In Little Brother
we met Marcus Yallow, aka M1k3y, a tech-savvy teen who was randomly arrested
and held prisoner in a secret facility by the Department of Homeland Security
after a terrorist attack in San Francisco.
Stunned and furious, Marcus leads a tech revolution against the new
security state after his release. Fast
forward two years and we join the brains behind the Xnet at the Burning Man
festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.
Things have not been going well for Marcus. He dropped out of college because his student
loans were through the roof, he can’t find a job and he’s living at home with
his parents who have both lost their
jobs. But Marcus has made it to Burning
Man. He’s somehow managed to save enough
money and borrow enough camping gear to make it to this year’s festival. And it is AWESOME! He and his girlfriend Ange are having a blast
dancing at all hours of the night and examining the art that thousands of other
people have put on display. Out of nowhere,
Marcus runs into Masha, a one woman tech army who works for DHS. Masha meets Marcus and hands him a 4 GB USB
stick. A USB stick with tons of
government documents so creepy and wrong that even loyal DHS employees couldn’t
keep it to themselves. Masha asks Marcus
to keep the stick safe and if he hears that Masha goes down, he’s supposed to
leak everything to the public.
All of that is quickly put out of Marcus’s head after one of
the huge art cars at the festival explodes.
Marcus manages to break his nose during all of the chaos and sees Carrie
Johnstone for the first time in two years.
Who is Carrie Johnstone? Remember the certifiably crazy woman who
waterboarded Marcus while he was being detained by DHS in Little Brother? That’s
Carrie Johnstone. Burning Man comes to
an end the next day and Marcus makes it back to San Francisco- with a lot of
burning questions. Marcus gets a lead on
a job while at the festival and once he returns home, he finds an email from
the campaign manager of Joe Noss, a man who is running for the California state
senate. And after months and months of
handing out resumes, Marcus has a job.
As the webmaster for Joe Noss’s political campaign, no less.
Meanwhile, Marcus and his friends manage to create a darknet
site in order to keep tabs on the 800,000+ government files that were on
Masha’s USB stick. And of course, word
gets out. Marcus is still trying to
fight the good fight to keep the government from hacking the privacy of the
American public. But as we learned in Little Brother, that fight is never
easy. I was really interested to see that
there are afterwords in the back of this book: one by Jacob Appelbaum of
WikiLeaks and another by Aaron Swartz of Reddit. There is also a bibliography section that has
lots of tips and resources if you are at all interested in learning about
modding your own open source programs. This
book was a crazy technological thrill ride and I loved every minute of it. Readers
who liked the intense, hacker filled pages of Little Brother you will love Homeland.
-Natalie
Now Reading: Ask the Passengers (the audiobook!) by A.S. King
Now Reading: Ask the Passengers (the audiobook!) by A.S. King
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