[pp.int.general] Little Brother

[Andrew Norton]

Yeah, I spoke to Cory not long after it came out. A month or so after 
the book came out in the summer, the PPUS were getting emails about free 
email accounts, I don't know if Rick+co were too, but I'd assume so.

As I told Cory, perhaps in a scary coincidence, I was working at one of 
the locations (the one central to the second half of the book) less than 
2 months after 9/11, at the time the 4 big bridges in the bay area were 
under 'imminent terrorist threat'. I had to travel 3 of them each day, 
and the studio we were filming in overlooked the bay bridge. One day we 
passed an abandoned 2 1/2 ton truck, and reported it to the army unit 
stationed at the midpoint of the bridge (which is where the exit to our 
filming location was) and 3-4 hours later, no-one had approached the 
truck, and traffic was still flowing.

I know from experiance how terrorist threats should be dealt with; I 
grew up around the IRA bombing campaigns of the 80s, and in 1993, I 
walked past a bomb minutes before it went off, in March 93. Such things 
stay with you....

Andrew


Glenn Kerbein wrote:
> Dear fellow pirates,
> 	I am currently in the middle of reading a fascinating book centering
> around the principle of privacy. "Little Brother," as it is titled,
> authored by copyleftist Cory Doctorow, is a necessary read. Not only
> does it cover anything any everything from free (sadly, in both senses
> of the word) software, privacy, and various action groups and non
> profits (EFF and ACLU were both mentioned within the same chapter).
> Often, and through Doctorow's gift of simplistic, layman's, writing, the
> fundamental issues regarding proactive, invasive, surveilannce, but also
> a subliminal practicality of doing so.
> 	TOR, Xnet (a fictitious software amalgamation of what I assume to be
> kismet, Firefox, and freenet/tor), and a slew of other essential tools
> for political outsiders (for lack of a better work, dissident seems
> apropos of nothing in this case) get thier mention. What really popped
> out was this section:
> """
>   I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake
> really hard to take any given giant number and figure out which
> email address through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party
> primes multiply together to give you that number.
> that hated Internet surveillance and promised to keep their mail
> accounts a secret from everyone, even the cops. I accessed it
> That means that if you can come up with a way of scrambling
> strictly via Xnet, hopping from one neighbor's Internet connection to
> the next, staying anonymous ­­ I hoped ­­ all the way to
> Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. If Benson could figure
> it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up with on the spur of
> the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a lot of email from people who
> heard in chat rooms and message boards that I could help them
> troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections.
> """
> 	It appears that the Swedes take the spotlight again, albeit within
> proper context, as it was, AFAIK, true that the PPSE had run a
> spam/temporary email service. (My rant about PPSE v. PPUS et al.
> synonymity is irrelevant right now) I think it would be apt to have a
> joint, or at least similar, release or writeup about this.
> 
> P.S.: It would behoove you to Goggle "little brother + ebook". Don't
> worry about copyright infringement, as the literature itself is under a
> CC-BY-SA.
> 
>