"Omfgomfgomfgomfgomfg you have no idea how amazing you are!!!!!" was the exact response from my Twitter friend
@EisMC2 when I told her I'd just interviewed Little Brother author Cory Doctorow and had returned with a
signed copy of the book for her. Indeed, it was @EisMC2 and her friend
@JackalAnon who first turned me on to Doctorow's epic updated spin on Big Brother. Uncannily prophetic, the novel serves as a veritable playbook for the Occupy movement, and with hacktivists as its heroic protagonists, it is also an inspirational work for many Anons. As such, in retrospect, it may be considered one of the great civil liberties books of our time.
The math, science, and sociopolitical commentary spun into the prose of Little Brother is pure genius, while the story makes for a gripping reading experience. As @EisMC2 puts it, Doctorow has a knack "for distributing the #Truth in a manner everyone can understand." For example, during an expository paragraph regarding a key plot point, Doctorow also manages to simply and concisely explain how Bayesian mathematics (which puts the spam in your filter) is being deployed in an unscientific way to find "statistically abnormal" people to put under the security microscope – irrespective of whether they're actually likely to have done anything wrong. Even if advanced probability theory isn't your thing, by the time you've finished
Little Brother, you'll have a deep understanding of how this kind of statistical analysis – which government agencies routinely rely on to make policy and find targets in the war of terror – can be misinterpreted and manipulated with chilling effect.
Though set in an unspecified near future, much of the fictional dystopian world Doctorow depicted when he wrote Little Brother in 2007 is now a reality (such as the indefinite detention of US citizens without trial or due process). It's a tale of terrorism, society's overreation to it, the psychology of fear, and the erosion of our constitutional rights. It also contains many elements occupiers will be all too familiar with: protests, out of control cops,
pepper spray, tear gas, smoke bombs, police brutality, and a biased and lazy media "reporting" on it all.
At the start of the year, having spent some quality time at
OccupyLSX, I met up with Doctorow at his North London workspace. Surrounded by
cool gadgets, toys, and all manner of geek memorabilia (such as an
original 1973 set of D&D boxed game instructions), I chatted at length with the author, digital rights activist, and
Boing Boing co-editor about Little Brother, its forthcoming sequel Homeland, the realities of Big Brother, and
how to stay under the radar when living in a
surveillance state.
Nicole Powers: What made you move to London?
Cory Doctorow: I moved here in 2003. I had been working for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, and my visa expired. I'm Canadian, and they had just brought in biometrics at the border. Canadians only have to do them if you have a visa...I just couldn't stomach the idea. I mean there were lots of reasons I wanted to get out of America, but the idea that I would take some affirmative step that would require me to be biometrically scanned over and over again...I was like screw it.
NP: I have to say I'm here because of a couple of Anon friends recommended I read
Little Brother. Reading that book in the context of what's going on, it seems so prophetic. It's almost more relevant now than it was in 2007 when it first came out.
CD: Well, I just finished a sequel to it that's all about Anon, WikiLeaks, Occupy, drones, SOPA, lawful interception, rootkits, and all of that stuff. The sequel is called
Homeland. It will be out in 2013. I literally finished it a week and a half ago.
NP: Why 2013?
CD: I have a book scheduled for 2012...The book I've got coming [this year] is the first book I've ever written set in the UK. It's called
Pirate Cinema. It's about the passage of an amped up version of the Digital Economy Act [a piece of UK legislation which came into effect in April 2010 and regulates digital media] that includes the three strikes provision that disconnects people from the internet if they're accused of file sharing.
It begins with these kids in the North who live in a completely blighted, no jobs landscape, much like the North today, but worse. All the money that there is and all the access to services that there is comes through the internet. So if your mum's signing on for benefits, she goes onto the internet. If your dad's got part-time phone bank work, he gets that through the internet. If your sister's doing well in her A levels, it's because she's got internet access. So when they get their families cut off, they cost their families everything. It's a kind of Dickensian story. They run away to London to spare their families the shame of living with downloaders and they form a kind of joke youth gang called the Jammie Dodgers. They squat these old pubs and make their own movies by recutting movies that they love and screening them in sewers and cemeteries. They take over Highgate for a night and they show them in old pubs and stuff.
