| For the last dozen years, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series has been a kind of cypherpunk training manual in the guise of young adult sci-fi. In the first book of the series, published in 2008, terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge, and the DHS turns San Francisco into a fascist surveillance panopticon. The teen hero of the story and his friends respond by hacking their Xboxes to create an anonymous and encrypted communications network, which they use to thwart the feds' spying and organize a resistance. In the second book in the series, Homeland, the same young crypto-rebel gets his hands on a thumb drive full of classified secrets, and has to figure out how to leak them to the public with maximum impact. Published in the spring of 2013, it more or less told the story of Edward Snowden's bombshell NSA leaks just months before they became public. Now the third book in the series has arrived, titled Attack Surface. It tells the story of the same cat-and-mouse game, but now from a darker and more adult perspective that far better matches our current reality: a young, morally ambivalent hacker recruited to work for the DHS and its surveillance contractors—while also secretly working on behalf of the dissidents trying to resist it. For Backchannel this week, I wrote a profile of Cory Doctorow and a review of his new, fully grown-up installment in the series. For the piece, I interviewed Cory Doctorow about how his technological idealism and ideology have changed over the last 12 years. And I also trace the influence Little Brother has had on modern digital subversives from Aaron Swartz to Laura Poitras to Edward Snowden, who carried a copy of one of Doctorow's Little Brother books with him as he fled to exile in Russia. Andy Greenberg | Senior Writer, WIRED |
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