The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on February 20, 2024

I loved this book. I recognize that I loved it because it pushed my buttons. Readers who do not share those buttons might not like it as much as I did, although it is a well told story that most fans of crime novels should appreciate. While stories about violence dominate crime fiction, I was pleased to read a book that focused both on financial crime and, even better, the dismal intersection of corporate greed and America’s prison industry.

Martin Hench is a forensic accountant. He recovers misappropriated money in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Hench first appeared in Red Team Blues. The Bezzle takes place a few years earlier. Hench is comfortable but not yet wealthy. He still needs to work from time to time to replenish his funds.

Hench hasn’t seen his friend Scott Warms in some time, so he is happy to receive Harms’ invitation to spend a long weekend on Catalina Island. Warms made a bundle of money by selling a startup to Yahoo. He knows many other wealthy people in the tech industry, some of whom vacation on Catalina. Warms and Hench plan to spend the weekend attending parties, drinking high-end alcohol, and doing drugs. Cocaine and weed, of course, but they also enjoy hallucinogens.

One of the parties is thrown by Lionel Coleman Jr. Hench learns from a driver that Coleman is importing fast food meals from the mainland, freezing them, and selling them to islanders who crave fast food because the franchises aren’t allowed to operate on Catalina. The labor is performed by people who have been recruited into a Ponzi scheme that Coleman has orchestrated. Hench convinces the driver that he will eventually lose everything he owns, as will his friends, family members, and most of the working-class island residents before Coleman disappears to the mainland with their cash.

Coleman doesn’t need the money he steals from the islanders; it’s small change to him. He steals it because he can. The novel suggests that he is representative of greedy, wealthy people around the world, people who operate fraudulent schemes of one sort or another, who dupe investors and consumers but rarely pay a price for their shameful behavior. They use campaign contributions and lobbyists to carve out loopholes in legislation that let them get away with fraud. Voters who are distracted by right wing screeds about crime and border invasions pay scant attention to the crime that actually affects them because those criminals are branded as entrepreneurs.

Hench causes Coleman’s scheme to crash before he can maximize his gains, forcing him to run back to the mainland before he is tarred and feathered. Coleman desires vengeance, a desire he satisfies when Warms is arrested for cocaine possession. The cocaine isn’t his, but Warms is a standup guy and won’t give up the person who left it in his car. He accordingly gets a monster three-strike sentence (the first two strikes being relatively inconsequential felony convictions for assault on an officer and drug possession during Warms’ youthful years).

Coleman has put together a bunch of businesses in the private prison industry that scam state government and prisoners alike. The prisons make money by cutting staff, which means cutting visitors, libraries, and efforts at rehabilitation. The evils that Doctorow writes about, including ridiculously expensive tolls that families must pay to speak to prisoners, are shockingly real, but they are a scam that most Americans don’t care about because prisoners don’t have lobbyists.

Coleman uses his leverage with the private prison system to make Warms’ life hell. When Hench starts looking into the ways that Coleman’s businesses are defrauding the government, Coleman threatens to have Warms killed if Hench doesn’t back off.

Cory Doctorow makes the point that successful businessmen confuse greed with intelligence. Hench is smarter than Coleman, leading to a relatively happy ending, assuming that anything about an unjust three-strikes imprisonment can be regarded as happy. But Warms is a likeable character who is upset when Hench seems willing to back away from Coleman just to save Warms’ skin. I always admire characters who are willing to sacrifice for the good of others.

And I admire Doctorow for telling an engaging story that spotlights the evil of private prisons. The issue doesn’t interest most people because, as Doctorow writes, “America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It’s not in our character.” Some sickness in the American soul causes people to believe that prisoners deserve to suffer. Americans like to feel superior to all the people we place behind bars until our children or friends join their ranks. Yet the people who really need to be in prison, the corporate fraudsters who have done much more damage than a typical three-strikes felon, never pay a price for their antisocial behavior.

Doctorow touches on other financial issues, including real estate investment schemes that profit by taking homes from underwater homeowners and the refusal of financial regulators to do their jobs because “regulation” is a dirty word to politicians who accept campaign contributions from regulated businesses. He writes about corrupt cops and a broken political system. And again touching on a neglected issue that is dear to me, he writes about the enormous profits the federal court system makes by charging the public to access supposedly “public” records — records that everyone should be able to see for free, rather than paying for the privilege of monitoring the actions of judges and lawyers in a judicial process that pretends to be open to the public.

Doctorow takes on all these issues without losing sight of the novelist’s primary goal: to tell an entertaining story. In part because the story is based on important issues that are usually ignored, in part because Doctorow’s central characters live their beliefs — beliefs that are founded in altruism rather than greed — and in part because the story is appealing, The Bezzle is a joy to read.

