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Nothing here is completely black-and-white, though, and many of Marcus' friends and family members oppose his actions. Being concerned with privacy and good with computers, Marcus has hacked his notebook to get around the surveillance features and takes other measures like putting gravel in his shoes to outsmart the gait-recognition devices in the school hallways. He's subjected to mild forms of torture until he yields completely, and is eventually released with instructions to tell no one about what happened and a warning that his every move will be watched from then on.Rather than giving in, though, Marcus decides to fight back against the Department of Homeland Security. He's grabbed off the street almost arbitrarily by the Department of Homeland Security and accused of being a terrorist.
In some ways, this is not the kind of book I usually read--phrases like "techno-geek" on the cover don't tend to appeal to me. The result is a thought-provoking examination of how far you should go in standing up for your beliefs.As a side note, the author of this book strongly opposes DRM and has released all his books in free, unprotected electronic formats at the same time as the print releases. As more and more citizens' rights are taken away in the name of safety, Marcus develops an underground network devoted to preserving privacy and freedom. But I picked this one up because both my brother and sister really liked it, and I'm glad I did.
When he isn't immediately willing to give up all his privacy and insists, for example, on seeing a lawyer, the situation only worsens. This makes him a good guy in my books. Doctorow raises a lot of difficult questions about the trade-offs between security and privacy, and tells a gripping story too.Marcus is a high-school student in the not-too-distant future, at a time when surveillance is increasing and school-issued notebooks record every keystroke a student makes. He's not really a bad guy, though, more concerned with getting out of school to play games with his friends than with using his abilities for any greater, malicious purpose.Unfortunately, after a terrorist attack in San Francisco, the authorities don't see Marcus' behaviour in such an innocent light.
The central themes are civil rights, privacy and freedom and a lot of interesting ground is covered in the book. The story is probably (hopefully.).
I'm over the age of the target audience and I can imagine that the young adult readers that this book is intended for would get a lot out of discussing the themes with other young adult readers. far fetched in parts but the ending seemed at odds to the rest of the book and too tidy and well resolved.There is quite a lot of technological content and most is well explained but I am already familiar with most of the tech he includes so I'm not sure how the less geeky reader would feel about it.
Little Brother is a novel for young adults which is set a few years in the future. Sometimes that makes the story seem incidental to the proselytising that is going on.
Regardless of your age; if you have never considered how surveillance features in your daily life then this book could open your eyes. A serious terrorist act shakes San Francisco and a group of teenagers get caught up in the aftermath.
However, as with other Cory Doctorow novels I've read, he has a point to make and uses the story as the vehicle for his opinions.
His goal is to take on DHS and win. It's a fascinating read and uses history, politics, and technology to fuel the plot, increasing interest in these subjects. Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is the story of 17-year-old hacker Marcus who gets hauled in as a terrorist suspect by the Department of Homeland Security after a major terrorist attack on San Francisco.This story is set in the not-so-distant future, maybe 2-5 years from now with a similar political climate and better technology. This book is full of geeky knowledge, and can tend to get a bit bogged down in these explanations in spots.Other than the unnecessarily-explicit teenage sex, this book is a winner. While it's message is a bit too can't-trust-adults, it's also a message that encourages teenagers to think for themselves and take action. Marcus spends his free time trying to beat the system (face-recognition has been deemed unlawful, but gait-recognition hasn't.yet) put in place to monitor the students every move and playing an alternate reality game with his friends. That is, until the game puts them in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading DHS to hauling them in and holding them for questioning in inhumane conditions.Once released, Marcus seeks to fight back, working around the bug placed on his laptop by wiring his XBox (a future version) to run on the Internet without a trace, and setting up a network with others to allow for free communication.
The government officials are just caricatures who don't even have a legitimate interest in the country's security, they just want to accumulate power. I agree with a lot of the ideas presented about the value of freedom, and those are especially important for the young adult audience this book is aimed at, and the various hacks that Marcus pulls off are interesting, but a lot of the information is given in the form of clunky infodumps which interrupt the story. Also, the views of anyone opposing Marcus are presented as fairly simplistic, straw man arguments. In the near future, high school senior Marcus Yallow and his friends are caught near the scene of a terrorist attack in San Francisco and apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security. Despite, those flaws, it is still a novel worth reading that is very relevant to today's world. In the aftermath of the attacks, numerous new security restrictions are imposed on San Francisco, and Marcus starts to resist them by setting up a secure Linux network that runs off of hacked XBox consoles, and using that network to spread ideas of ways to subvert the restrictions. After some rough interrogation, Marcus is released, but there is no sign of his friend Darryl. He also learns that Darryl may still be alive and starts searching for ways to find out what happened to him.This is an entertaining novel, but I wanted to like it more than I actually did.
Mad props to Cory for making this possible, and everyone should read this urgent, intelligent book, no matter how much money you have.Download free @ [.]. Also worthy to mention that this book is available for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.
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