They realize that their mission has to be to destroy the entertainment industry before the entertainment industry can destroy Britain. So they go to Leicester Square during premieres with thumb drives of the movie that's being premiered and hand them to everyone in the queue for tickets and they say, 'Every pound you give them goes to destroying our country. Here's a copy of the movie. Watch it at home. Make your own version. Come show it at one of our screenings.' They get involved in a big legislative fight to repeal this Digital Economy Act-like provision, and that's the book. I'm really, really happy with how the book came out. It's nice to finally write a book set here...
NP: Little Brother, it's not only like a playbook for the Occupy movement, it's like the playbook for how the authorities have responded to it too.
CD: Yeah, yeah, sure. That hasn't escaped my attention.
NP: You said that you left the US because you didn't want to have to regularly subject yourself to biometrics...But
in the UK there's even more surveillance.
CD: Oh, yeah. You can't escape it anywhere. It's a race to the bottom all around the world right now. Canada, Germany, the US, and the UK, as well as the rest of the EU, are basically locked in a race to see who can implement
1984 the fastest. The US -- obviously now you've got indefinite detention for American citizens on US soil. In Canada we're on the verge of getting this lawful intercept bill that's as bad as anything anywhere else in the world. In the UK we have the Digital Economy Act and widespread biometrics. In Germany the police just got caught deploying what they've called the
0zapftis Trojan, the government trojan where when people cross the borders and they examine their laptops they covertly put spyware on their computers so they can watch them after the fact. I mean really, at every turn there's somebody doing this, so it doesn't matter where you live. It really doesn't at this point. That's one of the things that I've really come to realize, the fight is global.
NP: Little Brother is set in San Francisco, and you talk about "arphids" and how the
RFID chips in the Bay Area's FasTrak toll tags and BART Clipper cards can be used to
keep track of people's movements in a way that was never originally intended. When I bought an Oyster card for the London Underground, which has similar technology, it made me think twice about linking it to a credit card.
CD: Yeah. I chuck my Oyster card out every 30 days and pay £3 pounds and buy another one because it builds up a history...I keep thinking of Cardinal Richelieu, the sinister string-pulling figure in French history who said, "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." The idea that there would be this remotely accessible record of everywhere you've been and everything you've done that you might be someday be called upon to justify...It's not that I've done anything wrong. I just don't know that I could explain everything I've done, so I would rather have less to explain. And of course, we are rapidly heading for a time when not having anything to explain will itself be suspicious...Why is your Oyster card only 30 days old? Why don't you have a record of all the places you've been? Why is it that you turn off your mobile phone when you're not using it? Why have you
jailbroken your device and taken control of it so that it doesn't transmit information about you?
...The other thing is the failure to update the electronic surveillance laws, which are 25 years old. When they were written, it was assumed that any data that was left on a server for more than I think two months was abandoned, and you didn't need a warrant to get at it. Now, of course, that is all your Gmail. So there was this effort to update it. Because the intention of the law was to say that active files, the things that people cared about, would need a warrant to look at. Things that were abandoned on servers you wouldn't need a warrant to look at because they were trivial. And what's happened is almost the reverse...
NP: Right, we're encouraged to store data in clouds. I'm suspicious of the cloud.
CD: I am too.
NP: I'd rather pay for my email -- there's no such thing as free. If you're getting something for free, you're giving up something.
CD: Yeah, I think that's right, although I think that there's a middle ground between that. One thing about paying for your email is that there's not a guarantee that whoever you're paying will treat you any better than Google will...There's a lot of idiots out there. Google is at least pretty smart about this. Of all the companies that deal with law enforcement that store communications, Google is one of the best in as much as they're pretty transparent. They publish this annual accounting of all the times they've been asked for access to their server data and who they granted it to and who they didn't. Every take down request they get they send to
ChillingEffects.org, so they're pretty transparent about this.
