Read Little Brother Here
In 2007, Little Brother was published, bringing us into the world of cryptography, terrorism, and computer hackers. This novel was written by Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow
Source: Wikipedia
Cory Doctorow is a journalist, blogger, and science fiction author. He was born in Ontario, Canada and is still alive today. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws. His work includes themes of digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo. He is a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Open University in the United Kingdom.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, with one of his popular works being Little Brother.
Little Brother is set in San Francisco, California. This story focuses on four teenagers who are accused of being involved in a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and BART transportation system. During the first few chapters, this story is being illustrated as they first start at school. As his friends play hooky, this is when they encounter an explosion. They are taken in by the DHS and are relentlessly questioned and accused. The cops believed they Marcus and his friends were terrorists from Al Queda. However, Marcus did not give in to their petty questioning and rudeness so he kept strong and withdrew information.
After Marcus and his friends are released from prison, they continue to run into issues with the DHS. For example, the DHS put a bug in Marcus’s laptop. In order to avoid this issue, he makes a new system called the ParanoidLinux in order to communicate secretly. He encourages others to use this system as they communicate secretly.
The story continues with Marcus and xnetters “jamming” people’s orphids, which are done by changing their information. This caused the DHS to be suspicious of everyone with these changed arphids.
We see how technology and communication can change our connection with the world. This technology, ParanoidLinux, allows anyone to communicate with any other, without any eyes seeing their conversation, including the police. This may be quite alarming since there are very dangerous people who can use this to many others’ disadvantage.
I found this book so far to be intriguing and captivating. Doctorow stresses the importance of privacy and how this is often breached. Although this is not the focal point of his work, I found this to be most important for me. As we know, all of our information is constantly readily accessed for anyone to see, because there are several ways of hacking systems on the Internet. This novel brings to the surface the underlying issues that may occur today, particulary with the Department of Homeland Security.
As this only covers the first ten chapters of the novel, I will be discussing the rest of the book in my next blog.