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.

After reading this book, I am now officially wary of my phone, my thermostat, my Kindle and various other devices in my possession.
The book centers on Masha, who makes a living analyzing and using the results of surveillance software. She’s a good person, with good intentions, and we all know where that leads.
The events of this book also touch on events that happened in two of Doctorow’s earlier books.
I greatly enjoyed this book. Masha is an interesting character who lives in much more of a moral gray zone than the main character of the two other books (Little Brother and Homeland.) I did find myself wanting to go back and reread those other two, since now I have another perspective on the events.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Terrorist or Freedom fighter? The answer depends on who is looking at the data. This book delves into the world of hacking, post soviet regimes populated with paranoid petty dictators, and protesters protesting police brutality, resulting in more paranoia on the part of the dictators and brutality aimed at the protestors. This is pretty grim stuff and as I read the book- it’s all happening in real time Summer of 2020.

Our heroine- Masha is a cool chick, one that Im pretty sure wouldnt want to hang around me. Written in first person , we follow Masha in her exploits as she uses her tech smarts to outwit the technology she helped to install while employed by a data security company, turning it into a weapon aimed at the oppressors. She flashes back to a decade before when she got her first taste- by working for a security contractor for the US and stationed in Iraq. There is some bad stuff going on in Iraq, and her employers turn a blind eye to things they aren’t getting paid to stop. Masha lives with her choices by “compartmentalizing” her feelings so she can sleep at night. But those compartments frequently crack open.

Her best friend Tanisha from childhood is leading a evolved Black Lives Matter group- Coalition of Black and Brow people-black and brown people ( Muslims and hispanics) join in to fight oppression. Not suprising, the powers that be- Republicans and corporate Democrats aren’t going to just lie down and lose their control. Its all going well until the the coalition is infliltrated by people who plan to discredit the cause- by digging dirt and turning peaceful protests into violent riots while the police stand by. This gives the police cause to purchase more battle gear and surveillance tech to spy on the populace under the guise of providing security. The slippery slope goes into a full slide.

Its is nerdery and spy stuff on steroids. I’m a casual nerd- ala the Martian, and had a hard time following passages like:
“... That Sectec box could handle ten million simultaneous connections, and registered the existence of a stock Windows laptop in the Sofitel Bltz, communicating over Tor. It profiled the machine by fingerprinting its packets, did a quick lookup in Xoth’s customer-facing API to find a viable exploit against that configuration, and injected a redirect to the virtual machine on my laptop. I could see the payload strike home.”
You got that? Ya me neither, but I figured that for most people the answer would also be NOPE. But stick with it, all that matters is to understand - Wow Misha is smart, good at her job and this stuff is real and scary.

The situation in the story as in real life is rather bleak: “So you can go and fight in the streets for the world of your dreams where everyone is treated fairly and unearned privilege is replaced by equal opportunity, but you might as well be fighting against gravity. Our modern oligarchs don’t even have to put you in jail to render you impotent: they can just turn your phone, car, TV, and thermostat into virtual ankle cuffs that tell them everything you say and everywhere you go, and rat out all of your friends.”

However the bright light that shines though is the while the citizens can never out gun the government backed surveillance systems with Billions at their disposal, they can hold elected officials accountable- and though democracy ensure that dirty deeds are exposed for what they are. Not an easy answer and required everyone to remain vigilant- by voting, minding their digital footprint, and when necessary protesting with full commitment of life and limb to see that justice is served.

I leave this review with quote: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

This book is a bit 1984 meets technology. Is Cory Doctorow the George Orwell of the cyber-age? Perhaps!

It's horrifying what can be breached via technological know-how, and reading this certainly gives me a bit of tech-dread. Are we all lulled into a false sense of security by companies telling us their programs and systems are unhackable? Is anything truly private if it's not literally only in written form locked away in an iron safe? The message of this book is clearly that privacy isn't private, not in the world of technology and political cyber-wars.

Message and frightening tech/cyber stuff aside, much of this book felt extremely inaccessible from a lay-person's perspective. If you know a lot about tech and cyber-security, and have a sense of the ongoing politically fraught cyber-wars and tech-intelligence, then this book will probably be fine. Even if you have a sort of sense but can read with the ability to bypass some of that "not understanding" I'm sure it'll be fine! I loved "Little Brother," and generally what I don't understand can be circumvented by plot interest. This one just felt a lot more out of reach for me, whether it's the unlikable main character, the very tech-heavy lingo, or the international criminal rings, it just felt more dense than I could take.

Cory Doctorow is clearly well-versed and masterfully able to weave a tech-tale that pulls all the stops.

Doctorow returns to the Little Brother universe for another techno thriller this time focusing on the character of Masha who is doing contract surveillance work for the bad guys during the day and advising the good guys on how to avoid surveillance at night. Doctorow is at his best when he is writing the script for tomorrows possible (let's hope not) headlines. Masha is a complex character and throughout the book she faces numerous moral quandaries. The tech in this book runs fast and deep but if you enjoyed the other two installments of the Little Brother series you will love this. This book was provided to me as an eArc in exchange for a fair review.

