*I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review*

How frightened are you of the increasing presence of exploitable technology in the hands, homes, and garages of citizens?  If, like me, you weren't, this book may cause you to rethink that position.  Masha is a well-paid hacker for a cybersecurity contractor that helps provide surveillance and counterinsurgency tools to authoritarian governments.  After her work is used one-too-many times to harm otherwise-innocent people, including those she considers friends, she is forced to make tough choices about which side she wants to be on.

The structure of this book can be a bit obtuse at times.  Chapters are long and bounce around between Masha's present and her recent past as it fleshes out her relationships with the other characters and career background.  It can sometimes be hard to keep track of whether you're reading a flashback or not.  There is also a significant, if necessary, use of technical jargon that can be off-putting.  Most of the references are explained, and as someone in the field most were references I was familiar with, but some are assumed, so you can occasionally get lost in a sea of "opsec", "stingray", "0-day", and the like.

This is apparently the third book in a loosely-connected series, but I didn't find myself getting lost despite not having read the first two.  There are references made to events that presumably happened in the earlier books, but I believe the characters are all unique to this one.  The events take place in a possible near-future, and most of the technology is a fairly-realistic extrapolation of what we have today, which makes the idea of it all being easily-hijackable by national and city governments that much more chilling.  This is definitely not a cozy, sit-by-the-fireplace type of book.  It's more of a "you think things are bad now?  In a few years they will probably be very much worse!" type of book.  But I think it's important for stories like these to be read, especially by those who are tempted to look the other way when governments take a turn towards authoritarianism because they aren't personally being targeted.

While I had not read the Young Adult novels from which this novel was a spin off, I’m familiar with his work and looked forward to the release of Attack Surface, which is definitely for a grown up readership, in large part due to the darkness at the heart of the novel. The sci-fi aspect was intriguing, as was the spy versus spy plot. The protagonist is is troubled and troubling, making questionable (at best) decisions front the outset. Even though the reader is privy to her thought process, it can be difficult to identify with her. And that may be the key to the novel and it’s universe, one very like our own reality with technology that often feels autonomous and antagonistic. But it’s the people (and countries) behind the technology that are the true threats, and this novel should give anyone pause about the power we the people have given not just to the tech that runs our lives, but also to the states that wield technology as a means of control and power.

This was a great book in typical Cory Doctorow fashion. I only wished that the ending was a bit more clear. Masha was an interesting protagonist who does go through a sort of character arc, but she was quite hard to like and root for at points.

This was my first Cory Doctorow book! After hearing my husband rave for years about his love for Cory Doctorow, I decided to jump right in!

I would describe this book as a techno -thriller with a dystopian vibe. It is definitely out of my wheelhouse, but made for an interesting read!

I thought the subject matter of the book was especially timely for 2020- hacking, paranoid dictators, protests, police brutality- all very much the subjects of current discourse. Apparently this book follows from a prior YA Book by the author, but I did not read the first book and still enjoyed this one.

I enjoyed reading from the perspective of the lead character- Masha, who was at times unlikeable but represented a complicated personality struggling to decide the right thing to do. I liked that the book looked at her perspective from her interactions with both the 'big brother' agency, as well as her friends back home. The fact that Masha was flawed and made unexpected decisions served to enhance the story. I also thought Doctorow did a great job delving into her world of tech prowess, especially for those of us who aren't necessarily as up-to-date with tech as the characters in the book.

Overall, this was an interesting read in a time where many of the warnings in the book are highly relevant to the world today. It really made me cognizant of my own reliance on vulnerable technologies,  and made me think about how I really need to do more.

I would recommend this to someone looking for a timely read with a good quality of thrill to it. It is a page-turner with a good balance of story and social commentary.

Thank you for the opportunity to read an advance copy!

Cory Doctorow's third entry in his Little Brother series leaves YA literature behind. Masha Maximow (returning from earlier installments) has been working on the side of the counterterrorists, which means she has been using cybersecurity technology to support the regime in power. This has often meant governments in power in Eastern Europe or elsewhere. But when Masha returns to the Bay Area and her hometown friends the game suddenly becomes personal.

Attack Surface (which refers to he different points (or "attack vectors") where an unauthorized user (the "attacker") can try to enter data to or extract data from a software environment, presents an adult perspective on the mass surveillance topic that has been central to the entire series. Masha finally has to confront her true feelings about what she has been doing. After years of convincing herself that she had been making realistic choices, she realizes that she has been making excuses for the true impact of her work.