But that said, if you want to protect your life on Google, what I would do is something in between. Because the other thing about Google is that I don't have a Gmail account -- well I do for my Android phone, but I don't accept email at it. But everyone else has a Gmail account, so there's copies of all my correspondence living on Google servers anyway. What you can do if you want your stuff to be stored in the cloud but not visible to law enforcement or Google is you can store it in a way so that they don't know what it is.
You can encrypt it.
That's really old technology, and it's getting better. It's still kind of hard to use, but there's browser plug-ins now that let you use Gmail directly. You don't have to like bring your mail into Thunderbird or some other mail app or some other program in order to encrypt it, you can do it right on your browser...It's still hard because it's secrecy and secrecy is hard to do. I mean, as every 12-year old who ever told his desk mate that he had a crush on the little girl across the hall, secrecy is hard, right? But if you take the time to learn it, and you do it well and you do it attentively, you can in fact have your cake and eat it too -- a little bit anyway.
NP: But then you get back into behavior patterns. If you have your stuff encrypted, will that alone be worthy of suspicion?
CD: Well the more you use encryption...
NP: And the more people that use it, the safer everyone is.
CD: That's right. The less suspicious it is...I think there is that nice rule of thumb that any time you're not paying for a product you're the product. But at the same time, just because you're paying for the product doesn't mean that they're not going to trade you to another company like a prisoner being traded around for a pack of cigarettes. Companies don't necessarily stand by their customers, and merely giving someone money isn't a guarantee that they'll treat you well, as countless
PayPal customers have discovered.
NP: I guess Twitter, though free, have also been fairly responsible. [Note: this interview was conducted prior to the
recent country-specific censorship controversy.]
CD: Yeah, they have...Some of the really good people who set up those policies at Google, the same people are now at Twitter. Alex Macgillivray, who's a Harvard Berkman Fellow, was one of the people responsible for the best policies about retention and notification and transparency at Google, he's now chief counsel at Twitter. So if the two firms seem like they have comparable policies, it's because the same people are establishing them.
NP: But part of that policy needs to be that they don't retain as much information so they can't be asked for it.
CD: Yeah. That's something that we've been talking about for a long time. I just
debated someone from the Chancellor's Office and someone from the Privacy Commissioner's Office in
Germany about
privacy and the web. There's this cliché that in Europe they worry about companies and in America they worry about governments. In Germany most of the fight about privacy has been about bizarrely Google's street view, whether or not you have the right not to have your house photographed, which just seems trivial to me. Meanwhile, Germany is an avid supporter of data retention laws which say that not only must you retain some stuff; you must retain everything, almost forever. Then they also have this Bundestrojaner, where they're infecting people's computers and spying on them.
I said, 'You can't have it both ways.' The only way to be safe from companies leaking or abusing lots of data about their customers is to reduce the incentive to retain lots of data about your customers - and in fact ideally provide disincentives, as sometimes we've had where you've had laws that say if you leak customer data you're liable for the consequences of it. The cheapest way to get out of that is just not retain customer data.
The best way to do that is to make it so that insurers go, 'If you retain customer data your premiums are 10 times what your premiums would be if you don't retain customer data because we're insuring you against the damages should you leak it. The cheapest way for us to insure you against those damages is to tell you not to retain it.' That would be ideal. You can't establish a regime that says you must retain customer data and then hope the customer data won't be abused...
I had a article in
The Guardian yesterday where I talked about how we want technologies that keep the Arab Spring safe...The whole American political classic reasoning that Facebook shouldn't be helping the Bahraini ministers figure out who to torture by going, 'Ah, that guy posted that he was going to the protest, and here's his network, let's round them all up and bung them in prison.' We all agree that Facebook shouldn't be a tool for spying on dissidents, but no one's ever figured out how to make a tool that lets the entertainment industry spy on you for SOPA to make sure you're not infringing copyright that doesn't also allow the Bahraini secret police to spy on you if you're a dissident.
