Little Brother

In 2001, just six weeks after the 9/11 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, the United States government enacted the USA Patriot Act. This Act revised surveillance laws, expanding the government’s authority to spy on citizens and reducing checks and balances on judicial oversight, public accountability, and the ability to challenge governmental searches in court. The government could now rifle through an individual’s records held by doctors, banks, universities, or the Internet. They could track travel patterns or reading preferences. To obtain permission for these searches, which often violated the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee to an expectation of privacy against unreasonable search and seizures, the government no longer had to show evidence that the search subjects were agents of a foreign power nor that the records themselves were related to criminal authority, discarding the need for probable cause that is also listed in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Patriot Act was renewed in various forms until 2020, when it was passed over for renewal by the House of Representatives.

Doctorow’s criticism of the Patriot Act is overt in the novel; the argument that if one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear ties directly to Marcus’s reaction when he is asked for his passwords. He doesn’t protect his privacy because he is a terrorist; he protects it because his privacy in turn protects his dignity. When the DHS begins to track the citizens through data, they uncover illicit affairs, kids sneaking out, and even people with medical conditions that they want to keep secret. None of these activities are terrorist related, but they are secret, and their public disclosure is embarrassing and unnecessary. Even the coffee shop owner, a former Turkish national, refuses to take credit or debit cards, reacting to the Patriot Act II, which allows the government to track citizen movements through their card usage. Doctorow’s assertion is that by creating a mountain of data on everyday citizens, the government is treating every citizen as terrorist suspects. In Little Brother, Doctorow demonstrates that invading the privacy of millions of people to find a needle in the haystack of data is an inequitable trade of rights for safety.