little brother

reading now via..

http://craphound.com/category/littlebrother/

by Cory Doctorow

lifelong drive of activism… overdrive… as Internet could help biggest pit.. org

p 22

it’s funny but when she was talking about my getting ‘privileges’ it scare me into submission. i felt like i’d done something to end up where i was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like i could do something to change it.

but as soon as she switched to this bs about ‘safety’ and ‘security’ my spine came back…..i thought i lived in a country with a constitution. i though i lived in a country where i had rights. you’re talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the bill of rights..

p 42

the law didn’t care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal

p 43

what if we changed the definition of normal..?….   give him a problem w two bad solutions and he’d figure out a third totally diff solution based on throwing away all your assumptions

p 46

they only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals.. if everyone was getting pulled over, it’d be a disaster.. gridlock

p 47

the paradox of the false positive..  city of 20 mn like ny.. 1-2 say 10 terrorists.. 1/20 000 of a percent.. say 99 % accuracy of catching…. so 200 000 id’d as terrorists.. when actually 10.. and… terrorism tests are closer to 60 or ever 40 percent accurate..

p 50

taking away our privacy isn’t catching terrorists: it’s just inconveniencing  normal people

p 55

what would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst.. take him out.. but then another/smarter… here’s a better idea: start intercepting the spy’s communications and feed him and his masters misinformation. ..replace his account of your movements with fictitious one.. make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him… manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the id’s of other spices.. in short.. own them.. this is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it’s pretty scary… someone who man-in-the-middles your communications can trick you in a thousand ways…. get around… use crypto.. w/ crypto.. doesn’t matter if enemy can see your messages because he can’t decipher/change/re-send them…

but… for crypto to work.. you need to have keys for the people you want to talk to..

public keys.. a little hairy but so unbelievably elegant..

in public.. each user gets two keys.. long strings of math gibberish.. whatever you scramble w one key the other will unlock and vice versa.. so you publish one of them.. the other you hide..  then if send message.. .. would know it’s from you..ie: if they can decrypt it w your public key.. it can only have been encrypted w your private key.. equiv of putting seal/signature on bottom of message… won’t keep message a secret… anyone can read it.. but they can’t change it and make it seem like it came

better… instead of just encrypting w private.. also encrypt with your boss’s public.. now locked twice..  now.. boss receives message.. unlock w both keys and know for sure.. you wrote it  and only they can read it..

p 56

way to fix any paranoid possibilities.. really widely advertise your public key..if it’s really easy for anyone to know what your real key is, man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder…

p 65

govts are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of govt becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new govt, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form , as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.. – dec of independence

p 75

i don’t get it.. you’re making it sound like the bill of rights is optional. it’s the constitution. we’re supposed to follow it absolutely.

p 76

a common oversimplification… she said giving me a fake smile.. fact of matter is that the framers of constitution intended it to be a living doc that was revised over time… they understood that the republic wouldn’t be able to last forever if the govt of the day couldn’t govern according to he needs of the day.. they never intended the constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. after all, they came here fleeing religious doctrine

sounds like you’re saying that national security is more important than the constitution… how can you protect freedom by suspending the bill of rights..

p 133

bunnie: autoimmune disease….. where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells.. right now america is on verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms…. we don’t win freedom thru security systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. we win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon..

a nother way

if i would have read 135-140 before reading book… I probably wouldn’t have read the book

Xeni Jardin (@xeni) tweeted at 8:50 AM – 2 Feb 2017 :

Pre-order a signed first edition of our Cory @doctorow’s ‘Walkaway,’ which got a starred review in Booklist today https://t.co/KKzaIvpE9L https://t.co/gCUQpWvnZ9 (http://twitter.com/xeni/status/827182294704279553?s=17)