It's a satisfying conclusion to the series (hard to imagine a sequel). The only negative aspect is Doctorow's tendency to discuss technical issues in excruciating detail. I don't really need to understand all of the details of how networked devices can be compromised to follow the narrative, and sometimes those details slowed my reading down and derailed the story.

Do you get a little thrill every time you watch a movie and they have the “I’m in.” moment? If so, you should absolutely check out Attack Surface.

Attack Surface is technically fictional— pun intended— but you’ll recognise our world in its politics and events. You’ll see technology being used for “good” and “evil.” You’ll see characters who are passionate about making their communities safe and fighting for equality. And you will definitely think more about the ways we communicate.

I also highly recommend its predecessors, Little Brother and Homeland. I enjoyed reading them a few years ago, and was very excited to return to this world. However, you can comfortably jump into Attack Surface on its own.

In the author’s note at the end, Doctorow himself provides the following description, which truly epitomises it best:
“This is a book about how people rationalize their way into doing things that they are ashamed of, and how they can be brought back from the brink.”

Attack Surface is Cory Doctorow’s newest book in a loose series that begins with Little Brother, though one needn’t have read the other two (thus “loose”) to follow and enjoy this one.  It’s a taut techno-thriller, though I’ll admit to glazing over at times in long sections of techno-speak.

The novel is two-stranded. In current time, Masha is a computer security expert working for a transnational company who sell their services — hacking, surveillance, tech manipulation and control, etc. — to anybody willing to pay with no attempt to distinguish any of their clients’ morality/ethics.  Which is why we first find Masha helping an old Soviet-satellite country’s dictator surveil and jail those annoying protestors who want some actual freedom. Masha, though, isn’t quite as amoral as her company, and so while she’s helping the bad guys she’s also teaching the resistance what they can (and can’t do) about the totalitarian regime’s surveillance of them.  She calls this compartmentalizing, and it conveniently allows her to get well-paid and do what she wants because her good deeds “balance out” her more problematic actions.  When things go horrifically awry overseas (in a terrifyingly all-too-plausible scenario), she returns to the States and helps an old friend Tanisha with her own form of resistance — the Black-Brown Alliance, a sort of descendant of BLM — which is being surveilled and undermined by local law enforcement and another transnational security company.   

Meanwhile, the second strand shows us how Masha got to that time that opens the novel, tracing her journey from high-school hacker (“When I was thirteen, I’d figured out how to get into the voicemails of all my school friends”) to  highly-paid private computer expert and the moral compromises she makes on the way.

Masha’s a complex character, not always likable (by either those around her or the reader) and her actions and thoughts can be at various times frustrating, annoying, repulsive, infuriating, and rewarding. That last word can apply to the reader’s journey with her as well. The plot is all too topical, unfortunately, both in its portrayal of the overseas plotline (Hong Kong will come quickly to mind), the surveillance of the post-BLM movement, and the post-government power of transnational corporations and their allegiance to naught but themselves and their profits.  The other characters aren’t as compelling, but are strongly portrayed, with Marcus (a main character in Little Brother) a nice foil to Masha in that he’s far less self-aware (Masha doesn’t lie to herself) and while he does the on-the-surface “good thing” he too often doesn’t consider the possible downside of his actions..

My one issue with Attack Surface is that it at times is too expositive for long sections (I wrote “exposition heavy” several times in my notes), and, as noted in my intro, I went into a daze more than a few times with the techno-jargon. It’s well done, and it’ll surely scare the hell out of you (and if you think Doctorow is grossly over-exaggerating make sure to read the afterword), but I’m not sure its length, density, detail, and frequency were all that necessary. Then again, it certainly adds to the authenticity and makes his point.

That aside, Attack Surface is a tightly written, fast-moving story with a social consciousness whose “speculative” part of its speculative fiction genre is all too likely.  Recommended.

Attack Surface answers some possible questions that lingered during the events of its predecessors, Little Brother and Homeland. It is an adult novel, rather than a YA like the others, and this story benefits from it being so. It is complex, violent, but still bares the same fast-paced excitement as the previous Little Brother books. Our characters are older and their decisions represent this. The stakes feel higher while our main character is faced with the technological crimes of her past and how she plans to carry on from them into her present..

