weateallthepies.com

For anyone who reads much on the internet or has even stumbled across the wonderful boingboing.net, Cory Doctorow needs little introduction. He’s a great advocate of the Creative Commons movement and has made most if not all of his writing available for free.

He also has a great deal to say that is interesting on a whole heap of topics I’m interested in so I was particularly intrigued by the release of his newest book “Little Brother” which spins some of those topics into a bloody great tale. I am only about half way through and it is easily the most entertaining thing I’ve read this year.

If you are even remotely interested in technology, online gaming, the surveillance society, online and offline freedom, digital rights, free speech, privacy, “the war on terror” and just a load of geeky goodness then you really have to read this book.

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.