/ / Little Brother, News

Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason” in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. I wasn’t able to accept the award (I’m in India, researching my next novel), so I asked Cindy Cohn, EFF’s legal director, to accept on my behalf and say a few words about EFF’s new lawsuit over NSA wiretapping, in which AG Alberto Gonzales, GW Bush, and Dick Cheney are all named as defendants. Tachyon’s put the text of the speech online — as ever, Cindy gave a hum-dinger:

And here’s where EFF comes in. Cory’s work and EFF’s mission have long been intertwined, not just because he was with us for so long and drank so much of our Kool-Aid, but even before that. And the same is true for Little Brother. While we thankfully haven’t yet had the next terrorist attack, the use of digital technology against ordinary people by an overreaching government is well underway. This week at EFF we filed a new lawsuit, called Jewel v. NSA, aimed at stopping one such invasion of our privacy, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of all of us, especially those of us in San Francisco.

That’s because the strongest evidence in the case is about San Francisco, specifically the installation of a fiberoptic splitter in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street that is making copies of all of the internet traffic that goes through that facility and giving it to the NSA. Those of you who watch EFF know that we filed suit against AT&T with this same evidence in 2006, but in the last year AT&T and the Administration bullied Congress into passing something called “retroactive immunity” for the telecommunications companies, trying to let them off the hook. We’re fighting that immunity in court, but this week we opened a second front, suing the government and government officials directly. This includes Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of this dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, you, me and Marcus Yallow alike.

Tachyon’s 13th Anniversary party wrap-up

/ / Little Brother, News

Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason” in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. I wasn’t able to accept the award (I’m in India, researching my next novel), so I asked Cindy Cohn, EFF’s legal director, to accept on my behalf and say a few words about EFF’s new lawsuit over NSA wiretapping, in which AG Alberto Gonzales, GW Bush, and Dick Cheney are all named as defendants. Tachyon’s put the text of the speech online — as ever, Cindy gave a hum-dinger:

And here’s where EFF comes in. Cory’s work and EFF’s mission have long been intertwined, not just because he was with us for so long and drank so much of our Kool-Aid, but even before that. And the same is true for Little Brother. While we thankfully haven’t yet had the next terrorist attack, the use of digital technology against ordinary people by an overreaching government is well underway. This week at EFF we filed a new lawsuit, called Jewel v. NSA, aimed at stopping one such invasion of our privacy, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of all of us, especially those of us in San Francisco.

That’s because the strongest evidence in the case is about San Francisco, specifically the installation of a fiberoptic splitter in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street that is making copies of all of the internet traffic that goes through that facility and giving it to the NSA. Those of you who watch EFF know that we filed suit against AT&T with this same evidence in 2006, but in the last year AT&T and the Administration bullied Congress into passing something called “retroactive immunity” for the telecommunications companies, trying to let them off the hook. We’re fighting that immunity in court, but this week we opened a second front, suing the government and government officials directly. This includes Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of this dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, you, me and Marcus Yallow alike.

Tachyon’s 13th Anniversary party wrap-up

/ / News

My new Internet Evolution column is up: “Don’t Judge New Media by Old Rules” considers the amazing hidden media formats that have been revealed by the Internet’s loosening of formal strictures:

Isn’t it amazing that there’s always exactly 60 minutes’ worth of news everyday, and that, when transcribed, it fills exactly one newspaper?

Have you ever stopped to think how utterly fortuitous it is that every televisual story worth telling can be neatly broken into segments of exactly 22 minutes (plus commercials) or 48 minutes (ditto)? That every story that makes a good subject for a film takes somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours to tell? That all albums fit conveniently on one or sometimes two CDs, except for best-of compilations? That all books are exactly long enough to bind within a single set of covers and not so short as to allow those covers to touch in the middle?

These are all technological norms that represent technological hangovers: We now assume that certain distributors will carry a particular sort of carton, and its contents will go onto a certain kind of shelf; 10-foot-tall photography books don’t fit in those cartons, and the trucks are already fitted for those cartons, and the shelves have been screwed into the walls of the bookstores.

Don’t Judge New Media by Old Rules

/ / Little Brother, News

Austin “Soon I Will Be Invincible” Grossman’s written a fantastic review of my young adult novel Little Brother for this weekend’s New York Times book review section. Incidentally, the book went into a fifth hardcover printing last week, and is going back for a sixth printing next week because so many orders came in between the fifth printing being set up and it being delivered!


“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. …

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

BTW, if I’m not mistaken, there are still some signed first-edition hardcovers in stock at Bakka Books in Toronto and Borderlands in San Francisco, and both stores ship.

Nerd Activists

/ / News

Austin “Soon I Will Be Invincible” Grossman’s written a fantastic review of my young adult novel Little Brother for this weekend’s New York Times book review section. Incidentally, the book went into a fifth hardcover printing last week, and is going back for a sixth printing next week because so many orders came in between the fifth printing being set up and it being delivered!


“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. …

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

BTW, if I’m not mistaken, there are still some signed first-edition hardcovers in stock at Bakka Books in Toronto and Borderlands in San Francisco, and both stores ship.

Nerd Activists

/ / News, Podcast

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s venerable Ideas programme just aired a fantastic one-hour segment on copyright called “Who Owns Ideas?” with a wide range of interviews with me, James Boyle, Steve Page from BNL, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eric Flint, Michael Geist and many others.

MP3: Who Owns Ideas?