"When surveillance is everywhere does it make you any safer?"
Reviewed by Clare O'Beara
Posted April 26, 2016
Thriller | Thriller Legal
Third in the 'Chris Bruen' technothriller series starts as
the protagonist opens his own law office. Who knew it was
so dangerous being a privacy lawyer? A new client, a
reformed hacker, gets Chris out of the office to tell him
that he believes he's under SURVEILLANCE and he's scared.
By the time they return with cups of coffee, an intruder
has shot the receptionist. Only Chris's swift thinking enables him and Ian Ayres to
escape, and he warns his computer expert Zoey Doucet to
stay away from the office and assume she's being
electronically tapped. Chris and Zoey are an item since the
previous book INTRUSION also set in San Francisco. Taking a
deep breath, Zoey attempts to summon up a skilled hacker
and thief who has gone off the grid. If he is still
around, and allows her to stay with him, she just might be
unfindable. Meanwhile Chris and Ian, a man Chris barely
knows, are running from a shadowy agency with the presumed
powers of the NSA but even less accountability. Knowing
this agency may exist is why someone wants them dead. We get a view inside this new agency with a seasoned NSA
analyst, Sam Reston, who is transferred to its data centre.
Here, even the window panes are soundproofed. He learns
that since Congress clamped down on the bulk data
collection of the NSA, this new agency is working in the
background to spy on everyone, by every means possible. Sam
is committed to the fight against terrorism. But this place
has a computer capable of breaking public key encryption on
emails and storing more data than in all the books ever
printed. He starts to wonder if privacy as we know it is
dead. Then he is told to find Chris Bruen. Amusingly he is
also warned to watch his younger colleagues in case one
turns out to be another Edward Snowden. The tension mounts as Chris and Ian are chased from one
location to another, avoiding CCTV cameras because they
don't know what the agency can tap into next. However I
found the initial concept vague compared to a terrorist
plot or industrial espionage, for instance. I had more
empathy with Zoey who finds herself in a strange land with
borderline psychotic hackers who are going after a drug
cartel's banked cash. Rather her than me. The trail taken
by the various characters shows us some contrasting
scenery, and there's also an appearance by a surprising
guest star. Recently I notice technothrillers turning to the attitude
that in America, and a lesser extent other countries, the
permanent, employed government goes its own sneaky,
arrogant way despite ephemeral, elected politicians and
responsibilities. The concept certainly needs to be
discussed and the solution offered in these books generally
seems to be releasing leaked files into the media.
Journalists and a few honest whistleblowers are shown to be
the conscience, the check and balance, of the massive,
impervious government. When SURVEILLANCE is everywhere,
says seasoned author Reece Hirsch, the danger may be more
from within than without. Read his ominous view of a
situation that may already exist, for all we know, and see
how safe you feel.
SUMMARY
When former computer-crimes prosecutor Chris Bruen and
retired hacktivist Zoey Doucet open their San Francisco
law
firm, it’s the best day of their professional lives. That
is, until their first client walks through the
door. Ian Ayres is an “ethical hacker” who was
hired
by a company to test the security of its online systems.
On
the job, he uncovered some highly classified information:
the existence of a top-secret government surveillance
agency
and its Skeleton Key, a program that can break any form
of
encryption. Now Ayres is on the run. And after government
agents descend on Chris and Zoey’s office during their
potential client’s visit—killing two employees—they, too,
are forced to flee for their lives. From California
to
Ecuador to Mexico, the trio must try to evade a hired
assassin, a bloodthirsty drug cartel, and their own
government. But how can they escape an adversary that can
access every phone call, every email, every video
feed? Surveillance is critically acclaimed
author Reece Hirsch’s third book in the Chris Bruen
series.
ExcerptThe day that Bruen & Associates opened for business was
one of the best days of Chris Bruen’s life—until the
first client walked through the door.Chris had always dreamed of starting his own law firm,
and he’d imagined that, given a blank slate, he could
create the kind of workplace that he had never found in
fourteen years of practicing law—egalitarian, loose but
well-managed, non-bureaucratic, fun. A place that was
more about doing the best, smartest work than putting
dollars in your column. Things were still fairly quiet on that first morning in
the new, red brick building on Folsom Street in San
Francisco’s South of Market district. His office
resembled a blast site, with open cardboard boxes and
files scattered everywhere. As he listened to voicemails
from clients with questions about the new firm, Bach’s
Brandenburg Concertos played softly in the background. Chris was braced for possible surprises on the firm’s
first day. In fact, he half-expected that one of his
hacker adversaries might “swat” his new office. Swatting
was a favorite hacker prank, and it involved placing an
anonymous call to the police or FBI and reporting a false
hostage situation, terrorist threat, or some other
extreme event that would draw a SWAT team down upon the
unsuspecting victims. Chris had already called the
police and FBI to warn them that they might be getting
that sort of anonymous tip, hoping it would at least give
the authorities pause before they came in locked and
loaded. The firm was operating with a skeleton crew consisting of
a receptionist, a file clerk, and the head of the
computer forensic lab Zoey Doucet. There were a couple
of talented associates at Reynolds Fincher whom he had
trained in privacy and security law, but it would have
been improper to offer them jobs before he had resigned
from Reynolds Fincher. He planned to begin the process
of bringing them over later in the week. By not
contacting them immediately, Chris was actually doing the
young attorneys a favor. Right now his previous partners
would be asking them all sorts of blunt questions; this
way, they could provide non-answers with a clear
conscience. Chris rolled his phone to voicemail and rose from behind
his desk, deciding to take a stroll around the office.
