Current events have not been so kind to aspiring hackers. Little Brother shows how we can get from where we are today to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies altogether. A recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the line into the world of Little Brother. I had the fortune of reading an early draft of Little Brother back in November 2006. Fast-forward two months to the end of January 2007, when Boston police found suspected explosive devices and shut down the city for a day. These devices turned out to be nothing more than circuit boards with flashing LEDs, promoting a show for the Cartoon Network. The artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to shell out a $2 million settlement, and the head of the Cartoon Network resigned over the fallout.
Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing Harajuku Fun Madness could be so trivially implicated as terrorists?
There is a term for this dysfunction—it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own devices. Coercing millions of people to strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors everyday is no solution, either. It only serves to remind the population that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy barrier to a determined adversary.
The truth is that we can’t count on someone else to make us feel free, and M1k3y won’t come and save us the day our freedoms are lost to paranoia. That’s because M1k3y is in you and in me—Little Brother is a reminder that no matter how unpredictable the future may be, we don’t win freedom through security systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon.
Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free.
Bibliography
No writer creates from scratch—we all engage in what Isaac Newton called “standing on the shoulders of giants.” We borrow, plunder and remix the art and culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears.
If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore.
Hacking is a great subject. All science relies on telling other people what you’ve done so that they can verify it, learn from it and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there’s plenty published on the subject.
Start with Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Hacking the Xbox (No Starch Press, 2003), a wonderful book that tells the story of how bunnie, then a student at MIT, reverse-engineered the Xbox’s antitampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, bunnie has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking.
Bruce Schneier’s Secrets and Lies (Wiley, 2000) and Beyond Fear (Copernicus, 2003) are the definitive layperson’s texts on understanding security and thinking critically about it, while his Applied Cryptography (Wiley, 1995) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. Bruce maintains an excellent blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. Crypto and security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the “cypherpunk” movement is full of kids, homemakers, parents, lawyers and every other stripe of person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers.
There are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best ones are 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting accounts of hacks accomplished, and O’Reilly’s MAKE magazine, which features solid how-tos for making your own hardware projects at home.
The online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. Ed Felten and Alex J. Halderman’s Freedom to Tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog maintained by two fantastic Princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about security, wiretapping, anticopying technology and crypto.
Don’t miss Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotics” at UC San Diego (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). Natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs from Toys “R” Us and turn them into badass toxic waste detectors. They unleash them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is.
Like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-DNS stuff is real. Dan Kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in 2004 (www.doxpara.com/bo2004.ppt).
The guru of “citizen journalism” is Dan Gillmor, who is presently running the Center for Citizen Media at Harvard and UC Berkeley—he also wrote a hell of a book on the subject, We, the Media (O’Reilly, 2004).
If you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with Annalee Newitz’s Wired article “The RFID Hacking Underground” (www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html). Adam Greenfield’s Everyware (New Riders Press, 2006) is a chilling look at the dangers of a world of arphids.
Neal Gershenfeld’s Fab Lab at MIT (fab.cba.mit.edu) is hacking out the world’s first real, cheap “3D printers” that can pump out any object you can dream of. This is documented in Gershenfeld’s excellent book on the subject, Fab (Basic Books, 2005).
Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things (MIT Press, 2005) shows how arphids and fabs could be used to force companies to build products that don’t poison the world.
Speaking of Bruce Sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the law, The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam, 1993), which is also the first book published by a major publisher that was released on the Internet at the same time (copies abound; see stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html for one). It was reading this book that turned me on to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I was privileged to work for four years.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) is a charitable membership organization with a student rate. They spend the money that private individuals give them to keep the Internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due process and the rest of the Bill of Rights. They’re the Internet’s most effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up for their mailing list and writing to your elected officials when they’re considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the mafia or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. EFF also helps maintain TOR, The Onion Router, which is a real technology you can use right now to get out of your government, school or library’s censoring firewall (tor.eff.org).
