Scary as Fiction
I recently read and enjoyed Little Brother, a near-future young-adult technothriller by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. It’s also recommended at Mental Multivitamin in the most recent On the Nightstand entry. The Little Brother of the title is Marcus, a hacker kid in San Francisco. After he’s arrested and held on suspicion of terrorism, he finds Homeland Security has used people’s fear as justification to invade privacy. He begins acts of electronic rebellion to circumvent electronic surveillance. He is later disappointed when those who held and tortured him are released with minimal punishment.
Two recent pieces show how timely and relevant are the issues raised in Little Brother. This piece in Wired (link from ALoTT5MA), “I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” by Mathew Honan, details how the GPS application of the iPhone can be manipulated:
I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score–a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior–a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.
In “Forgive Not,” a New York Times Op-Ed, Dahlia Lithwick recently decried the tendency to exonerate torturers because it’s painful to acknowledge complicity:
Indeed, the almost universal response to the recent bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee – finding former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials directly responsible for detainee abuse that clearly rose to the level of torture – has been a collective agreement that no one need be punished so long as we solemnly vow that such atrocities never happen again.
She argues that the torturers shouldn’t be above the law, or forgiven in the wave of hope brought in by a new administration:
I believe that if it becomes clear that laws were broken, or that war crimes were committed, a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate further. The Bush administration made its worst errors in judgment when it determined that the laws simply don’t apply to certain people. If we declare presumptively that there can be no justice for high-level government officials who acted illegally then we exhibit the same contempt for the rule of law.
If you’re interested or concerned about issues like these, read Little Brother if you haven’t, already. And see how quickly fiction has become science and history.