Cory Doctorow is what I would call a modern master storyteller. I have yet to be lukewarm about any setting or atmosphere he develops in science fiction. Attack Surface manages, once again, to grasp my attention in the way only Doctorow is able. I absolutely loved that this was a standalone novel set in the Little Brother universe. It is such a juicy dystopia. As a reader, it is quite obvious that Doctorow is established and educated in the material he is writing about – namely hacking and technological exposure.

If someone were to ask me to summarize the way in which Docotorow’s stories stand apart from other authors, I would say this:

Social commentary… but make it sci fi!

Ethical and radical at its core, Attack Surface explores huge questions of digital safety in away that scared me even more than Little Brother – a concept I thought was not possible. This is a heavy, educating, and creepy story of our modern world as it could be… and how it might already be.

Published by Tor Books on October 13, 2020

Attack Surface is a near-future novel of ideas. Science fiction is supposed to be the literature of ideas, but quite a bit of it, while fun, is shallow. There’s nothing shallow about Cory Doctorow. When he isn’t writing science fiction, he writes penetrating essays about intellectual property and electronic surveillance. He’s an activist, a blogger, and a celebrated author of speculative fiction that often explores threats to privacy in a digital world.

Attack Surface is set in the same future as, and has some characters in common with, his novels Little Brother and Homeland. Both of those novels have a creative commons license so you can read them for free, but Attack Surface is a standalone that doesn't demand an acquaintance with the earlier books.

Attack Surface tells a timely story about the struggle for justice. But worthwhile fiction reflects themes through characters, so Attack Surface is also about the protagonist’s struggle to become a better person — a person she can live with and might even take pride in being. The novel suggests the possibility of redeeming bad choices by making good choices. Redemption doesn’t erase the pain we cause others — as one character observes, life isn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system that allows ethical debt to be canceled by good deeds — but regretting the past should not be an obstacle to moving forward on a better path.

The story involves two competing corporations, Zyz and Xoth (they both hired the same branding company), that provide technology and strategy to American law enforcement agencies and foreign dictators. The technology enables a surveillance state and crowd control. Used maliciously, the technology permits its users to take control of self-driving cars and direct them toward swarming protestors. The malicious use of such power is likely inevitable, or so the protagonist concludes.

Through his characters, Doctorow warns of the risk that governments and/or powerful corporations can take over the microphones and cameras on cellphones and computers, track the movement of people who carry them, spoof cellphone towers with drones to identify everyone who attends a protest, and yes, hack self-driving cars and every other bit of wired technology, from your Alexa to your smart refrigerator. And he makes it clear that there’s not a damned thing you can do, from a technology standpoint, to protect yourself from it. Reading books like Attack Surface is scary but necessary.

The plot follows the present life of a young woman named Masha while revealing her backstory in time-jumbled scenes that eventually cohere. Masha was a bright and deliberately underachieving student who had a strong grasp of internet technology. She went to work for Homeland Security, excusing her contribution to the surveillance state with self-assurances that patriotism can’t be bad. The lure of money and patriotism took her to Xoth Intelligence and its rival Zyz. Her work took her to Iraq and to Central America before she was assigned to help the dictatorial government in Slavstakia stifle dissent. Masha tried to balance her tech support for oppression by giving aid and comfort to the dissenters.

Back in America, where Zys is handing the techniques of oppression to the Oakland Police Department and is hoping to score a similarly lucrative contract with San Francisco, Masha is blackmailed by Xoth, a company that portrays itself as a more ethical provider of systems that help the police control and spy upon the populace. While trying to cope with corporate superpowers, Masha uses her free time to help politically active friends shield themselves from surveillance, an effort she knows to be futile. The friends believe in her inner decency despite her decision to work against their interests in her various jobs.

The importance of friendship, in fact, is a key theme of Attack Surface. Masha gets through life by compartmentalizing. Don’t get too close to anyone and you don’t get hurt, she thinks. By the novel’s end, she begins to realize that putting friends in compartments only denies pain by denying love. Not just love of friends, but the larger love of humanity that helps us stay human.

Reading a Cory Doctorow novel leaves the reader with a lot to unpack. The world is complex and getting more complex every day. Doctorow cuts through the noise to caution us about trends that are changing the world in ways that will leave most of the next generation with considerably less privacy than we have been able to enjoy.

Attack Surface invites the reader to ponder serious issues: Cutthroat corporations that act in their own interests to the detriment of everyone who lives outside the upper echelons of the corporate bubble. The government’s use of private sector contractors to violate laws so that the government can pretend to have clean hands. The increasing tendency of police departments to conduct unlawful surveillance and justify their actions as necessary to fight domestic terror. The use of social media, not exclusively by Russians, to interfere with democracy. The importance of unrelenting activism to hold the forces of oppression at bay.

