Attack Surface

Attack Surface is a novel by the Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow, published in 2020 and set in the world of his earlier books Little Brother and Homeland.

Masha grew up in a country whose government disappeared people and then went to work, for a great deal of money, for the industry that supplies such governments with their tools. She is very good at surveillance, and the book follows her through the projects she builds, the clients she serves and the smaller, riskier interventions she makes on the other side when a target seems to deserve it. The two halves of her working life cannot both continue, and the novel traces how the compromises add up until one of them has to stop. Doctorow writes the technical detail of data collection and the politics of it with equal attention, and the book is as much about the ordinary people who build these systems as about the systems themselves.

It is a standalone story rather than a sequel, and it returns to the same near-future United States as the author's earlier novels for young readers.