Security expert Bruce Schneier has a fun column in this month’s Wired about the mindset it takes to succeed in his line of work:
Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”
The article jumped out at me because of its thematic similarities to an afterword Schneier has contributed to Cory Doctorow‘s new YA novel, Little Brother, in which he persuades teenage readers that “security is fun,” and encourages them to look at the world with an eye towards how its systems might fail—in order to make them stronger. “You’ll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don’t actually do what they claim to,” he writes, “and that much of our national security is a waste of money.”
Oh, yes, he goes there: Because one of the coolest things about Doctorow’s novel, apart from the fact that it has not just one but two afterwords (the other is by Xbox hacker Andrew Huang), is that it’s the literary world’s most explicit assault on the “War on Terror” yet, a not-quite-science-fiction story (think William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognitions) in which a teenage hacker takes on the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco prompts a government response much like the one that’s actually taking place, tweaked just a little stronger. It’s a level of direct political engagement I’ve seen few “adult”/”literary” novelists attempt in the last few years—granted, I’m not especially well-read, but the only book that sticks out in my memory is Nicholson Baker‘s Checkpoint, which is certainly passionately argued but unfortunately doesn’t hold up that well as art.
Little Brother does hold up, and Doctorow makes the technology so easy to understand it becomes practically invisible—except, of course, to eyes trained to find ways to make it break. Granted, some of the strokes he uses to paint the bad guys are overly broad, but this is still one of the most awesome books any young adult could read this summer… and one of the most important novels anyone of voting age could read in the months leading up to our next election. As Schneier says in his afterword, “Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider.” Or, as Huang observes, “We don’t win freedom through security systems… We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon.”