The novel also asks hard questions. Is surveillance technology ethically sound when a government uses it to control white supremacists? The technology might save lives, but what happens when white supremacists take over the government and use that same technology against their enemies? Perhaps the way to control white supremacy is not through technology but through empowering people to stand up against it.

Masha’s moral and ethical journey makes compelling fiction, but the story’s urgency lies in its reminder that most of the events in the novel could take place tomorrow. Attack Surface is compelling fiction because of its importance and a fascinating read because Doctor is such a convincing storyteller.

RECOMMENDED

An adult successor to the previous books in this series, and I enjoyed it even more than the prior ones.  This author is writing some of the most exciting and important stories in the genre.  I look forward to many more and appreciate the early access.

Cory Doctorow is a fantastic author.  Very detailed and extremely smart when it comes to laying out a story.  Atack Surface is no exception.  Masha is a complex character way beyond her years in intelligence and working in the field.  Part of the time I can hardly follow what is happening when it comes to the tech aspect of things, but then I put it together contextually and while I'm probably missing something I think that I get the big picture.  Mash is at the head of this complexity.  She is smart, witty, and very introspective.  I love the compartments.  I love when those compartments start to open against her will.  Doctorow has not only written a book that is timely for what is happening today with BLM and the division of our country, but he has added heart and purpose to it and it should be a thing that everyone identifies with or has some empathy towards.  

Now, on to the paranoia.  Well, Doctorow knows so much more than I do about tech and spying and all that jazz that it is impossible to read this book and not feel a little paranoid about who is listening, watching, taking notes about you ( if you fancy yourself as someone that is important enough to be listened to, watched, etc.).  It adds a certain reality to the story and should make us all worried that our governments may not be able to be trusted as much as we think they are.  It's a solid read.

Cory Doctorow’s latest book showing the dangers of over surveillance in the near future. The heroine, Masha Maximov,  with a background working for DHS, is now a contractor initially helping he emoloyer put surveillance in an Eastern European country.  But on the side she is helping the dissidents her systems monitor to evade them.  Her long term crises of conscience lead her back to SF and some major wars with Oakland and SFPD contracts from her former employers.  The book is dedicated to the whistleblower including Snowden, Ellsberg, Manning etc, which points to the authors leanings. These leanings drive the book, which is well written and a good read, to be a little preachy on the topic.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow is a highly recommended tech thriller set in an alternate universe.

Masha Maximow is a counterterrorism programmer for an international cybersecurity firm. She programmed the hacks that allowed countries to spy on their citizens. She thought she was on the correct side but... She also sometimes for her own reasons uses her skill set to help the dissidents evade detection and tracking. When the targets of government tracking are citizens in a foreign country, Masha could easily compartmentalize how she was assisting the violent actions against citizens, but when the same technology is used against her friends, Masha is suddenly faced with a dilemma and must choose a side when no choice is without consequences.

The narrative follows Masha alternates between her present day relationship to a radical group in San Francisco and her past working for Xoth and Zyz. We can follow what she did in her job and how that translates into the real world and impinges on real life citizens of other countries and in her home. Masha's job helping spy on people and keeping track of their every move and their every contact and interaction with other extracts a steep toll.

Attack Surface is the third book in a series, following Little Brother and Homeland, but it can be read as a standalone novel set in the alternate universe created in these novels because Doctorow introduces new characters in this novel. The characters grapple with the integrity of using technology and surveillance to spy on and detain citizens based on their actions and beliefs. Those who followed the Edward Snowden controversy will appreciate the questions raised in this novel, a science fiction novel that is surely fact based. This is a technology heavy thriller, very technology heavy. I followed along only because I often have discussions involving many of the issues here with a programmer. (But I will admit to occasionally skimming some tech-heavy parts while following the action.) The heavy cybertech terminology and the tech-heavy vocabulary may lose some readers along the way as they lose track of the plot due to the vocabulary.

If you can overcome or understand the tech-vocabulary, the story is very captivating and extremely frightening. What will keep the pages turning in this compelling novel is the fact that this is fiction, but could easily become fact. It is a warning, of a sort, and Doctorow makes clear in his afterward what he thinks we should be concerned about and why. (I'm not overly crazy about authors preaching to me about what they think "I" should think, but I do like to keep informed and research information about everything. If an author points out information, I will take on researching it on my own, thank you.)