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Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on April 25, 2023

I’m not tech-savvy, so I didn’t know that the Red Team is a term used to identify people who try to exploit weaknesses in digital systems while the Blue Team tries to insulate systems from attack. And since I’m also not cryptocurrency savvy, I can’t say that I followed all the details in Red Team Blues. Explanations of blockchains and such seemed to make sense as I was reading them, but five minutes after I closed the book I was thinking, “I’ve got no idea what you just explained to me, Cory.” I don’t think that matters (although tech and crypto savvy people might salivate over the details) because the story is fundamentally about people and the impact that certain events have on their lives.

Martin Hench plays on the Red Team. He’s a good guy, not someone who uses hacking skills for criminal purposes. He typically sells his services to victims of digital crimes, helping them recover their losses in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Martin lives on a very fancy bus and often spends his nights in Walmart parking lots.

Martin’s old friend Danny Lazer is a billionaire who founded a company that provides the tools for the next internet revolution. Danny’s wife died, leaving him to wonder why he wasted so much of his life chasing a fortune when he could have been spending more time with his wife, working a couple of hours each month and earning enough to pay for a comfortable life in a Baja beach shack.

Danny eventually sold his company and started a new one. He married his much younger former personal assistant, Sethuramani. He’s chasing money again, this time with a new form of cryptocurrency. He started the company so he would have something to leave to Sethu, who is quite capable of managing it.

However, Danny is in trouble. He acquired “the signing keys for four of the most commonly deployed secure enclaves.” I won’t try to explain what that means because, although Doctorow explained it in simple terms, my simple mind can only wrap around the simplest part of the explanation. Suffice it to say that, in the wrong hands, the keys to secure enclaves can be used to wipe out records of digital transactions and destroy the foundational trustworthiness of companies that use them. So naturally, someone stole the keys, threatening to bring down Danny’s new company and quite a few other companies, as well.

Martin earns three hundred million dollars by recovering the laptop that contains the keys, using techniques that Doctorow carefully explained and that I vaguely grasped. I didn’t quite buy the location from which the missing laptop is recovered (it depends on an innate trust in human nature that I wouldn’t expect to find in thieves), but that’s not an integral part of the story.

Martin’s digital detective work leads him to some dead bodies that are an integral part of the story. The father of one of the dead kids is seeking vengeance. Martin had nothing to do with the deaths, but be becomes a target. He can either use his wealth to skip the country and hide quietly until he dies, or he can incite a war among groups of very nasty people who depend on lawyers and technology to hide their money. He opts for starting the war, then ducks out of the way.

Much of the story (the part I understood and thus found interesting) follows Martin as he tries to hide from and ultimately thwart the criminals who want to kill him. To that end, he shuts off his phone and stays away from his fortune so he can’t be traced. He lives as a homeless man for a few days, opening his eyes to the people he used to look away from. Martin is a decent human to everyone he encounters (unless they’re trying to kill him) and is surprised by how less fortunate people reward his decency with kindness. Maybe the story is a little too hopeful in that regard, but in a country where we are constantly told that “those other people” are out to harm us, it’s good to remember that many of “those other people” are just like us.

Doctorow emphasizes the environmental damage caused by the servers that “mine” cryptocurrency and the nefarious uses (including money laundering and tax evasion) to which cryptocurrencies are put. Doctorow’s law enforcement agents (Homeland Security in a turf war with Treasury) are credible, in that they prefer a “harm management” approach to actual law enforcement. Keep the violence offshore, let the rich shelter their money and avoid taxes, and everyone stays happy. When Martin throws a wrench into the works, bringing some of the violence into America’s borders, I suspect that most readers will agree that he’s doing the right thing, even if the strategy risks collateral damage.

The novel is marketed as a thriller, but it is not the kind of story that depends on chases and fights to get the reader's juices flowing. The violence occurs offstage. Martin sets events in motion with his mind and keyboard rather than his fists. In the meantime, he has to confront the isolation caused by his lifestyle (most potential sex partners don't want to overnight on a bus) and decide whether it makes sense to reject a woman he admires when she is willing to let him into her heart.

Doctorow is an interesting writer but an even more interesting person. He refuses to attach Amazon’s Digital Rights Management technology to his audiobooks, so Amazon refuses to sell the audio versions. Doctorow has principled reasons for resisting Amazon’s DRM technology, so he produces and markets his own audiobooks. I’m not into audiobooks but I applaud Doctorow for standing up to Amazon.

