Marcus is a seventeen-year-old hacker in San Francisco who loves playing computer games and subverting his school’s online security system to do so. He and his three friends skip school one day to play an online game that involves going to real places to search for clues. But just as they’re getting started, the Bay Bridge is blown up by terrorists. Marcus and his friends are picked up by National Homeland Security and taken to a secret prison where they are held for several days and interrogated. Marcus had enough gadgets on his person to arouse suspicion. Once they let him go, he’s so angry that he gets even by establishing an army of teen hackers in order to fight the government’s ever-increasing infringement on civil liberties and to expose NHS for the sham that it is. Using the secret identity “M1k3y,” he becomes a hero throughout geekdom—and a marked man everywhere else. The government would love to get its hands on him. The problem is, they have no idea who he is, and he always manages to stay one step ahead of them. On its most superficial level, Little Brother functions as a fast-paced action novel that’s impossible to put down. But you don’t have to scrape very far beneath its surface to appreciate its truly subversive nature. For the more technologically inclined, it offers the tools to stage a techno-revolution, and for the more politically inclined, it offers the impetus for wanting to do so. (Age 13 and older)

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.