Many thanks to the people who helped with suggestions and technical details to make this book work: Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Swartz, Quinn Norton, Tiffiniy Cheng, Nicholas Reville, Holmes Wilson, Joe Trippi, Danny O'Brien, Tim Hardy, Nat Torkington, Thomas Gideon, Roger Dingledine, Barry Warsaw, Gord Doctorow, Roz Doctorow, James Gleick, Lee Maguire.
Thanks to my campmates at Liminal Labs for introducing me to Burning Man and making me so welcome there.
Thanks to John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor and Wil Wheaton for letting me give them a cameo (and thanks again to Gilmore for his plotting suggestions!).
Thanks to my agents, Russ Galen, Danny Baror, Heather Baror, and Justin Manask, for the awesome work in bringing
Little Brother
and
Homeland
to the world.
Thanks to all the fans and readers, the librarians and teachers, and hackers and remixers and
especially
the booksellers who put my books into peoples' hands.
Thanks to my editors, especially Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who has always improved my books.
"Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn't a utopian is a shmuck."
Cory asked someone to write to the children of the newest generation and to say something to inspire them. To write something that would encourage them to take up the cause of bettering the world. That's you or someone you love - when you're finished, please pass this book on to the person who needs it most.
Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us. Every minute that we are able to enjoy in a society that is not ruled by senseless violence is a minute given to us by the hard work of people who dedicated their lives for something better. Every person we meet is carrying his own burdens. Each person is the center of her own universe. There is so much left to be done, so many injustices to right, so much suffering to relieve, so many beautiful moments to be lived, an endless amount of knowledge to uncover. Many secrets of the universe wait to be uncovered.
The deck from which our hands are dealt need not be stacked against us; it is possible to create societal structures that are just and capable of reasoned compassion for everyone. It is possible to change the very nature of our lives. It is possible to redesign the entire deck, to change the very face and count of the cards, to rewrite the rules and to create different outcomes.
We live in the golden era of surveillance; every phone is designed to be tapped, the Internet passes through snooping equipment of agencies that are so vast and unaccountable that we hardly know their bounds. Corporations are forced (though some are willing enough!) to hand over our data and data of those whom we love. Our lives are ruled by networks and yet those networks are not ruled by our consent. These networks keep us hooked up but it is not without costs that they keep us hooked together. The businesses, the governments, and the individuals that power those networks are incentivized to spy, to betray and to do it silently. The architecture of the very systems produces these outcomes.
This is tyranny.
The architecture of our systems and of our networks is not the product of nature but rather the product of imperfect humans, some with the best of intentions. There is no one naturally fit to survive in these unnatural systems, there are some who are lucky, others who have adapted.
This letter to you, from your perhaps recent past, was written with Free Software written as a labor of love by someone who wished to help the children of Uganda while flying over an expansive ocean at difficult to understand heights, it was composed while running under a kernel written by scores of people across every national line, across every racial, sexual and gender line by a socially and politically agnostic engineer, it was sent through multiple anonymity networks built by countless volunteers acting in solidarity through mutual aid and it was received by an author who published it for a purpose.
What is the common purpose of all of these people? It is for the whole of our efforts to be more than the sum of our parts -- this creates a surplus for you -- to give breathing room to others, so that they may take the torch of knowledge, of reason, of justice, of truth telling, of sunlight -- to the next step, wherever it may lead us.
There was a time when there were no drone killings, societies have existed without armed policemen, where peace is not only possible but actually a steady state, where mass surveillance was technically and socially infeasible, where fair and evenhanded trials by impartial juries were available for everyone, where fear of identification and arrest was not the norm but the exception. That time was less than a generation ago and much more has been lost in the transition from one generation to the next.
It's up to you to bring those things back to our planet. You can do this with little more than cooperation, the Internet, cryptography, and willingness. You might do this alone or you might do it in a group; you might contribute as a solitary person or as one of many. Writing Free Software empowers every person, without exception, to control the machines that fill our lives. Building free and open hardware empowers every person, without exception, to construct new machines to free us from being slaves to machines that control us. Using free and open systems allows us to construct a new basis by which we may once again understand as a whole, the systems by which we govern ourselves.
We are on the edge of regaining our autonomy, of ending total state surveillance, of uncovering and holding accountable those who commit crimes in our names without our informed consent, of resuming free travel without arbitrary or unfair restriction. We're on the verge of ensuring that every person, not one human excluded, has the right to read and the right to speak. Without exception.
It's easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face everyday -- how might one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices. Omission and commission are the yin and yang of personal agency.
What if you could travel back through time and help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon papers? Would you take the actions required, would you risk your life to end the war? For many it is easy to answer positively and then think nothing of the actual struggles, the real risk or the uncertainty provided without historical hindsight. For others, it's easy to say no and to think of nothing beyond oneself.