This is a book that preaches to the choir. If you understand everything Doctorow writes about here in terms of cybersecurity and government ops and private industry-as government, then it's a mostly fun ride through the chaos of modern warfare and political force while watching the narrator develop a conscience, or at least kind of a conscience. If you don't know much about this, then you might find this hard going. It could be educational, which I think is one of Doctorow's motives in publishing it, but you'll still need other sources on ethical hacking and related topics.

It's Cory Doctorow! I'm such a huge fan and this one did not disappoint. It's a little eery, the way the book is constructed and how close it hits to home right now, so be aware that this isn't going to be any kind of escapist fare, but still! New Cory Doctorow! Read it!

This is a story about technology & how connectivity can impact autonomy.

This is an excellent book by author known for dystopian brilliance. I found I didn’t enjoy the protagonist; however, it didn’t detract terribly from my overall enjoyment. Overall, a chilling, enjoyable read!

Thanks Netgalley & Macmillan – Tor/Forge for this e-arc!

From the marketing of this book, it looks as if it's not explicitly a YA novel like Little Brother and Homeland were, but this is a sequel set in the same universe of a semi-current alternative world. Doctorow takes one of the side characters of the earlier books and presents the bulk of Attack Surface from Masha Maximow's perspective. The novel begins as Masha is working for a cyber-security subcontractor, Zoth, supporting a vast array of surveillance tools to squash political dissenters and activist at a fictional post-Soviet bloc country. She's also helping a small band of dissidents circumvent and obstruct the intelligence gathering tools she's responsible for. The rest of the novel alternates between what happens whens some of the same surveillance tools are used against Masha's friend Tanisha in Oakland, and the backstory of how Masha went rose in the ranks of the intel contractor community. I really liked Doctorow's decision to alternate between these two colliding storylines, slowly building to a crescendo where we see Masha's compartmentalization collapse, which forces her to take ownership for how her actions have affected others. Doctorow writes in the Author's Note, "Today, I remain a technological optimist--but a realistic one...Technology cannot substitute for a just society, but it can help you create that society...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." I was a huge fan of the two prior books and was happy to see Doctorow has not lost the ability to weave a competing narrative full of well-fleshed characters while still including instructive segments on cyber-security topics.

Masha is a hacker that helps governments spy on dissidents. When she's not working, she's helping those same dissidents stay "hidden" from the surveillance systems as long as she feels they're fighting for a just cause. But then things start hitting close to home when the systems are used on her longtime friends. Now Masha has to choose a side.

This is the first book that I've read by Cory Doctorow. It took a while for me to really get into Attack Surface, but once I reached that point I thought it was a good book. Based on the description I thought I wouldn't need to read Little Brother and Homeland first. I think I would've enjoyed Attack Surface more if I had read them. I felt like I was missing a chunk of Masha and Marcus' history. There was glimpses of their backstory, but I felt like there was more to it.

I do recommend the book to anyone that likes sci-fi or tech thrillers. Maybe try reading the Little Brother series first though.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Attack Surface: A Novel For Today

After the events of a weekend in which waves of violence overtook American streets, I find myself wishing that Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel Attack Surface were already available.

It’s a novel that is perfectly suited to inform national dialogues about police violence, how

technology can undermine or promote human freedom, and how members of the dominant culture can be allies in combating injustices committed against marginalized groups.

Picking up a decade after the events of Doctorow's Hugo-shortlisted novel Little Brother, this new book follows the career of Masha Maximow, the hacker/programmer who showed up briefly in previous stories.

As an anti-hero protagonist working for private security firms, Maximow's loyalties are split between the well-funded realpolitik employers that let her live in luxury, and the idealistic friends and allies she helps in secret. This makes for interesting internal character tensions, as well as opportunities for Doctorow to delve into the details of computer security and encryption.

One of Doctorow’s strengths as a writer is his ability to tackle complex real-world computer security issues with a depth of knowledge, while making the subject accessible to lay readers. He also makes it evident why the subject — and the nuances he's describing — are of immediate relevance to the plot.

Where the book stumbles is when Maximow reconnects with her former antagonist and ally Marcus Yallow, who was the protagonist of Doctorow’s previous novels Little Brother and Homeland. Yallow’s wide-eyed techno-utopianism feels at-odds with the more pragmatic worldview that has informed Maximow’s life for the majority of the book. Maximow’s subsequent road to Damascus moment is unconvincing at best. This tonal confusion may in part be explained by the unusual placement of Attack Surface as a novel for adults that is a continuation of a story set by two YA novels.

Major portions of Attack Surface are spent in protest scenes that are nearly identical to those plastered

across every news station in the U.S.A. right now, and Doctorow captures the hope, the fear, and the confusion of these types of events. Any reader who has participated in a protest that was targeted by the police will recognize that Doctorow is clearly writing from experience.