NP: Or the American government when it comes to Occupy.
CD: Or the American government when it comes to Occupy, right. This is again having your cake and eating it too. You've got Hillary Clinton one day wagging her finger at China and saying, 'You mustn't crack down on your citizens and your Internet should be freer,' and then turning around and coming home and going, 'WikiLeaks is a rogue organization we should be shutting down, we should be serving special warrants, we should be spying on all the people involved in it.' You can't have it both ways. Either you build an infrastructure that's resistant to spying or you build an infrastructure that's amenable to spying. But there's no infrastructure that's resistant to spying except when you need it to be amenable to spying. It's one or the other.
NP: In
Little Brother you talk about how the First Amendment needs to be absolute if it's going to work.
CD: I don't think that I did argue that it had to be absolute particularly...[*See passage referenced below.] I think what I argued was that wartime is a poor excuse for saying it shouldn't be absolute. That if you think that the framers didn't mean in wartime too, you misunderstand the circumstances the framers operated in...Clearly America was much more fragile in 1776 than it is today. Yet they wrote it in 1776. They didn't wait 100 years and go, 'Now that we've entered a long period of peace we can afford to start thinking about our liberties.' They were talking about their liberties when they were under siege...At the time that I wrote this book a sound bite that you heard a lot from the
Fox News crowd was, 'The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. The framers clearly didn't mean that if it endangered the country you should uphold the Bill of Rights.' But they did. They really, clearly did.
The Fourth Amendment exists specifically because of general writs...Literally the King's soldiers had these roving warrants essentially, where they could just knock on anyone's door and search them, and search their goods and search their papers. The wording of the Fourth Amendment is specifically about when your country is at war a soldier shouldn't be allowed to come in and search your stuff. It pretty much says that. So to me in 2007 when I was writing it, the thing that really struck me was that anyone who said the framers clearly didn't mean the First Amendment should be employed at time of war, they were just wrong...It's a profoundly historically ignorant thing to say the framers didn't mean wartime. They really, clearly meant wartime.
NP: People think the government's enhanced search and wiretap provisions are only going to be used on terrorists. But if you don't need warrants and you're trusting people's judgment, it's too easy for law enforcement to look stuff up on the computer, so why wouldn't they?
CD: Well, that's happened. There's three things we need to worry about. One is lazy cops. Like the number of drug dealers who were magically transformed into terrorist drug dealers when the DEA was chasing them and didn't want to screw with warrants. You just look at the stats. The number of drug related terrorism warrants issued just goes up as soon as they can. It's the path of least resistance. You're busy, this is the easy way to do it - it's smart...So that's one.
Two is crooked cops, because everyone knows someone who knows a cop that you can pay to run license plate. And as soon as there's lots of other stuff hooked up to that license plate then you can pay that same crooked cop to look that up too. This is the Bradley Manning or whoever it was behind WikiLeaks lesson, that when 2 million people have access to secret data it's not really secret.
Then the third thing is that when it's wiretapping the whole internet the way they did at the
Folsom Street switching center, where like they had AT&T install a beam splitter so they could copy off every packet being transmitted on AT&T's backbone and send it to the NSA for analysis, by definition you're not looking at terrorists when you're doing that because you haven't started by saying we'll only intercept terrorist communications. You've started by saying we're going to intercept everyone's communications and look for terrorists, and that means that it can't be just terrorists who are losing their Fourth Amendment rights. This is everybody because you can't harvest everyone's communications to look for terrorists without harvesting everyone's communications.
NP: And looking at someone's computer data is far more intrusive than rifling through their belongings.
CD: It's like following me around for the last 40 years...
NP: And then poking around my brain.
CD: Poking around in my brain, reading my diaries and so on. Yeah, absolutely...