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Tor/Forge .
The review will be posted on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Attack Surface, Cory Doctorow’s newest novel in the Little Brotherverse, is excellent. Like the previous novels, it has nerds fighting for human rights, it has protests and activism, it has open-source and soldering irons. In comparison, however, it now has expense accounts, workplace intrigue, and added nuance. It shows us while technology can help organize political power to fight oppression, it can be quickly adopted by the oppressors themselves–a marked growth of this series’ evolving thesis. If you enjoyed Little Brother or Homeland, you don’t really need to read any further–you’ll love it, and appreciate the increased insight that comes with another decade of Doctorow’s focused thinking on the intersection of technology, freedom, and politics. I was unable to put it down, and read it in a single sitting, until the early hours of the morning. If you haven’t read the previous books or thought Marcus seemed naive, caught up in his own technonavel, give Attack Surface a shot.

While the previous two books were from the point of view of Marcus, Attack Surface is about Masha. She signed up with the Department of Homeland Security to help fight terrorism, after the terror attack from the start of Little Brother. Something like a decade later, she’s bounced around a few places. The start of Attack Surface has her jet setting around the globe, working for a cybersecurity company, installing software for authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist governments by day, and helping the very activists she’s helping target at night. This is not a stable situation. Before long, she’s looking for a new job. She ends up back in the Bay and stumbles upon another government operation violating civil rights.

I loved Masha as the viewpoint character. Masha is certainly an adult, and, while she has some personal blind spots, she’s full of self-insight. I enjoyed getting to walk through her past, and I liked seeing old favorites from previous books. Although no longer nemeses, Masha still serves as a way to see Marcus from a different angle, enriching the previous works.

Doctorow still delights in didactic description–for instance, you’ll read about how governments analyze social networks, what to avoid and what to strive for in a protest, and I hope you come out of it realizing that you definitely still can’t trust your pocket camera microphone with its unauditable baseband processor.

When thinking about technology from a political angle, it is very easy to get wrapped up in the tech. After learning how to use some math and engineering, it’s easy to confuse playing super spy with these things as fighting for freedom, as making the world a better place. It’s equally as easy to get overwhelmed and apathetic because you can dream up a scenario where any particular thing could be broken, so why try to do anything at all? Attack Surface does an excellent job of helping the reader keep this balance.

Honestly, I don’t think you need to read Little Brother and Homeland to enjoy Attack Surface, but if you haven’t read them and are looking to read them spoiler-free, stop reading here. SPOILERS FOR LITTLE BROTHER AND HOMELAND FOLLOW.

Little Brother (2008): Marcus, the main character, and a few of his friends are arrested and detained by the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack in San Francisco. After witnessing some government abuses of power, Marcus and his friends use commodity hardware, strong encryption, open-source software, and The Power of Friendship to “fight back against the surveillance state”. It ends after Marcus convinces a journalist, who writes about some shady things the DHS is doing, and the State Patrol comes in to shut the DHS’s operation down.

Even though Doctorow brings the reader to a boil showing that “it could happen here”, Little Brother is a relatively fun read. There’s teenage romance, of course. Doctorow drips with delights in his didactic sections, instructions showcasing various technologies and techniques that can be used to increase “opsec” or to bypass surveillance and tactics used by oppressive regimes.

Homeland (2013): Set a few years later, California’s economy is in rough shape. Marcus is working as a web developer for an idealistic politician. Marcus gets a thumb drive from Masha, a character we know from Little Brother. It’s full of secret documents detailing government abuses from around the world, and Masha tells Marcus to leak the documents if she goes missing. Sure enough, she does, and Marcus has a dilemma. If he releases the documents publicly, his boss won’t be elected, but there’s no guarantee that just dropping the documents on the internet will actually help anything.

Between Little Brother and Homeland was Occupy Wall Street, that campus police officer walking down the line of students spraying them with military pepper spray from a foot away, the Arab Spring…

Homeland expands on the idea that fancy tools and techniques can be used to organize mass movements to hold the government accountable while adding a bunch of “things will get complicated real fast, and many things won’t seem black-and-white.”

Attack Surface is a welcome addition to the Little Brotherverse. It’s upbeat, without being naively optimistic. It avoids cynicism and apathy while acknowledging these as common responses to “the current political realities”. Experiencing an adventure from Masha’s perspective is an enlightening change from riding along with Marcus. The added depth and perspective expand not only this work but also the previous ones. I definitely recommend it!