Some of the police tactics that Doctorow describes — including kettling, deliberate provocations, and cell phone jamming — have been on display over the past few days. The ways in which the protagonists of Attack Surface circumvent those tactics are not always as effective as Doctorow describes, but the novel still provides a good crash course in some forms of effective protest management.

Given the events of this past weekend, I wonder if Doctorow underestimated the willingness of American police officers to act with unmitigated violence, and if he overestimated the judicial system’s ability to hold those police officers accountable.

Despite the ways in which Doctorow depicts omnipresent surveillance, privatized military being turned against citizens, and corporate corrosion of democratic accountability, Attack Surface is at its heart a hopeful novel. This is a story in which protests work and in which individual actors are able to affect change for the better. I am not sure that I found that believable, but at this present moment many readers might need something hopeful.

Attack Surface is a vital and necessary contribution to the public discourse. Doctorow is extremely talented at diagnosing potential problems with new technologies being used to subvert human freedom, even when the resolution to the story he tells might ring hollow.

I wish it were available now, rather than being released in October.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book, in return for a fair and honest review.

Cory Doctorow's books are hit or miss for me - some of them just don't grab me (but I always give them a shot). However, Little Brother and Homeland both belong on my all-time favorite list. Needless to say, having the opportunity to read another book set in the Little Brother environment was exciting - and this book did not let me down.

While it certainly can be read as a standalone book, the events of the previous two books give a lot of context here. In this book, we focus on Masha, who made very different decisions and took a different path from Marcus and the other characters from the first two books. This is certainly one of my weaknesses - I always love reading about the "other side" - the people who made different choices. Particularly with an author as skillful as Doctorow, at getting into people's heads and making the reader understand them as real people.

In some ways, this was a terrifying book to read right now, as I'm reading about what's going on in Portland. But, you don't walk away from this book, thinking that "resistance is futile" - instead, you can see at least a glimmer of hope.

Attack Surface is potent and powerful in its message and extremely timely given current world events. This book will scare the crap out of you, in a good way, because it’s meant to wake you up. To make you think about the ways technology is being used and manipulated, to use and manipulate people. A very plausible and frightening warning of where this world could be a few weeks from now.

But I also had some real problems with this book: I found it very frustrating to read until I was in the last 25%. Basically, when the author stopped jumping backwards in time to earlier parts of the main characters life, and stuck with the main story and the action that was happening on the current timeline, then I was really more engrossed, but that feeling of being sucked into the story not wanting to stop turning pages came very late for me in this book.
Honestly, if I hadn’t committed to giving an honest review of this book I’m not sure I would’ve ever finished reading it. About 20% of the way into into the book I didn’t want to keep reading. I did not like the main character. I did not like the continual interruption in the current action which WAS interesting, to spend what seemed to be inordinate amounts of time explaining how the main character got to where she was today; all the work that she did, her misery, her ridiculously wealthy and hedonistic lifestyle, which was not helping me feel sympathetic towards her even though it was a plausibly accurate portrayal of how military-contractor cyber security experts can be paid and treated. The pace felt like I was trying to run underwater: I want my legs to go faster, but I can’t!
Yes it is vital to the story to understand the main characters’ relationships with her two former bosses. But I still feel like we could’ve saved about 50 pages by tightening up all the expositions of her past and moving more quickly forward with the present.

The author had to do an incredible balancing act to reach a wide target audience, which I’m sure is his intention. Personally, as someone who has spent decades in a day job in the information technology and networking fields, I fully understood all the technology features that featured prominently in the story, and the author took great pains to explain. But I’m not sure he will hold the attention of the common person who does not fully grasp things such as: programming, networking, WiFi, cell phone network logistics, operating systems, cryptographic systems, Internet security certificates, and many other things like these. There were several occasions where the author spent several pages explaining one of these technologies in a way to attempt to make them understandable to the layperson. These info dumps took me out of the story, and sometimes still didn’t feel he was successful in explaining these very complicated things in a down-to-earth way. People in the tech industry, or who are tech savvy, will eat the story up and get it. But I’m afraid that the sheer volume of technical jargon and real, or soon to be real, technologies, which are practically their own character in the story, will feel very overwhelming for your average reader.

The book attempts to end on a hopeful note, that the world can be changed, that this person who did so much wrong to others could grow a conscience and change herself, and that politics and technology must work tandem to affect good change. But I kept wondering why these EvilCorps were not disappearing Masha in the end, locking her away forever in some blacksite hellhole? If she wouldn’t cooperate, she was a dangerous liability. Had she not already violated her non-disclosure agreements, and would likely again? Is it harder to make someone disappear if they live in a foreign country, than from America?

In the end I identified more strongly about Masha’s cynical side. Even if good regulations and protections are enacted and constantly reviewed and revised, people still haven’t changed themselves on the inside. Money still talks, most people still have a price that will buy their support or their silence, even relinquishing rights and freedoms for a feeling of security. And no human, no government on this planet has ever or will ever find a solution to corruption, greed or hate. Those things lie in the human heart.

I believe this is an important book for this world.
I just didn’t love it.