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Privacy In Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

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For centuries, great leaders have empowered the nation by defeating authority. From MLK to Malcolm X, they have fought to gain the rights of many injustices. Cory Doctorow writes Little Brother to describe how a young teen named Marcus overthrows the government and prevails. At the start of the book, Marcus rebels and giftedly fools the security system. During their break, they leave the school and enter the city to play an alternative reality game. While playing the game, a terrorist attack occurs near the Bay Area and they almost perish. The Department of Homeland Security rounds up anyone left and takes them to a undisclosed prison. This includes Vanessa, Jolu, Darryl, and Marcus. In addition to being held captive, the DHS finds Marcus …show more content…

Doctorow made it clear that the DHS wanted to enforce surveillance. The bombing gave a perfect excuse to monitorize the citizens living in the Bay Area. After people found out about the “Xnet”, the DHS had put Fastrak readers all over town. When you drove past them, they logged the time and your ID number to create a perfect picture of who went where” (Doctorow 45). This is significant because the Fastrak readers enabled the DHS to pinpoint where you are going during a specific place or time. It is evident that the DHS holds a lot of power within society. For this reason, it provides an easy access of information without revealing where they got the crucial information. In addition to this issue, our constitution including are democratic system have demanded that the government be accountable for gathering such offensive data. Surprisingly, The American Civil Liberties Union states that,“history has shown that powerful, secret surveillance tools will almost certainly be abused for political ends and turned disproportionately on disfavored minorities”(ALCU). This suggests that privacy is often unjustified within the barriers of the national security and many people are associated with the stigma of being targeted by national security through surveillance. This is important because the use of security can violate the rights privacy and contribute to the stigmation which in the DHS case is the blame of being associated with

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