EFF has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general audience, as do the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org), Public Knowledge (publicknowledge.org), FreeCulture (freeculture.org), Creative Commons (creativecommons.org)—all of which are also worthy of your support. FreeCulture is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. It’s a great way to get involved and make a difference.
A lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with the verve of Slashdot, “News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters” (slashdot.org).
And of course, you have to visit Wikipedia, the collaborative, net-authored encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than a million entries in English alone. Wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. One caution: you can’t just look at the entries in Wikipedia. It’s really important to look at the “History” and “Discussion” links at the top of every Wikipedia page to see how the current version of the tru
th was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing points of view there and decide for yourself whom you trust.
If you want to get at some real forbidden knowledge, have a skim around Cryptome (cryptome.org), the world’s most amazing archive of secret, suppressed and liberated information. Cryptome’s brave publishers collect and publish material that’s been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests, or leaked by whistle-blowers.
The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands down, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of Alan Turing and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war novel that you won’t be able to put down.
The Pirate Party mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden (www.piratpartiet.se), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing (July, 2006). They’re a little out there, but a movement takes all kinds.
Speaking of out there, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies did indeed try to levitate the Pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange and work with a group called the Up Against the Wall Motherf___ers. Abbie Hoffman’s classic book on ripping off the system, Steal This Book, is back in print (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002) and it’s also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want to try to update it (stealthiswiki.nine9pages.com).
Hoffman’s autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (also in print from Four Walls Eight Windows), is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it is highly fictionalized. Hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great activist instincts. If you want to know how he really lived his life, though, try Larry Sloman’s Steal This Dream (Doubleday, 1998).
More counterculture fun: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road can be had in practically any used bookstore for a buck or two. Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL is online in many places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the MP3 at archive.org. For bonus points, track down the album Tenderness Junction by the Fugs, which includes the audio of Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman’s levitation ceremony at the Pentagon.
This book couldn’t have been written if not for George Orwell’s magnificent, world-changing Nineteen Eighty-Four, the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. I read this book when I was twelve and have read it thirty or forty times since, and every time, I get something new out of it. Orwell was a master of storytelling and was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that had emerged in the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it is one of the novels that literally changed the world. Today, “Orwellian” is synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink and torture.
Many novelists have tackled parts of the story in Little Brother. Daniel Pinkwater’s towering comic masterpiece, Alan Mendelsohn: The Boy from Mars (presently in print as part of the omnibus 5 Novels, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997) is a book that every geek needs to read. If you’ve ever felt like an outcast for being too smart or weird, READ THIS BOOK. It changed my life.
On a more contemporary front, there’s Scott Westerfeld’s So Yesterday (Razorbill, 2004), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and counterculture jammers. Scott and his wife, Justine Larbalestier, were my partial inspiration to write a book for young adults—as was Kathe Koja. Thanks, guys.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors and heroes who made it possible.
For the hackers and cypherpunks: Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz
For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O’Reilly
For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum
For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O’Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, Damon Knight, Scott Edelman
Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas.
If the seller of this electronic version has imposed contractual or technical restrictions on it such that you have difficulty reformatting or converting this book for use on another device or in another program, please visit http://craphound.com for alternate, open format versions, authorized by the copyright holder for this work, Cory Doctorow. While Cory cannot release you from any contractual or other legal obligations to anyone else that you may have agreed to when purchasing this version, you have his blessing to do anything that is consistent with applicable copyright laws in your jurisdiction.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LITTLE BROTHER
Copyright © 2008 by Cory Doctorow
Afterword copyright © 2008 by Bruce Schneier
Afterword copyright © 2008 by Andrew Huang
All rights reserved.
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor® Teen Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Doctorow, Cory.
Little brother / Cory Doctorow.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1985-2
1. United States Dept. of Homeland Security—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Fiction. 3. Computer hackers—Fiction. 4. Civil rights—Fiction. 5. Counterculture—Fiction. 6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PZ7.D66237 Lit 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2008001827
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
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