In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother,
young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized
by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San
Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of
the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers,
fighting back against the tyrannical security state.
A few years later, California's economy
collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as
webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform.
Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political
underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a
Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and
governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha
goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world.
Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same
government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years
earlier.
Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave
him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that
will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by
friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard
him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration
without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at
all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet,
before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right
thing to do.
Meanwhile, people are beginning to
shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting
pain until they get the answers they want.
Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next
week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little
Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to
make the world a better place.
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