This is the first novel in a trilogy. It does not depend on a cliffhanger to induce readers to buy the next book. The quality of Red Team Blues is reason enough to look forward to the next one.

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Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on October 13, 2020

Attack Surface is a near-future novel of ideas. Science fiction is supposed to be the literature of ideas, but quite a bit of it, while fun, is shallow. There’s nothing shallow about Cory Doctorow. When he isn’t writing science fiction, he writes penetrating essays about intellectual property and electronic surveillance. He’s an activist, a blogger, and a celebrated author of speculative fiction that often explores threats to privacy in a digital world.

Attack Surface is set in the same future as, and has some characters in common with, his novels Little Brother and Homeland. Both of those novels have a creative commons license so you can read them for free, but Attack Surface is a standalone that doesn't demand an acquaintance with the earlier books.

Attack Surface tells a timely story about the struggle for justice. But worthwhile fiction reflects themes through characters, so Attack Surface is also about the protagonist’s struggle to become a better person — a person she can live with and might even take pride in being. The novel suggests the possibility of redeeming bad choices by making good choices. Redemption doesn’t erase the pain we cause others — as one character observes, life isn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system that allows ethical debt to be canceled by good deeds — but regretting the past should not be an obstacle to moving forward on a better path.

The story involves two competing corporations, Zyz and Xoth (they both hired the same branding company), that provide technology and strategy to American law enforcement agencies and foreign dictators. The technology enables a surveillance state and crowd control. Used maliciously, the technology permits its users to take control of self-driving cars and direct them toward swarming protestors. The malicious use of such power is likely inevitable, or so the protagonist concludes.

Through his characters, Doctorow warns of the risk that governments and/or powerful corporations can take over the microphones and cameras on cellphones and computers, track the movement of people who carry them, spoof cellphone towers with drones to identify everyone who attends a protest, and yes, hack self-driving cars and every other bit of wired technology, from your Alexa to your smart refrigerator. And he makes it clear that there’s not a damned thing you can do, from a technology standpoint, to protect yourself from it. Reading books like Attack Surface is scary but necessary.

The plot follows the present life of a young woman named Masha while revealing her backstory in time-jumbled scenes that eventually cohere. Masha was a bright and deliberately underachieving student who had a strong grasp of internet technology. She went to work for Homeland Security, excusing her contribution to the surveillance state with self-assurances that patriotism can’t be bad. The lure of money and patriotism took her to Xoth Intelligence and its rival Zyz. Her work took her to Iraq and to Central America before she was assigned to help the dictatorial government in Slavstakia stifle dissent. Masha tried to balance her tech support for oppression by giving aid and comfort to the dissenters.

Back in America, where Zys is handing the techniques of oppression to the Oakland Police Department and is hoping to score a similarly lucrative contract with San Francisco, Masha is blackmailed by Xoth, a company that portrays itself as a more ethical provider of systems that help the police control and spy upon the populace. While trying to cope with corporate superpowers, Masha uses her free time to help politically active friends shield themselves from surveillance, an effort she knows to be futile. The friends believe in her inner decency despite her decision to work against their interests in her various jobs.

The importance of friendship, in fact, is a key theme of Attack Surface. Masha gets through life by compartmentalizing. Don’t get too close to anyone and you don’t get hurt, she thinks. By the novel’s end, she begins to realize that putting friends in compartments only denies pain by denying love. Not just love of friends, but the larger love of humanity that helps us stay human.

Reading a Cory Doctorow novel leaves the reader with a lot to unpack. The world is complex and getting more complex every day. Doctorow cuts through the noise to caution us about trends that are changing the world in ways that will leave most of the next generation with considerably less privacy than we have been able to enjoy.

Attack Surface invites the reader to ponder serious issues: Cutthroat corporations that act in their own interests to the detriment of everyone who lives outside the upper echelons of the corporate bubble. The government’s use of private sector contractors to violate laws so that the government can pretend to have clean hands. The increasing tendency of police departments to conduct unlawful surveillance and justify their actions as necessary to fight domestic terror. The use of social media, not exclusively by Russians, to interfere with democracy. The importance of unrelenting activism to hold the forces of oppression at bay.

The novel also asks hard questions. Is surveillance technology ethically sound when a government uses it to control white supremacists? The technology might save lives, but what happens when white supremacists take over the government and use that same technology against their enemies? Perhaps the way to control white supremacy is not through technology but through empowering people to stand up against it.

Masha’s moral and ethical journey makes compelling fiction, but the story’s urgency lies in its reminder that most of the events in the novel could take place tomorrow. Attack Surface is compelling fiction because of its importance and a fascinating read because Doctor is such a convincing storyteller.

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