NP: Watching the brutality of the various Occupy police raids, it seems the US is waging war against its own citizens in a way that it hasn't maybe since the 1960s.
CD: I was going to say, it's not the beginning of America waging war against its own citizens because there's the whole civil rights movement, and the gay rights movement, and the Indian rights movement. I think one of the things that makes this a little like the '60s is that there were a lot of white middle class freedom fighters who were getting their
heads broken that required an official response from the political class that wasn't required when it was merely black activists getting their heads broken because of the way that race and privilege work in America. The same with gay rights struggles...
NP: Ironically, given that lawyers generally have such a bad name, they've often been the unsung heroes of the Occupy movement.
CD: Yeah, yeah, certainly. I've put the Lawyers' Guild in the sequel to
Little Brother. It's true...I think of the law in terms of struggle as being like shellac. When you make a political change you need the law to seal it in place. Otherwise, if all you do is convince one person in power that they should reverse themselves, release this prisoner, reverse this policy, whatever, when you do that with one person in power, one emperor, one prime minister, one president, then the next president changes it. When it becomes law, then it binds all the leaders who are to come. It becomes part of their structure...
NP: That what's scary about the NDAA, because when Obama signed it, he said in his
signing statement that he wasn't going to use it to indefinitely detain American citizens, but that caveat is meaningless.
CD: It's the argument that was made here with some success about the national database...That however much you trust today's Parliament, a national database is a gun that you load and hand to all the Parliaments and Prime Ministers that will follow. It's not reserved to the person who brings it into effect.
NP: Changing topic slightly...I have to say your essay in the forward to
Little Brother completely changed my mind about copyright.
CD: Thank you. The thing I may be working on when you leave today is my nonfiction book about copyright which I'm taking about the eleventh run at...It's called
Information Doesn't Want to be Free. The other half of that, of course, is people do.
NP: Because with laws like SOPA, which the entertainment industry lobbied for, they're essentially criminalizing almost their entire consumer base.
CD: Yeah, sure. The way I sort of explain to people who are in the industry is there's nothing wrong with an industry having rules. But that's where they should stay. If you have to understand industry special regulations in order to do everyday things that aren't part of that industry, it's broken. [For example], there are complex forms you have to fill out when you're doing inter-bank, overnight lending to balance out the books. If I asked you for a fiver because tomorrow's payday and I need a fiver for lunch, I shouldn't have to fill in the same paperwork. And if I did, we would say this is totally fucking broken.
When Universal wants to build the
Harry Potter ride and they call a lawyer at Warner's to negotiate the terms, that makes total sense. When a 12-year old in Brighton wants to build a
Harry Potter fan site, she shouldn't have to talk to the same lawyer at Warner's. And if she does, the law is broken. You will never make a law that a 12-year old can understand and abide by that will also be useful as a set of regulations for managing the supply chain of the entertainment industry. It's one or the other. The problem is that because everything on the internet involves a copy, and because copyright is triggered when copying happens, we've decided that copyright should be the law of first resort on the internet.
That makes no sense at all because although everything we do on the internet involves copying copyrighted works, it's not part of the entertainment industry. What copyright does well is serve the entertainment industry, so let's narrow its scope. Let's make it a meaningful regulation that the entertainment industry can use to govern its internal processes and let's take it out of scope for things that everyday people do. Which isn't to say that there should be no rules for what every day people do, but the act of copying a song for a friend shouldn't be treated as equivalent to pressing a record and putting it in a record store. They're just not the same thing. You will never have a rule that makes sense for people who press records, which no one does anymore, if you want it to also impact people who move data from one device to another.
NP: You quote Tim O'Reilly, when you talk about how for most artists "the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." You also referenced a Q&A you saw with Neil Gaiman. When he was asked how he felt about piracy with regards his books, you recall him turning the question back onto his audience by asking if they found their favorite author for free - by being loaned or given a book - or by actually buying a book. "Overwhelmingly," you noted "the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free." That was exactly my experience with
Little Brother. It was a couple of Anons online that said you
have to read this book. It might have just stopped there, with me failing miserably to remember to go out and buy it, except for the fact they were able to send me a download link. That's why we're having this conversation.
