“Little Brother”: A New Perspective on Freedom

Portrait of Cory Doctorow, Borderlands Books, San Francisco, CA (by Alex Schoenfeldt Photography, www.schoenfeldt.com , CC-BY)

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, journalist, and activist who was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that defended freedoms related to technology, law, policies, and standards. His book, Little Brother, is a provocative tale about a high school senior and his group of friends. This book not only highlights some of the freedoms that he believes in, but also provokes the reader into questioning what they believe in regards to civil liberties and basic rights.

Set in San Francisco, it follows their exploits as they evolve from technology savvy students into guerrilla fighter trying to defend what they perceive as fundamental freedoms and basic rights from overreaching governmental authorities following a fictional terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and BART.

This book brings to light several basic issues of civil liberties and poses the question: how many of our liberties should we be willing to give up in the name of safety and security amid an age of terrorism?  The answer that the book suggests is none. That despite governmental crack downs, we should be actively fighting for our liberties and for our privacy.

This is an important question that we need to ask ourselves, especially concerning the events that have happened in recent memory. The United States response to the September 11^th terrorist attacks marked a huge shift in the way our country operated in terms of liberties and privacy. Not only were the powers of governmental agencies expanded “in the name of security”, but they were given authority to perform tasks that even a year before would have been deemed grossly inappropriate and highly illegal.

Terrorism is about terror. Little Brother helps illustrate the point that unconditionally surrendering basic freedoms for the illusion of security proves that terrorism works and in some cases, can fuel it. The response that government has to said terrorism is highly ineffective in the sense that it doesn’t just target terrorists; it targets anyone who doesn’t fit a predetermined mold. While the general population may see this as a good thing because it seems effective on the surface, there are too many casualties that result from this way of thinking.  People become unfairly targeted for investigation based on something as innocuous as the way they dress or how they talk.

Let’s take the Patriot Act, for example. In terms of domestic and international surveillance, it expanded governmental powers in 4 ways:

1. Records searches. It expands the government’s ability to look at records on an individual’s activity being held by third parties. (Section 215)
2. Secret searches. It expands the government’s ability to search private property without notice to the owner. (Section 213)
3. Intelligence searches. It expands a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment that had been created for the collection of foreign intelligence information (Section 218).
4. “Trap and trace” searches. It expands another Fourth Amendment exception for spying that collects “addressing” information about the origin and destination of communications, as opposed to the content (Section 214).

(from the  ACLU website)

Not only did it allow for previously illegal policies to be placed into effect, but it also allowed for government to trample all over the constitutional rights of private citizens. While the Supreme Court has ruled in several cases that privacy is a basic right as a citizen, in times of terrorism, it seems that constitutional rights go out the window. We’re exchanging our rights and our freedoms for what we think is safety.

While I understand that the government has to be seen doing something, treating constitutional rights as if they’re optional is not the right approach to solving the problem, it only proves to the terrorists that their tactics work. Just because we want security doesn’t mean that we should be willing to give up basic rights that our country was founded upon.