He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero.

Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier.Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him-but he can't admit to being the leaker because that will cost his employer the election. It's incendiary stuff-and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world.

Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumb drive containing a WikiLeaks-style cable dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. Marcus and Ange are at the Burning Man festival when he's given two things: a job offer to work as webmaster for a reform-minded politician, and a USB drive containing an array of data that could embarrass government and corporate interests.In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful novel Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco-an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state.A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus' hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. The novel ends with him in the arms of his new girlfriend, Ange. He's held in custody and waterboarded but then released. Because of his skill and inclination for gaming the systems around him, Marcus falls under suspicion and is arrested. Homeland is a sequel to Doctorow's 2008 novel Little Brother, about a teenage hacker named Marcus Yallow who gets caught up in the aftermath of a 9/11-scale terrorist attack in San Francisco. More generally, the story embodies a particular outlook on the world - tech-savvy, suspicious of state and corporate power - that reflects what Swartz had articulated. As Doctorow made clear in his eloquent obituary, he drew on advice from Swartz in setting out how his protagonist could use the information now available about voters to create a grass roots anti-establishment political campaign. Although no one would have wished it, Swartz's death will shadow the release of Cory Doctorow's new young adult novel, Homeland.

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