CD: Yeah, absolutely. The reality of the 21st Century is that copying is never going to get harder, so if you want to make contemporary art then copying should be part of it. There's nothing wrong with not making contemporary art. There's nothing wrong with being a heritage artist. There's nothing wrong with wanting to go to a Ren Faire or do Civil War re-enactments. That's all great. If you want to paint like Michelangelo and make your own gesso from rabbit skin, I'm all for it. But if you're making contemporary art and you don't intend it to be copied, it lacks the single characteristic of the contemporary era, which is copying. Leaving aside commercial questions and leaving aside all the other questions, there's enormous artistic satisfaction to making art that travels by copying because it becomes part of the 21st Century, of the 21st Century.
NP: But as a society we're getting obsessed with criminalizing people.
CD: Everything not mandatory is prohibited...I know that
America imprisons more people than anyone per capita, and black people are imprisoned at a higher rate in America than they were at the peak of apartheid in South Africa. So certainly, as a prison industrial complex we rival and beat anyone in the world...I guess some of this is like the lady swallows a fly and then swallows a spider to catch the fly and the bird to catch the spider. Once you criminalize drugs, you start putting people in jail, and then drugs don't go down at all, because of course they won't, then you have to put more people in jail to prove that the first batch of people you put in jail weren't a waste of time...
And there's this symbiotic relationship between criminalization or prohibition, and the people who benefit from enforcement, right? There's a rogue economist named Max Keiser who has a notional fund, just a fund on paper that you can buy into if you wanted to follow a stock. It's called the
Gulag Wealth Fund, [and is comprised of] private prison companies, mercenaries, arms dealers, and so on. Basically, his theory is that if the Gulag Wealth index goes up, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. And the Gulag Wealth index has been soaring.
NP: The war on drugs has been a complete failure, yet we continue to invest in it, and I read somewhere that the person that created the TSA has gone on record as saying the whole thing is a "
complete fiasco," yet we continue to spend billions on
virtually useless security theater at airports.
CD: It's a bit like in the Soviet Union. There was an official state science that was written by ideology and not evidence, and which is comparable to our drug policy for example...Stalin was very fond of a thing called
Lysenkoism. Lysenko was a geneticist, who's been discredited, who believed that you could induce changes in children by altering their parents. So if you cut off a frog's leg a certain number of its spawn would only have three legs. [Stalin] liked this for ideological reasons because it implied that you could perfect the human race by shaping parents before they had kids. If you induced changes into parents...they would pass it on to their children in their genes. This was part of the Stalinist project, and it was wrong. I mean it's not just repugnant, it's just wrong. But it was nevertheless state science, and so when they planted crops they had to plant crops according to Lysenkoian principles, which created these famines that killed tens of millions of people.
There was this thing that happened when Western scientists would go to conferences where Russian scientists were at and vice-versa. They would sit there with their biologist counterparts and everybody knew Lysenkoism didn't work, but they also knew that their counterparts couldn't say that it didn't work. Everyone would be just kind of embarrassed when the subject of genetics came up. It's a little like finding out that someone you know believes in homeopathy or something. Like, 'You believe in crystal healing? Huh?' Except that it's not like you just believe in crystal healing, but like someone will chop your head off if you stop believing in crystal healing. That's where the drug war is at, that's where the copyright wars are at, and that's where a lot of this stuff is at -- because we continue to incarcerate people.
I don't take drugs...I don't even hardly drink alcohol...I don't have a dog in this fight, but we keep claiming that marijuana turns people to heroin addicts, and it's really clear that it just doesn't...It's this bonkers thing right? We're spending millions, filling our prisons, taking people out of productive work, doing all the stuff that just costs a fortune even as austerity is coming along. And it's all tied into three strikes rules and minimum sentencing rules, so we can't even change it. There's that shellacking layer I was talking about before. The office of the drug czar in America, which is the person responsible for drug enforcement, has as part of his job description in statute, the thing that you have to do by law is try to discredit any research that shows that drugs aren't dangerous. Regardless of its evidentiary basis, that's part of your legal obligation...To deny science if science is ideologically inconvenient. So we are mired in this...
