Little Brother -- Cory Doctorow

Marcus Yallow is an ordinary seventeen year old kid. He is smart enough to hack the security on his school notebook and fool the cameras that monitor the hallway to skip classes to play an internet treasure hunt with his friends. He finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack, held by the Department of Homeland Security and under suspicion for being reluctant to divulge his passwords for his private data on his phone and computer.

After being released he finds that rights to privacy, freedom of speech and assembly that he had always taken for granted are rapidly being surrendered in the name of 'security' and the war against an unidentified terrorist threat. He finds ways of encrypting and securing his emails and communications using a cobbled together network of hacked x-box consoles, and becomes 'M1k3y', the unwitting and unwilling figurehead of a rag tag resistance to the burgeoning police state.

This is a book aimed at young people - indeed one of the slogans of the resistance is "Don't trust anyone over twenty five", echoing the calls of the hippies and yippies of the 60s - but there are important lessons to take on board for all of us. How much freedom are we willing to sacrifice when there is very little prospect of catching any real terrorists? Even the omnipresent security cameras in the UK have done very little to deter crime, according to police reports.

The book may be a little preachy in places, but the technical explanations of things like anonymous routing, DNS tunnelling and public key encryption are very well done. The plot rattles along at a fair pace and builds to a believable conclusion. We can look at things like the pictures from Guantanmo Bay and Abu Graib, and think that such things can never happen 'here', but the scenario laid out by Cory Doctorow is sadly all too plausible.

The book is freely available for download at the author's site here and I would say that is well worth reading. If you enjoy it and find it useful, you can buy a copy when it is publshed, buy the audiobook or donate money to sponsor resources for a class at a school.