Friday, May 29, 2015

Little Brother

Little Brother is the first of a book series written by Cory Doctorow. He has also written Homeland, the second instalment of the series. The story is about a modern San Francisco where the government begins invading people’s privacy to the max in search of terrorists. It explores how far our government’s power will go and how the people will fight back. The overall theme is liberty and freedom.
               
In the beginning of the book San Francisco suffers from a terrorist bombing and in the rush of it all military take the main character Marcus Yallow and his friends: Vanessa, Darryl, and Jolu into custody and pretty much torture any information they know out of them as they are now suspected terrorists. After they get all the information out of Marcus and his friends that they think they need (none of which has anything to do with the terrorist attack), they are set free again but under constant surveillance. All except Darryl who was injured when they were captured and the captors say they never saw him and are going to arrest the rest of them again and make them “disappear”. When they are finally come back into society, after a week or so of capture, they find out that the government has started violating citizen’s privacy any way they can. In response Marcus joins and helps distribute a network called the Xnet where you can use the internet completely anonymously by using a hacked version of an xbox that bounces from router to router so anyone tracking or monitoring it would get lost. This and many other ways were how Marcus and others fought against the DHS and the government.
               
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about the freedoms we have as Americans and would like to protect them. This book goes into detail explaining a lot of tech involved in Marcus’ fight against the DHS (Department of Human Services) so if you would like to learn about technology and the violation of American’s rights than you should read this book immediately.




Book Review by Mason B.

2 comments:

  1. Lucas Hernandez B7May 29, 2015 at 10:41 AM

    I would definitely want to read this book because the government spying on us is a big controversy. It seems really intriguing because the USA is torturing its own citizens and trying to see if they committed an act of terrorism. Normally the US government says that they don’t spy and use harsh methods of torture so this is interesting and stunning to me. A connection I have to this is when I was watching CBS news and a big story on Edward Snowdan was on, basically he said that the US government was ease dropping on our phone calls, reading our texts, and our internet searches. The government said that it was to see if any terrorist activity was going on or about to happen. So the whole US government spying for terrorism is a big connection I make with this book.

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  2. Mason Lovan Block 8May 29, 2015 at 11:51 AM

    I’m am very interested in this book “Little Brother”. This book sound very interesting because in this book they are fighting for freedom, and now and days some people’s rights can be taken away just like that. The book “A long way gone” Ismael Beah he was fighting for freedom from corrupt government. I really enjoyed this book because it was filled with action and it was kind of exciting!

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