Little Brother: Chapters 1–4

Both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application.

Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.

TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren’t allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time—no way could the school keep track of them all.

Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.

I surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots — ankle-high Blundstones from Australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal detectors that are everywhere now.

Ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators.

We were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were.

Each desk had a gorgeous office chair in front of it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter of the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw.

If you stare at someone long enough, they’ll eventually look back at you. She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic.

Two of them — severe haircut lady and utility belt man — looked at me from their ergonomic superchairs.

I wish I could say that I’d anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but I wasn’t nearly that paranoid/clever.

But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.

“We have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus. Your possession of these articles” — she gestured at all my little gizmos — “and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we’d no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. It’s enough to put you away until you’re an old man. Do you understand that?”

There are doubtless extenuating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions.

She had a neat pile of documents in front of her, and her ubiquitous go-cup of Starbucks beside her.