"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George OrwellWith incredible speed our world moved from disconnected villages to a global network - one owned by the power brokers. The consequences couldn't be foreseen.
This is the second book of the Bitpats, a revolutionary group working to preserve the right, the ability to stay out of sight. In a world dominated and driven by data, the digitization of information we didn't even know was important, the big players not only know where we are but they can make reasonable guesses about what we do next... what products we will buy, what cause we will support. This changing world makes even silence into a statement.
Where people once could recreate themselves and start fresh, that opportunity is gone. Digital footprints never disappear... no tide of time sweeps in to wash them away.
The new tools are double edged, however, and Tricia Campbell finds a new lease on life by turning the system on itself. Joining forces with Joshua Raintree, a financial analyst, and Kenny Lu, a technical wizard, she helps clients thread their way through the web of online identities and biometrics that were created to close the loopholes. They create what Tricia terms "crypto citizens" - using the tools created to track citizens to free them, to release them through the cracks that still exist in the web of global data. They find the ways and places a person can hide their identity while moving about freely in a world characterized by sophisticated surveillance.
The Bitpats, led by Boone, work with them, as this pro-freedom group understands why, the harder it gets to disappear from sight, the more important it is to do it.
This is a war novel; it involves conflicts that are at once political, economic, technological, and philosophical. It poses an existential question: Does a government or agency have the right to hold citizens under constant scrutiny?
This is story of grand passions, both good and bad; a story of the haphazard application of technology, which is indifferent to the morals of the people or group applying it; it's a story of a struggle to remain human in an increasingly inhuman world.
