Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3)

by Cory Doctorow

“The fact that you don’t have a solution doesn’t mean that you don’t need to find one and it doesn’t mean that one can’t be found.

In the 1960s, the CIA tried surgically implanting cats with listening devices—and training them to spy on America’s enemies. (This is real. Google “acoustic kitty.”)

“Wikipedia? That dump’s a whitewash. The redpill bros and the Blue Lives Matter folks have figured out that brigading Wikipedia gets them better bang for their buck than hitting social media. That’s where all the lazy journalists go for their backgrounders.

because America, fuck yeah: milkshakes and giant movie theaters and highways and barbecue and simple politics with only two parties that mostly agreed on mostly everything that mattered, like bombing the shit out of everywhere else.

But the stuff we were doing—finding and exploiting the fracture lines in their own organizations, trolling the shit out of them—took bad guys off the field by pointing them at each other. It made them stop trusting each other, made them point fingers at each other, accusing one another of being secret double agents and provocateurs.

Security is a team sport, and your data is only as secure as the sloppiest person in your group.”

the worst sin in my world was to bullshit yourself. If you had to do something evil because it was convenient or because it was inevitable or because it was well paid, then sure, be as evil as you need to be, but don’t pretend that you were acting virtuously.

people usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it’s too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

I gave her a bottle: Fiji, of course, because nothing connoted luxury like buying water from a conflict zone.

San Francisco was a game of musical chairs where the music was speeding up and the chairs were being yanked away. It used to be an easy game, with so many chairs that there’d always be one for you provided you weren’t choosy about which chair you got—now just having a chair marked you as a one-percenter.

Every city was beautiful when you found the right place to stand.

the point of fake news isn’t just to make it so that no one can tell what’s true, it’s to make it so that no one cares anymore, so that when you try to get all your friends to go out and march about something that they should already be thinking about, they’re all like, ‘Eh, is that even

Now, I had friends. Not monsters and not golden heroes. Just civilians, with deep reserves of bravery and principle. People who made a dent in the universe without having to become monsters. Could that be me?

So much of this stuff was just garbage but because she’d saved it for a decade, it had acquired a penumbra of precious antiquity, like Duchamp’s urinal: once you treated something like it was worth keeping, it was.

Any weapon you don’t know how to use belongs to your enemy.”