In a May 20 column in the
British paper The Guardian, author/Internet personality Cory Doctorow
commented on how terrible people are at understanding probability
and statistically rare occurrences. The column jumps around, touching on
everything from Vegas odds to stranger-danger pedophile attacks, but it
centers on a crucial point: The security systems aimed at capturing terrorists
are fundamentally flawed, and by their nature, they're far less likely to
succeed at their goals than they are to invade regular folks' privacy, impede
their freedom, and create new problems.
Oddly, Doctorow presents a
tighter, more focused version of that exact argument over the course of 380 pages in his taut pop novel Little
Brother than
he does in the 750-word column. Where the Guardian piece tries to be broad
and inclusive, Little Brother limits itself to specific ways in which draconian
post-Patriot Act policies are harming a meekly acquiescing American society.
The novel opens with 17-year-old San Franciscan Marcus Yallow using clever
workarounds to evade his school's anti-truancy motion detectors and RFID chips.
(As usual, Doctorow's clear explanations of current and
five-minutes-into-the-future techno-flummery are reminiscent of Neal
Stephenson's.) Because they're cutting class, Marcus and some friends wind up
on the streets during a terrorist attack. So they're bagged, tagged, and
imprisoned by the Department Of Homeland Security, which treats them and
hundreds of others as enemy combatants, deserving of contempt, abuse, and
egregious rights violations. Marcus' experience in their cells and
interrogation rooms has a deep psychological effect, and he sets out to regain
his privacy and self-respect by creating a surveillance-proof communications
network. Soon, he's in an all-out war against the DHS' increasingly invasive
data-mining programs and fascistic social crackdowns.
Little Brother is being marketed as a
young-adult novel, but it's an entertaining, smart all-ages read. While it
props up a villainous straw man or two, and veers into Harry Potter fantasy
territory at the point where a sympathetic teacher is magically replaced by a
one-dimensional DHS stoolie, it mostly sticks to believable current events, and
believable reactions to them on both sides. The tight thriller storyline and
ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy are nigh-irresistible. And yet Little
Brother still
allows room for typically informational Doctorow asides, from how-to lessons on
finding hidden cameras and encrypting private information to intelligent
analysis of why anti-terrorist policies need to be retooled. Little Brother isn't quite The Anarchist Cookbook, but as a call to arms (or at least to changing attitudes for anyone aggravated
by "If you aren't a terrorist, you don't need privacy" cant), it's
convincing and
a great read.