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A review by ncrabb
The Switch by Joseph Finder
5.0
It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. You’re harried; you’ve been through all the humiliation of a TSA security check at the airport; you scoop up your shoes and belt, you snag that Mac Book, shove it in your bag, and go home.
Oops! You snagged someone else’s Mac Book by mistake. Oh, and look at that! There’s a password on a post-it note attached to the bottom of the laptop. Well, it’s not yours, but, ah heck, you have the password. Maybe you can just open it and see who it really belongs to so you can make the exchange and get your laptop back.
That’s the life of Michael Tanner as the book opens. He’s a decent moral guy with a personal honor code that doesn’t allow him to cheat on people with whom he’s in business. He’s a coffee roaster entrepreneur in Boston, and his company is in financial trouble. He is being consistently outbid by a competitor, and he doesn’t understand how the competitor is getting information. Worse still, his realtor wife wants to leave him. She has been begging for the couple to have a child for months, and Tanner keeps putting her off. She’s done with that and with the marriage. He wants her back.
Now he has a laptop that apparently belongs to a U.S. senator. On that laptop are horrifying files that outline a government plan to essentially hijack the camera and microphone in every smartphone in the nation, essentially turning every phone into a continuous camera and every microphone into a continuous listening device.
Naturally, the senator panics. She is an elected official whose staffer has illegally taken files from a secure server and placed them on a jump drive, and from there onto her Mac Book. If that unit isn’t found, she faces prison.
Her staffer hires a shady Russian hacker to figure out that the laptop the senator took is Michael Tanner’s, and he calls Tanner assuming he can just pull off a quick exchange. But he decides to lie about the laptop’s ownership[ so as not to implicate the senator. Little does he know that Tanner has already been inside the computer and knows the real name of the owner.
That lie starts a chain of events that will truly bathe you in adrenalin tsunami after adrenalin tsunami. I’m not engaging in hyperbole here. I found my heart rate and breathing impacted by this so suspenseful and scary is it. If you genuinely believe that your government is beneficent and would never harbor data or do anything that would harm you, cuddle that illusion closely and cherish it, and don’t read this book. If, on the other hand, you have suspicions about what goes on at that massive NSA server farm in Utah? Oh, yeah, this is your kind of book, and you’ll miss out hugely if you decide to leave this unread. At one point, Tanner’s identity and Internet connectivity are entirely stripped from him, and he is every bit as much a prisoner walking freely as if he were in the most impenetrable cage in a supermax prison. People who follow me here know that I’m pretty niggardly with those five-star ratings; I almost never give them out. But this is a 10-star book if you like thrillers where every word matters, chapters are short, and the narration is crisp and machine-gun staccato. Read this and ponder whether anything like what happened to Tanner could happen to you. This book totally kills the argument I hear all the time from naïve people who say, “I have nothing to hide; I’ve done nothing wrong.” But neither had poor Michael Tanner.
Oops! You snagged someone else’s Mac Book by mistake. Oh, and look at that! There’s a password on a post-it note attached to the bottom of the laptop. Well, it’s not yours, but, ah heck, you have the password. Maybe you can just open it and see who it really belongs to so you can make the exchange and get your laptop back.
That’s the life of Michael Tanner as the book opens. He’s a decent moral guy with a personal honor code that doesn’t allow him to cheat on people with whom he’s in business. He’s a coffee roaster entrepreneur in Boston, and his company is in financial trouble. He is being consistently outbid by a competitor, and he doesn’t understand how the competitor is getting information. Worse still, his realtor wife wants to leave him. She has been begging for the couple to have a child for months, and Tanner keeps putting her off. She’s done with that and with the marriage. He wants her back.
Now he has a laptop that apparently belongs to a U.S. senator. On that laptop are horrifying files that outline a government plan to essentially hijack the camera and microphone in every smartphone in the nation, essentially turning every phone into a continuous camera and every microphone into a continuous listening device.
Naturally, the senator panics. She is an elected official whose staffer has illegally taken files from a secure server and placed them on a jump drive, and from there onto her Mac Book. If that unit isn’t found, she faces prison.
Her staffer hires a shady Russian hacker to figure out that the laptop the senator took is Michael Tanner’s, and he calls Tanner assuming he can just pull off a quick exchange. But he decides to lie about the laptop’s ownership[ so as not to implicate the senator. Little does he know that Tanner has already been inside the computer and knows the real name of the owner.
That lie starts a chain of events that will truly bathe you in adrenalin tsunami after adrenalin tsunami. I’m not engaging in hyperbole here. I found my heart rate and breathing impacted by this so suspenseful and scary is it. If you genuinely believe that your government is beneficent and would never harbor data or do anything that would harm you, cuddle that illusion closely and cherish it, and don’t read this book. If, on the other hand, you have suspicions about what goes on at that massive NSA server farm in Utah? Oh, yeah, this is your kind of book, and you’ll miss out hugely if you decide to leave this unread. At one point, Tanner’s identity and Internet connectivity are entirely stripped from him, and he is every bit as much a prisoner walking freely as if he were in the most impenetrable cage in a supermax prison. People who follow me here know that I’m pretty niggardly with those five-star ratings; I almost never give them out. But this is a 10-star book if you like thrillers where every word matters, chapters are short, and the narration is crisp and machine-gun staccato. Read this and ponder whether anything like what happened to Tanner could happen to you. This book totally kills the argument I hear all the time from naïve people who say, “I have nothing to hide; I’ve done nothing wrong.” But neither had poor Michael Tanner.