember sitting in DFW airport with Richard, inside the security perimeter, at some stupid restaurant, looking at all the very metal eating utensils, the glasses hanging in the bar, thinking about how easy it would be to wrap a glass in a napkin, pocket it, and then quietly crush it on the airplane, using shards of glass as weapons. So easy. What an outrage. We also talked about how much trouble we thought we could get in for even saying something about that, for walking up to a TSA official and pointing out that someone could do it. Certainly we’d be detained, maybe arrested. Such bullshit.

Later Schneier says,

  Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.
  So close the book and go. The world is full of security systems. Hack one of them.

Yeah! Go kids!! Go get smart and save the world, seriously! We have royally fucked you and we’re very sorry!

No seriously though. I was so happy to read this book. It’s not a jolly lark to read (I cried in some parts!), but I highly recommend it to everyone. Everyone!

Here’s a recent photo of a relevant sign, so you don’t get disappointed that there were no pictures to go with this post:

Warning and ivy, 2008