Thread by @doctorow

My next book, Attack Surface - AKA Little Brother 3 - drops in the US/Canada tomorrow (it's came out in other English-speaking countries on Oct 1) and today, @wired's @a_greenberg published his review of the series and the new book.

It's excellent.

wired.com/story/his-writ…

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Attack Surface is a standalone Little Brother book for adults, telling the story of Masha Maximow, a complicated sometimes-villain from the first two Little Brother books. While Marcus Yallow spends those books fighting surveillance, Masha is one of the people building in.

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At first, Masha feels like she has good reasons for doing what she does, redirecting her trauma of living through a terrorist attack into making her city and country safer.

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But as she moves from the DHS to some Beltway Bandits contracting in an Iraq Forward Operations Base, hunting insurgents, she increasingly turns to compartmentalization and rationalization as a means of living with her own reflection in the mirror.

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Finally, she finds herself in the former USSR, where a new employer puts her to work spying on pro-democracy activists for brutal oligarchs, and to assuage her conscience, she moonlights teaching those same activists to resist her employer's surveillance gear.

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This self-destructive behavior can't last long - as Masha flees her (former) employer's wrath, she returns to San Francisco, where her childhood best friend is now a racial justice organizer being targeted by the cyberweapons Masha herself built.

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What follows is the story of Masha's moral reckoning, and moral reckonings are the theme of Greenberg's piece: after all, Little Brother and Homeland inspired a legion of pro-user, anti-surveillance technologists and activists.

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But it also led plenty of people into tech careers that have been devoted to taking away the freedom and power that Little Brother excited in them to begin with.

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Indeed, virtually everyone working on surveillance, ad-tech, or DRM started with the life-changing experience of discovering how code could project your will around the world, and how networks could set your mind free to wander the globe in search of likeminded communities.

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And now, every day, they go to work making sure no one else will have that experience. Like all of us, they make a compromise, which begets a compromise, which begets yet another and another, and one day you find yourself working for @PalantirTech or NSO Group.

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Indeed, under conditions of monopoly capitalism, a sizeable fraction of us, in tech and out, spend our lives (and our money) furthering the interests of companies and states that are destroying those lives, and the planet too.

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In the book, Masha thinks about this as a form of debt, like the "tech debt" that ever programmer has had to contend with: you take a shortcut, and then you have to prop it up in subsequent revisions, until the whole app is a teetering mess built on a crumbling foundation.

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Like so many of us, Masha's moral debts have mounted and threaten catastrophic default. Attack Surface is the story of how she structures a bankruptcy that she can emerge from, transformed into a new and better person.

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In his review, Greenberg talks with eminent human rights technologists about their own experience of the novel, and the tales he relates - many of which I read for the first time this morning - literally brought a tear of awesome, overwhelming joy and pride to my eye.

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From @n8fr8, who put the book into the hands of every young technologist he met and then assigned it to his @ITP_NYU classes, where it found its way into the hands of @harlo, who calls it "fundamental to her origin story."

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"It informed my thoughts around how privacy should work, the interplay between movement activists, technology and the law, and what you should look out for when inviting technologies into your life to do that movement building."

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Today, Holmes is director of the @FreedomofPress, teaching activists and journalists to resist foundation - the Foundation is also home to #SecureDrop, which @aaronsw helped create. Aaron wrote an afterword for Homeland, and took his own life shortly before its publication.

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I toured that book haunted by his specter, telling his story as best as I could at every stop. Then, years later, I happened on some video shot at that time: Laura Poitras's Academy Award-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR.

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Homeland gets a cameo there, as @snowden is packing his go-bag while he hustles out of his Hong Kong hotel room, heading for a HK safehouse, a plane, and then, thanks to @JohnKerry's decision to cancel his passport midflight, to a long-term exile in Russia.

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Greenberg quotes Snowden on the book: "He is to me a radical idealist, because no matter how bad things get, his mind goes to the stories of cooperation and creation-sharing.

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"When the traditional structures of oppression are up to no good, as was the case in Little Brother, Cory doesn't reflexively indoctrinate young readers with platitudes on the inevitability of corruption. He helps them reimagine the limits of their own power."

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And then Greenberg quotes my @EFF colleague @Evacide, who, like Masha, is a brilliant security researcher raised by Soviet refugees: "This is a book for the people who realize that they've grown up and made a lot of compromises, and about how you turn back from that."

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Eva is joining me on the Attack Surface Lectures, a series of eight events that start tomorrow night.

read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-…

Her remarks, and those of Greenberg's other sources, filled me with soaring joy this morning.

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Even in the midst of my crushing, daily anxiety for the future of technology, the nations of my birth and residence, for my child and the planet she'll inherit, I was uplifted today.

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These books of mine have gone far, thanks to readers like you. Today, with one day to go before Attack Surface's publication, I feel like, in some small way, I may have made a difference.

eof/