In the crush of constant deadlines, it was too easy to
let a moment like this slip past. He didn’t consider it
a victory lap: more like a conscious effort to imprint on
his memory the beginnings of something good. He had high
hopes for the firm, and he expected that Bruen &
Associates would not remain a scrappy startup for long. As he emerged from his office, the receptionist Becky
Martinez quickly slid a thick book into her lap and under
her desk. Becky, a night-school law student, was putting
her life back together after a bad divorce. She was
exactly the sort of person that Chris was committed to
hiring for this new enterprise—bright, kind, and highly
motivated. “It’s okay to read if the phones aren’t ringing,” Chris
said. “You don’t have to hide your law books from me.” “Thanks. I wasn’t sure how you felt about that.” “I don’t think things are going to be this quiet for
long, though.” “I hope not.” “Me, too, Becky. Me, too.” Chris walked down a short hallway off the reception area
to the computer forensic lab. The secure entry keypad had
not yet been installed so he was able to duck in. Zoey didn’t notice him immediately. Nestled in a thicket
of servers and computer monitors, she watched as the
output from an anti-virus program scrolled across her
three screens. When she finally noticed Chris, she said, “You’re going
to need to double the number of servers if we’re going to
be competitive. You know that, right?” “Good morning to you, too.” “Sorry, but I love my new toys. I want more.” “Is there anything that you need to do your job that you
don’t have?” “Well, no,” Zoey conceded. “But you never know when a
big breach might come along and max out our resources.” “We’ll get there. Dave Silver at BlueCloud just agreed
to pay a big retainer against our fees to help subsidize
our start-up costs.” “It’s nice to have billionaire friends.” “Well, he’s not exactly doing it out of friendship. He
owes us. We sort of saved his company when they were
being blamed for the Lurker virus.” “Oh, right, there was that.” “So how do you like having your own shop?” Chris asked,
resting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll let you know when things are fully built out,” Zoey
said. Then she broke into a grin. “But, yeah, it’s
pretty awesome.” Chris noticed a glass vase that stood on one of the lab’s
wooden, non-conducting countertops. Rather than flowers,
it was filled with a limp bouquet of multi-colored wires
held together by a big ribbon tied in a bow. A Hello
Kitty card was pasted to the front of the vase with tape.
It read: Congratulations, Geek Girl! (We knew flowers were too
girly for you.) From the Bottom of the Hill Gang Zoey had been a bartender for several years at the Bottom
of the Hill, a music club on Potrero Hill, and she stayed
in touch with the crew there. “Funny,” Chris said. “And true.” “What can I say? They know me.” Chris pointed at the vase. “I didn’t think of you as a
Hello Kitty kind of person.” “I’m not. That looks like Erin’s work.” Chris examined the blank-faced, big-headed cat cartoon.
“You know, I once met someone from the Hello Kitty
marketing team. Do you know why Hello Kitty doesn’t have
a mouth?” He placed both hands on his chest. “Because
Hello Kitty speaks from the heart.” Zoey swiveled around in her chair to face him. “I think
Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because, if she did, she
would never stop screaming.” Chris laughed, appreciating, as always, Zoey’s deeply
twisted mind. After his wife died, Chris had opened an
account with an online dating site but quickly abandoned
the experiment. He didn’t like treating a relationship
as if it were merely another online search that could be
perfected through the judicious selection of search
terms. If he’d applied only the standards of what he
thought he wanted, he never would have found Zoey. “Write up your wish list of what you’d like for the next
stage,” he said. “I think I’m going to be in a position
to make it rain.” Across the hall from the forensic lab was the file room,
the domain of file clerk Ira Rogers. While the file-
clerk job wasn’t very demanding, Ira was a perfect fit
for it. He was starting an independent record label and
had proven himself a talented producer of quirky art-pop
records. His natural meticulousness behind the mixing
console carried over to his day job at the firm. Chris
didn’t expect Ira to love being a file clerk, but he did
his job efficiently and he was an interesting person to
have around the office—if only to hear his critiques of
Chris’s music choices and his debates with Zoey over
hyper-specific ten-best lists (Ten Best Songs with a
Backwards-Guitar Solo, Ten Best Songs in Which the Singer
Has a Fake British Accent, etc.) Some sort of symphonic electronic pop music played softly
in the file room, but Ira was nowhere to be seen.
“Ira?” Ira emerged from between two sliding, floor-to-ceiling
stacks of files. He was pale and delicate-looking, with
washed-out blondish hair cut short. Even when drugs
weren’t involved, there seemed to be something about the
rock and roll life that kept guys like Ira as rail-thin
as teenagers. Rockers like Iggy Pop and Keith Richards
might grow into scaly, wizened raptors, but they never
seemed to put on weight. “Yes?”
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