Back in the dark ages of technology (the early 1990s) a friend tried to convince me of the necessity of learning about technology. As he was (and remains to this day) the smartest person I know. I didn't dismiss his argument that we needed to understand technology in order to know what the government could do with it to keep tabs on us as complete paranoia. Hell, if I had graduated from University it would have been in 1984, so the idea of Big Brother looking over our shoulder wasn't something I ever took lightly.
Still, at the time, I really didn't understand what he was so worried about, not realizing just what technology could do and its potential for surveillance work. Sixteen years later I'm wishing I took him a little more seriously as the world has gradually given itself over to technology, and more and more opportunities exist for monitoring our every move. Information chips on credit cards, GPS systems in cars that track your movements, and CCS Cameras on every corner equipped with gait and face recognition software to pick out individuals in a crowd are only the tip of the iceberg, as it's the stuff I know about. It's the stuff I don't know about that worries me now.
In the past decade, science fiction writers have had a field day with technology and its applications for surveillance and control. Yet, perhaps because they are so obviously science fiction, or the stories I've read just a little too outlandish, it's been easy to disassociate what they have written from the world we live in and dismiss them as fantasy. That is until I downloaded a copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother from the free download page at his Craphound web site.
Cory Doctorow is a Canadian science fiction writer and, for lack of a better description, copyright and free technology activist. He's one of the co-editors for Boing, Boing, has worked extensively with groups around the world at freeing up copyright restrictions and creating open source technology, and founded the open source company, OpenCola. It's his belief that by making his work available as downloads it creates the potential for more, not less sales, so all his books are available as free downloads under the Creative Commons Licence. (If you're interested in reading up on this sort of thing in detail Cory has gathered together a collection of essays he's written about it in Content that can be downloaded from his site.)
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