It’ll get posted as a link later in the day anyway, but I just finished reading Little Brother, Cory Doctorow’s new YA novel at lunch, and wanted to recommend it very strongly to, well, everyone. It’s an absolutely brilliant stealth primer on the issues surrounding on-line privacy and civil liberties, as well as being a entertaining read. It’s a YA novel, so it reads at a terrifying pace – I think it took me a hair under two hours to read cover to cover – but there’s quite a lot of information in there, disguised as a ten-seconds-in-the-future yarn about what happens when Homeland Security fuck with the wrong teenager.

Yes, surveillance, civil liberties, e-privacy and so on will be familiar hobby horses to anyone who’s read Doctorow’s stuff on BoingBoing or in the media, but this is the first time he’s come out with a book aimed so squarely at them, and his passion for the subjects clearly drives him without it ever feeling preachy.

You can get the book for free in a variety of formats, and it will amply reward time invested in it. Highly recommended.