Little Brother: Chapters 5–8

“It was because I wouldn’t unlock my phone for them, that first night. That’s why they singled me out.” I couldn’t believe it, but there was no other explanation. It had been sheer vindictiveness.

The street was barricaded at every corner, the cross streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript 18-wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship’s docks and to Chinatown.

We stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up.

I had some money saved — odd jobs, Christmases and birthdays, a little bit of judicious ebaying.

The bad news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. It’s all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit in that little case.

The Xbox was cracked by a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the 360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we all called the “luggable” — it weighed three pounds!) succumbed.

ParanoidLinux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret.

It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert.

I let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fervently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home.

When I got home, I read that a group of parents was suing the school board over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they’d already lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.

That hidden section looked just like random junk — when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguishable from random noise — and they’d never even know it was there.

“Officers, I can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives or shoplifted gewgaws in my son’s bag. I think we’re done here. I would like your badge numbers before you go, please.”

It’s how computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. You ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average.

The DHS had put FasTrak readers all over town — when you drove past them, they logged the time and your ID number, building an ever more perfect picture of who went where and when, in a database that was augmented by “speeding cameras,” “red light cameras” and all the other license plate cameras that had popped up like mushrooms.

If everyone was getting pulled over, it’d be a disaster. No one would ever get anywhere, they’d all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. Total gridlock.