Software Reality

Book Review: Little Brother

Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Books (April 2008)

Summary: Fast-paced and exciting but trips over its own good intentions. An uncomfortable blurring of truth with fiction detracts from an otherwise important message.

What happens if the co-editor of a popular blog like Boing Boing decides to write a novel gathering together his favourite posts and concerns from said blog? Answer: You get a fun, suitably paranoid page-turner called Little Brother.

Little Brother (LB) reads like a novelisation of the more sinister “see how the Government is raping our freedom this time” pieces on Boing Boing. If the masses are truly victims of their Government or the local council’s petty surveillance-obsessed mania, sometimes it pays to stand before the omnipresent CCTV camera and be counted. And this is where Little Brother fits in.

Big Brother is Watching the Trees, No Wood Found Yet

Another well thought out plan from NuLabour. According to several sources, the government is mulling over the idea of a central database of all UK communications data. This would include times and durations of phone calls, plus emails and net access for all UK citizens.

The wording is hazy and the details scant, but it should be noted that (especially with phone calls) there’s no talk of recording the content, just times, and senders/recipients. Of course even this is pretty damned intrusive, and is a chilling piece of insight into how far such a government would be likely to go if the technology (or its ability to adequately specify such technology) allowed it.

Luckily, it’s highly unlikely that such a mammoth project could ever get off the ground. Given that the government couldn't even set up a gun database with a few thousand names on it, I can't see how the scheme could ever possibly work, or be useful even if it did work. There are one or two technical hurdles to overcome, to put it mildly.