But what if you didn't need to travel back through time?
There are new Pentagon Papers just waiting to be leaked; there are new wars to end, new injustices to make right, fresh uncertainty that seems daunting where success seems impossible, new alternatives need to be constructed, old values and concepts of justice need to be preserved in the face of powerful people who pervert the rule of law for their own benefit.
Be the trouble you want to see in the world, above nationalism, above so-called patriotism, above and beyond fear and make it count for the betterment of the planet. Legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong -- do what is right and never give up the fight.
This is one idea out of many that can help you and your friends free our planet from the tyranny that surrounds us all. It's up to you now - go create something beautiful and help others to do the same. Happy hacking,
Anonymous
000000/002012/00/00/00:00:00:00
Hi there, I'm Aaron. I've been given this little space here at the end of the book because I'm a flesh-and-blood human and, as such, I can tell you something you wouldn't believe if it came out of the mouth of any of those fictional characters:
This stuff is real.
Sure, there isn't anyone actually named Marcus or Ange, at least not that I know, but I do know real people just like them. If you want, you can go to San Francisco and meet them. And while you're there, you can play D&D with John Gilmore or build a rocketship at Noisebridge or work with some hippies on an art project for Burning Man.
And if some of the more conspiracy-minded stuff in the book seems too wild to be true, well, just google Blackwater, Xe, or BlueCoat. (I myself have a FOIA request in to learn more about "persona management software," but the Feds say it'll take three more
years
to redact all the relevant documents.)
Now I hope you had fun staying up all night reading about these things, but this next part is important, so pay attention: what's going on now isn't some reality TV show you can just sit at home and watch. This is your life, this is your country -- and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved.
I know it's easy to feel like you're powerless, like there's nothing you can do to slow down or stop "the system." Like all the calls are made by shadowy and powerful forces far outside your control. I feel that way, too, sometimes. But it just isn't true.
A little over a year ago, a friend called to tell me about an obscure bill he'd heard of called the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeitting Act, or COICA. As I read the bill, I started to get more and more worried: under its provisions, the government would be allowed to censor websites it didn't like without so much as a trial. It would be the first time the U.S. government was given the power to censor its citizens' access to the net.
The bill had just been introduced a day or two ago, but it already had a couple dozen senators cosponsoring it. And, despite there never being any debate, it was already scheduled for a vote in just a couple days. Nobody had ever reported on it, and that was just the point: they wanted to rush this thing through before anyone noticed.
Luckily, my friend noticed. We stayed up all weekend and launched a website explaining what the bill did, with a petition you could sign opposing it that would look up the phone numbers for your representatives. We told a few friends about it and they told a few friends and within a couple days we had over 200,000 people on our petition. It was incredible.
Well, the people pushing this bill didn't stop. They spent literally tens of millions of dollars lobbying for it. The head of every major media company flew out to Washington, D.C. and met with the president's chief of staff to politely remind him of the millions of dollars they'd donated to the president's campaign and explain how what they wanted -- the only thing they wanted -- was for this bill to pass.
But the public pressure kept building. To try to throw people off the trail, they kept changing the name of the bill -- calling it PIPA and SOPA and even the E-PARASITES Act -- but no matter what they called it, more and more people kept telling their friends about it and getting more and more people opposed. Soon, the signers on our petition stretched into the millions.
We managed to stall them for over a year through various tactics, but they realized if they waited much longer they might never get their chance to pass this bill. So they scheduled it for a vote first thing after they got back from winter break.
But while members of Congress were off on winter break, holding town halls and public meetings back home, people started visiting them. Across the country, members started getting asked by their constituents why they were supporting that nasty Internet censorship bill. And members started getting scared -- some going so far as to respond by attacking
me
.
But it wasn't about me anymore -- it was never about me. From the beginning, it was about citizens taking things into their own hands: making YouTube videos and writing songs opposing the bill, making graphs showing how much money the bill's cosponsors had received from the industries pushing it, and organizing boycotts putting pressure on the companies who'd endorsed the bill.
And it worked -- it took the bill from a political nonissue that was poised to pass unanimously to a toxic football no one wanted to touch. Even the bill's cosponsors started rushing to issue statements opposing it! Boy, were those media moguls pissed...
This is not how the system is supposed to work. A ragtag bunch of kids doesn't stop one of the most powerful forces in Washington just by typing on their laptops!
But it did happen. And you can make it happen again.
The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won't win every time -- this is real life, after all -- but we finally have a chance.
But it only works if you take part. And now that you've read this book and learned how to do it, you're perfectly suited to make it happen again. That's right: now it's up to you to change the system.
Aaron Swartz
Powell's: Portland, OR
This section is dedicated to Powell's Books, the legendary "City of Books" in Portland, Oregon. Powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something I've always loved -- and every time I've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a Powell's at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!