(I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. A friendly person over at the publisher actually asked if I would review it, which is the first time that’s ever happened!)

I don’t know if this is a dystopia technological thriller or a fictionalise depiction of the world we’re living in, I just know it’s a very interesting and quite terrifying story. It’s hard to read and think “this is fiction” and assume you are reading about a parallel world where technology is used as a mean to control people behaviour and to repress dissent.
I work in high tech and I know what are the technologies being developed or already existing. All the technologies in this book are already existing and some cases when they were used to control political opponents appeared on papers in recent times.
But this is also the story of Masha, of her friend and of hope that comes from people joining forces and fighting for a better world.
Masha isn’t a likeable character and I found hard to warm up to her. She works for security companies that use the technology to monitor people. She’s an excellent technician but she’s also a damage person who must compartmentalize her life in order to survive.
I met some people like her, people who work to develop technologies that can be in a moral grey area. It’s not hard to see how they are considering their activities as business as usual and avoiding to reflect on the moral implication.
Even if I think it’s a bit unreal that a highly specialised tech guy have a Damascus moment and decides to take side with the good guy it was also a moment I loved because it was hope in quite bleak story.
There are good guys and there are bad guys in this story. At the end of the day all the main characters are women. They are brave and they fight and even Masha, who is morally grey, is able to change and grow.
The technical aspect is interesting and Doctorow did an excellent job in explaining the different technologies and helping people to understand what are the implications and how they can be used.
The plot is quite gripping even if it drags sometimes. It’s not heartwarming and I’m still quite terrified by what I read. I’m a bit paranoid about connected devices and this story did affected me as it made me wish to go back to a very simple phone with no internet connection.
There’s hope at the end to this story but there’s also the message that the power can affect the persons and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don’t know if my review is logical or what else, I just know that this book should be read by a lot of persons as we need to know how technologies can be used to manipulate and control us.
I strongly recommend it because, even if it’s not a perfect book, it’s important to know.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is the third book set in the Little Brother world, but it is told from the perspective of a newish character. Masha is a very minor character in the first two books, but here she is the star of the show. I had often wondered about Masha while reading the first two books. Wondering what made her tick and why she makes the choices that she does. This book does explain it all, and then some.

I liked Masha for the most part, although there were many times I didn’t understand her choices, and I’m not sure she did either. Although she was an idealist at the start, wanted to help catch the terrorists who attacked her city, she soon gets caught up in the surveillance racket and soon discovers that there is no real distinction between good guys and bad guys. Almost anyone in the right circumstances will make a bad decision. She does what she can to ease her conscience, but soon even that is not enough to keep her from despising herself and what she has done.

Although you don’t really have to have read the first books to get this one, it does help. There are a lot of flashbacks to the other books and to the parts of Masha’s life that happened during those books that we didn’t know. There is also a lot of tech talk, which does at times slow the narrative down, and many times goes over my head. But some of it is damn scary too. All the different ways that the government, businesses and others I don’t want to think about, can spy on you, yes you, the average citizen just minding their business.

This book is perhaps a bit darker than the other two, but the ending is so hopeful. I loved seeing how Marcus and Angie’s lives turned out, too. A good commentary on how tech can be helpful but also a cautionary tale on how governments could easily go down the wrong road.

I read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother several years ago and had enjoyed it tremendously. It had a brilliant plot, some fantastic characters and nonstop action that kept the pages turning, all the while educating the readers about IT security. Attack Surface happens about ten years after Little Brother, with the same main characters now older, and maybe wiser.

Here, Masha Maximow, the hacking wizard who had lent her considerable talents to the government intelligence agency out of patriotism in Little Brother, has the centre stage. She has moved on to working for private surveillance contractors who, for gigantic fees, help government agencies of all varieties spy on whoever they consider their enemies – sometimes their own innocent citizens. She seemingly has no qualms being on this side of the surveillance apparatus and, whenever her conscience wakes up, does just a little something to coax it back to sleep. Her assignment as the book begins is to help an authoritarian regime somewhere in the east of Europe spy on, and suppress, those protesting against it. True to form, Masha educates the protesters about how to evade the systems she herself has put in place during her off-work hours. When she is kicked out of the company once her extracurricular activities come to light, she goes back home to San Francisco, where her childhood friend is at the forefront of a movement against the racial profiling and persecution of non-white people. Now, with the issue too close for comfort, she has to finally choose between staying on the side of the persecutors and moving over to the other side, where the people she cares about are, amidst deadly persuasion by powerful organizations.

