Everyone should go out now and download or buy a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and give it to a teenager. I don’t know a lot of teenagers (the court mandates that 
) but I am going to seed a few copies about.
It’s not the world’s greatest novel – not even close – but it is an important novel. It’s also a little heavy on the rhetoric and I don’t know a lot of teenagers who talk like the main character (more’s the pity).
Much like the Max Headroom’s tagline of “20 minutes into the future”, Little Brother is set in a RSN San Francisco. A San Francisco that has a little of the smell of Big Brother. The same smell a lot of Americans, British and Australians can sense as our civil liberties are slowly eroded in the name of “national security”.
The main character, Marcus, is a 17 year old high school student interested in computers, gadgets, role-playing and girls. Shortly after the opening of the book a major terrorist incident occurs: the bombing of the BART and the Bay Bridge. In the aftermath of the incident Marcus and three of his friends are detained and interrogated as suspected terrorists. After a week of detention all but one of them is freed but warned that the government is watching them and told to tell no one they were detained.
Marcus decides to take action and possibly revenge for his missing friend and that’s where the story starts getting interesting.
The main aspect of the book that appealed to me is the first rate introduction to the whys and hows of privacy and security. An introduction that even paranoids like me can appreciate. Doctorow explains PKI, RFID hacking and a bunch of other security mechanisms, counter-measures. Most importantly, Little Brother teaches the reader how to THINK about privacy and security.
This is the key thing missing from a lot of actual “grown-up” security books – thought leadership. A lot of these security books provide mechanisms and systems to measure risk and apply controls. Less often do they teach people how to think about threats, how to distil threats into risks and how to apply controls to mitigate those risks. Very rarely, if ever, do they teach you how to think like the attacker.
Little Brother is like a distilled HOWTO on being a sneaky bastard. It teaches you that paranoia, properly applied, is not only healthy but logical given the threats to our privacy and security.
Little Brother also demonstrates that sometimes attacking the control is almost as effective as attacking a target. Rendering the control inoperative not only lowers the protection of the target but can result in the target’s defenders being tied up trying to protect the control instead of the target.
Overall, an excellent book that offers some really useful insights for both adults and teenagers. Go give it to a teenager and hopefully they’ll trust someone over 25 long enough to read it.
You can download the book for free at:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
Or you can buy it via your book store or Amazon.
