The above quotation from the Declaration of Independence is repeated several times in Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, and for good reason–it becomes the credo of our hero, 17 year-old hacker Marcus Yallow, in his fight against the Department of Homeland Security.

Well wait–maybe I should back up a little bit. (What follows are minor spoilers, but nothing more than you’d get from the inside flap of the book.)

Doctorow’s novel begins in the near future (say around a decade or so, though no exact dates are given), and has extrapolated our current surveillance state into the future. All of the students have government-provided, locked down laptops. “Gait monitors” track students by their distinctive walks. RFID tags abound.

Being a teenage rebel, Marcus has already gotten used to evading these types of pervasive surveillance, which he routinely does to skip class and play games with his friends. On one particular day, though, when he and his friends are out skipping school, terrorists attack his home town of San Francisco. During the ensuing chaos, Marcus and his friends are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security.

And held prisoner on suspicion of terrorism. And tortured.

Once released, Yallow finds himself in a new world–where the DHS has San Francisco in a neo-IngSoc lockdown and Marcus himself is a marked man. So he does what any technically-minded rebellious teenager who’s been betrayed by his own government would do: he vows to take the DHS down.

What follows is a tense series of events as Yallow slowly but surely finds chinks in the electronic surveillance that has infiltrated the City. He builds a “shadow internet” along with some like-minded others. Using social media and crowdsourcing, he’s able to refine his efforts to make government surveillance not only worthless, but also annoying enough that even scared, DHS supporting adults begin to complain.

As the story beats move, Doctorow also follows through the impact of this mini-revolution on Yallow himself, his friends, and his burgeoning relationship with a girl as tech-savvy as he is. Both elements of the story are satisfying and the conclusion is both optimistic and tempered with realism.

Overall, I think that Docotorow has done a fine job in crafting a young adult book in the model of the classic Heinlein juveniles: smart teenager uses his wits and knowledge to beat an omnipresent authority. It’s a good read for teenagers and adults alike.

That said, it’s not a perfect book. Doctorow is clearly from the “Tell, not Show” school of science fiction writers, and the constant explanations of different technologies gets a little draining and at times drags down the story. Being a tech geek himself, I’m surprised that he wasn’t better able to integrate the exposition a little more seamlessly than he does.

There are other frustrations with the characters as well. Apart from Yallow and his girlfriend, none of the other characters are very strongly drawn. They’re just plot placeholders for moving from one point to the next. Here’s the overprotective dad. Here’s the 60s radical social studies teacher so that Yallow can learn about Yippies. The villains are all drawn with a sneer with no apparent attempt to emphasize with people who are honestly trying to deal with and prevent a future terrorist attack.

The only other complaint I have has to do with a couple of sex scenes that Doctorow inserts into the novel. Now, I don’t have an objection to sex scenes per se, but they were rather awkward and seemed jammed in for the sake of being “edgy” rather than serving the story. Not to mention that they’re explicit enough that they could, in all good faith, be kept out of school libraries and away from teens who might gain some real benefit from reading the book.

Overall, though, I found Little Brother to be a satisfying, preaching to the choir read and I’ll be looking forward to Doctorow’s future books.