Attack Surface is presented as a first-person narrative by Masha who, in addition to relating the present happenings, also tells the story of her rise from being a talented immigrant without a father to earning uncountable amount of money by helping powers that be in their quest to spy and control anti-establishment activities at various places across the world. She explains the circumstances and the thought processes through which she has convinced herself that she was on the right side while many things point in the other direction.

Doctorow has turned up the malicious usage of technology by oppressive regimes by several notches and makes the reader look at all electronics with a scared, suspicious eye. In addition to being a technological thriller, Attack Surface is also the story of Masha’s inner conflict, having to choose between a comfortable life aiding the authorities persecute unsuspecting masses and a fugitive life helping those spied on. The overload of technological details, though for the most part flying over my head, does not deter the reader; it rather pulls one deeper into the plot. Doctorow does the voice of the impudent female tech wizard so well that it is very easy to visualise Masha, and the people and situations she describes.

The major difference between Attack Surface and Little Brother is that there is less of action and more of discourse, about the usefulness of surveillance in fighting terrorism and its harmfulness to individual freedom, that drags down the novel’s pace at times. Apart from that, I had a fantastic time reading this thought provoking novel and would rate it 4 out of 5 stars.

My immense gratitude to the author and the publisher of this book, and netgalley.com, for the ARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Christ, I kind of wish I hadn’t read this now. And I mean that in the best possible way. I didn’t understand 1/2 of the really technical stuff, but the descriptions of what comes of that tech being abused? That I got all too well. 

This was a sobering and terrifying story that didn’t leave me completely hopeless, but did leave me with planning to do a lot of research on better understanding what happens when you own your own wiretap.

And I never want to own a self driving car.

I read the first book in this series way back in 2013. Little Brother was a fast-paced response to increased surveillance and eroding civil rights in the face of terrorist threats. Homeland built on that theme by looking at the extra-legal activities of a government contractor that was prepared to use deadly force to keep their secrets secret. Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Attack Surface, is the darkest and most terrifying of the series yet. I recommend that interested readers go back and re-read the first two books to refresh their memories, because this book heavily references them.

Masha Maximow drifted away from her friends in high school, physically and ethically. Where her friends Tanisha and Marcus became big league hacktvists fighting against a host of nefarious things that the government and their contractors have been up to in the name of fighting terror and crime. Masha’s ability to come up with ways to weaponize relationships and technology lands her a job with people Tanisha and Marcus view as the enemy. In the decade since Homeland, Masha has made a lot of money doing things she spends a lot of time not thinking about because, as she points out to her very scary bosses, the information they collect catches a lot more normal people than it does criminals or terrorists.

At the beginning of Attack Surface, we meet Masha in the middle of a job in what appears to be a former Soviet state. On the clock she helps the government install tech that collects and analyses information collected from ordinary citizens’ and activists’ phones. Off the clock she helps the activists avoid that surveillance. When things go extraordinarily pear-shaped, Masha is fired and cut adrift from the clandestine world she was hiding in for ten years. Now that Masha doesn’t have an official job to do, she returns to her hometown of San Francisco.

In Little Brother, technology was a tool. It was neither good or bad except when humans put their hands on it. Marcus, the protagonist of that novel, saw technology as a way to a future utopia of sharing and equality. That hope is far, far away now that Masha is the protagonist. She’s so cynical and burned out that she spends most of the novel telling people all the ways that they’re fucked. Masha is a prickly person, so much so that I was strongly reminded of Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium trilogy. The more I read, the more paranoid I got. I started heavily side-eying my cell phone and wondering about how many apps I needed to give up. Technology, in Attack Surface, reads more like a weapon and a drug. We’re addicted to our devices for so many reasons. But in the hands of unscrupulous police departments, governments, and government contractors, all of our devices might as well be tattling on us all the time, giving up data that could be used to charge people in the event that they need to disappear and stop making “trouble.”

This really is a frightening book. And I think it might be my favorite because, on top of a plot that keeps twisting and turning and scaring the hell out of me, it also contains an intriguing psychological portrait of a damaged woman who has spent too much time ignoring her now-shouting conscience and thought-provoking ideas about cybersurveillance, civil rights, and social justice.