Government Paper: Little Brother Review

Cassidi Hastings
1st Period, Government
10.2.08

Little Brother
By Cory Doctorow

Marcus Yallow lives in San Francisco, California. His life revolves around video games and learning how to ‘cheat the system’ of his high school. Until one day his world is completely shattered when a terrorist group bombs the Bay Bridge, and Marcus is falsely accused of being involved with it. He is taken with three of his friends and held until he tells them his email, cell phone, and computer passwords. After searching through all his personal effects, they release Marcus and two of his friends, holding the third, and threatening death if they ever tell anyone.

“They” is the Department of Homeland Security.

Marcus was, understandably, angry. The very government that was in place to protect him was doing the opposite; It took him away from his family without ant provocation, kept him locked up, and thoroughly violated his privacy. He soon found the DHS also bugged his house, and placed a chip in his computer that documented all internet activity. It wasn’t long before most of his closest friends were placed under suspicion and similarly tracked.

Marcus decided he needed to take matters into his own hands. He put his hacker skills to use and created the “Xnet”, a way to acess the internet undetected and untraceable through the Xbox network.

A simple way to stay under the radar becomes a mass trend, used by younger generations to share opinions and news without being silenced by the government. Naturally, there are those who strongly object to this, and DHS tried to catch the offenders by tightening their “defenses” even more. It becomes a desperate chase between Marcus and the Xneters and an older generation set on shutting down his system and silencing “M1K3Y”, Marcus’ screenname as the creator of Xnet.

One reoccurring theme in “Little Brother” is this phrase from The Declaration of Independence:
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles and organizing it’s power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
This means that when the government started taking away inalienable rights, it is the responsibility of the citizens to take a stand.

Marcus, through his Xnet, informed the people around him of what was really going on in the government. He eventually told his story to a news reporter and everything was disclosed to the general public. Ntraully, there was such an outcry that the DHS was forced to shut down their illegal operations and release their prisoners, some of which had been held without due process for 5 months.

Marcus, a seventeen year old boy, saw a problem in his society and did everything in his power to inform and rally his community to change the status quo. If he hadn’t pushed to share his story, the government would’ve continued to do these things without the knowledge or consent of the governed.

What I learned from this book was that there are things going on in our very own government that we don’t know about, and while in some cases it is best to keep things from the public, when citizens are endangered by ignorance, public officials have the responsibility to inform and represent the population. However, they won’t go through the effort for apathetic majority; we need to be actively involved in our community and constantly be on the look out for procedures and policies that are detrimental to our democracy and are not in line with what our citizens and people want.