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clivemeister 's review for:
Attack Surface
by Cory Doctorow
Imagine a world in which everybody, from teenage upwards, had a chip implanted in their hand which allowed everyone with a few resources - governments, police forces, corporations, even local councils - to track your every movement, to know who your friends are and how close you are to them, to see what you are shopping for (or even thinking of shopping for) - in short, to see into the most intimate details of your life.
Well you don't have to image it, because you're already living in it. That mobile phone in your pocket? That's the chip. The resources needed? That's what this book is about: quite how pervasive the surveillance tools have become, and how easy this is becoming for anyone with an agenda.
This is a proper scary book: well written characters, facing a real threat that we are all in the process of falling into, and to which we are mostly turning a blind eye - the easy automation of mass surveillance.
The hero is Masha Maximow, who works as a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst/hacker for a shadowy multinational which sells these capabilities to anyone with the money to buy them. To begin, we see Masha setting up mass surveillance for a fictitious eastern block country's dictator. She's incredibly well paid for her job, because she's really good at it. But she doesn't always feel that great about it... So she spends her evenings hanging out in bars and clubs with some of the very people the government is surveilling, and trying to educate them into better habits, trying to protect them from the surveillance she herself is setting up.
Soon, Masha returns to the US, when she realises her best friend is falling prey to the same technologies she is rolling out in other countries. What can she do, given it's her former employer who seems to be behind this?
Cory Doctorow really knows his stuff here, and that technical understanding shines through. There are no made-up piles of technobabble, but instead there are straightforward explanations of what's going on and how one might - in principle - protect against it. It's hard, though - as hard in the book as it is in real life.
As we learn more about Masha's past, we see how she came to be in this morally ambiguous situation. We also meet some of the other characters, some of whom will be familiar to those who have read earlier Cory Doctorow books like [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584] (but you don't need to have read those to enjoy this book). We find that increasingly the surveillance technology is too powerful, that it's harder and harder to fix these problems with more technology. In the end, the lesson Masha learns is that only real fixes are political, not technological.
This is an important book because exactly that is true out here in the real world. We need to be able to see what's going on inside our governments and corporations and police forces and local councils, and hold them accountable to standards that we set - not that they set, to suit their own agendas. This doesn't mean simplistically demanding that Facebook "take down the conspiracy pages", or that the government promise to track "only the bad guys". We can't rely on Facebook's technology to solve the problems it created, or rely on governments universally to agree with our definition of "the bad guys". The genie is out of the bottle, folks. Bury your head in the sand if you like, but don't be surprised if the world changes on you. You may find someone has grabbed you roughly by the neck and is holding you down - for the greater good, and entirely for your own protection of course.
Well you don't have to image it, because you're already living in it. That mobile phone in your pocket? That's the chip. The resources needed? That's what this book is about: quite how pervasive the surveillance tools have become, and how easy this is becoming for anyone with an agenda.
This is a proper scary book: well written characters, facing a real threat that we are all in the process of falling into, and to which we are mostly turning a blind eye - the easy automation of mass surveillance.
The hero is Masha Maximow, who works as a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst/hacker for a shadowy multinational which sells these capabilities to anyone with the money to buy them. To begin, we see Masha setting up mass surveillance for a fictitious eastern block country's dictator. She's incredibly well paid for her job, because she's really good at it. But she doesn't always feel that great about it... So she spends her evenings hanging out in bars and clubs with some of the very people the government is surveilling, and trying to educate them into better habits, trying to protect them from the surveillance she herself is setting up.
Soon, Masha returns to the US, when she realises her best friend is falling prey to the same technologies she is rolling out in other countries. What can she do, given it's her former employer who seems to be behind this?
Cory Doctorow really knows his stuff here, and that technical understanding shines through. There are no made-up piles of technobabble, but instead there are straightforward explanations of what's going on and how one might - in principle - protect against it. It's hard, though - as hard in the book as it is in real life.
As we learn more about Masha's past, we see how she came to be in this morally ambiguous situation. We also meet some of the other characters, some of whom will be familiar to those who have read earlier Cory Doctorow books like [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584] (but you don't need to have read those to enjoy this book). We find that increasingly the surveillance technology is too powerful, that it's harder and harder to fix these problems with more technology. In the end, the lesson Masha learns is that only real fixes are political, not technological.
This is an important book because exactly that is true out here in the real world. We need to be able to see what's going on inside our governments and corporations and police forces and local councils, and hold them accountable to standards that we set - not that they set, to suit their own agendas. This doesn't mean simplistically demanding that Facebook "take down the conspiracy pages", or that the government promise to track "only the bad guys". We can't rely on Facebook's technology to solve the problems it created, or rely on governments universally to agree with our definition of "the bad guys". The genie is out of the bottle, folks. Bury your head in the sand if you like, but don't be surprised if the world changes on you. You may find someone has grabbed you roughly by the neck and is holding you down - for the greater good, and entirely for your own protection of course.