I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s excellent young adult novel, Little Brother, a book I mentioned a week or two ago. Neil Gaiman put it very well when he wrote about Little Brother
I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
I don’t do book reviews, but I’ll paste here a few snips from the book which as I read them seemed worth a cut and paste to a blog entry. Oh, and I just have mention in passing that I enjoyed the way Cory tossed “caltrops” and the Scoville scale into the story. Also, food for thought for me was the idea that arfids (RFID chips) in library books might be used to track people around… being over 25, a lot of the tech stuff I’ll probably have to remain pretty clueless about. But, I do recommend that you consider donating a copy for a teacher or librarian. No doubt some arfids will get nuked, so the list may continually need replacements copies, but that’s a small price to pay for an important message. 
I still take my freedom for granted and let other
people take it away from me. You’re the first generation to grow
up in Gulag America, and you know what your freedom is worth
to the last goddamned cent!
Most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. Stills from the Geist video have appeared on the front
pages of newspapers in Korea, Great Britain, Germany, Egypt and
Japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on
primetime news. The issue came to a head last night, when the
British Broadcasting Corporation’s National News Evening
program ran a special report on the fact that no American
broadcaster or news agency has covered this story.
The quote above didn’t remind me of Sibel Edmonds. No, no, not at all…
Not really Cory’s words, but ones we could all use to see more frequently:
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
if it’s the DHS’s job to keep us safe, they’re failing. All the crap they’ve done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. Tracing us around the city? Taking away our freedom? Making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? Calling dissenters traitors? The point of terrorism is to terrify us. The DHS terrifies me.
Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device.
(from the Afterword by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Xbox Hacker )