It's policy based evidence, not evidence based policy...Inconvenient truths are prohibited. This happens in copyright and elsewhere, and there's only so long that you can deny reality before you get a famine...I think that we're seeing that in the entertainment industry with copyright. We're seeing it with drug policy and so on. We are reaching these crises where we have to ask ourselves how many more people can we imprison?
NP: ...Sometimes I despair of where the world is going.
CD: It's an odd and interesting place. I think science fiction has very little to tell us when it comes to predictions but it's very good at both immunizing us against bad futures and inspiring us to good ones. That's what I see writing science fiction is doing, but I don't claim to know anything about the future, just that I hope that I can do one or the other or both of those.
NP: Little Brother was set in an unspecified near future...
CD: It's a contra-factual near future. It's doesn't have a date because it's not projected to be at a specific date.
NP: The same with the sequel?
CD: Yeah, same thing. It happens in the near future. It happens tomorrow. But it's always tomorrow.
NP: What's the society that you're seeing in the sequel?
CD: The book opens with the main character [Marcus Yallow], a year and a half later. He's just dropped out of uni because his dad's been made redundant because of austerity; his dad was a Prof there so he was getting free tuition.
There are no jobs for young people. [Marcus is] broke. His student loans are starting to be called in. All of his friends are building up student loans. He's knocked on every door in town. He can't find work. Finally he gets a job working for a muck raking independent candidate for the California Senate. At the same time he's given a parcel of leaks that have come from Masha, the character who's working for the DHS in the previous book who defects. It turns out she's been hiding in Mexico for the intervening year and a half, and everyone who's disaffected in the DHS and in the government has been smuggling her, as an honest broker, everything they're disaffected about, all of the smoking guns.
She gives it to [Marcus] as an insurance file to hold onto in case she disappears, and then she disappears. He has to decide what to do with it...They're coming up to state elections, he discovers that essentially Blackwater, although they're not called Blackwater, has spun out its mercenary arm, and then its mercenary arm has become a debt collection arm, and it's debt collection arm has started buying sub-prime student debts and has worked out that you can buy these really cheap, these defaulted student debts, and that they can probably collect on some of them, first just by strong arm tactics. But they have actually lobbied secretly in all 50 state capitals for a law that would allow them to attach the assets of parents if the students are living at home...So if you graduated from uni and you can't find a job and you've moved back in with your parents and you're carrying student debt, now your parents' house is on the line. [Marcus] discovers this, that essentially the military industrial financial debt industry has become one big thing and is conspiring to confiscate the last assets of everyday Americans as part of the overall rip-off of the
student debt spiraling crises.
So he's riding this edge between being the smart IT guy running a Howard Dean style guerilla, super next generation political campaign, and then on the other side running essentially WikiLeaks. It turns out that a group of Anons have taken over his WikiLeaks site, and while he's trying to figure out what to do they start leaking it, and he has to work out what to do about it...There's big protests and there's drones and there's pepper spray and there's Bundestrojaners, and the government's taking over people's mobile phones and tracking them, and taking over people's computers and tracking them, covertly activating their cameras -- you know about this
Lower Merion School District outside of Philadelphia?
NP: Yes, I do.
CD: All that kind of lawful intercept, surveillance society stuff. It's the same stuff that was in the last one but more so, updated for what's going on today. So that's the second book.
*Passage referenced:
"They set out the Bill of Rights because they thought that having absolute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. Like the First Amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. They didn't want to face the risk that some jerk would decide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal."
For more on Cory Doctorow visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.
( on my country doesn't exist these products 
)
I think it's pms, but still... CAN THEY STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER 
Silencia
