As I was reading Little Brother, I was intrigued by the points that Cory Doctorow made. Some of his arguments were interesting since Marcus was purely intent that the DHS was terrible. It seemed that the US would turn into chaos from the inside out because of another terrorist attack. We do not actually see the adult side. Without Marcus, the tactics the DHS was using to track down terrorists would have definitely been more efficient. The jailing teenagers’ part was a little extreme, but the other tactics such as following unusual routes could prove to be useful in tracking drug deals and even potential terrorist attacks.
That is not what intrigued me the most. The most interesting part of the book for me came at the beginning of chapter 10. This is where I finally understood how public/private key encryption works. We mentioned it a few times in class, but the beginning of chapter 10 explains the logistics of it. Using only public key encryption is useless because it is not a secret. Anyone on the web will be able to read the messages you encrypt. However, using both a public and private key is a very secure means of communication. The message is encrypted twice, both with a public key and a private key. There is still a very sneaky way of bypassing this. Billy could trick Bob, who is trying to send a message to Jim, into thinking that Billy’s public key is actually Bob’s public key. In this way, Billy can intercept Jim’s messages and become a man in the middle. In order to actually maintain secrecy, one must establish a web of trusts. But even this web of trusts can be infiltrated, as evidenced by the events later in the novel. That is the inherent flaw in the private/public key encryption. It involves around human trust, which can be easily betrayed by anything from money to power. Human trust is what fails here in the situation provided in Cory Doctorow’s novel.
