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have anything to hide, sure, but there\'s a reason we close the door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public.

The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual surveillance--what\'s the difference between the cops watching your every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy next door?

I\'m an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our technology. They\'re the strongest bonds we have. We don\'t aim telescopes through each others\' windows, because only creeps do that.

But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.

They\'re our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we want to live in.

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Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds to this book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift:

http://craphound.com/content/buy
 
If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for a worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing:

http://craphound.com/content/donate

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About the Author

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist, blogger and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has contributed to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist, Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon, Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and websites. 

His novels and short story collections include *Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town*, *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*, *Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present* and his most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called *Little Brother*, published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of his novels and short story collections are available as free downloads under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses.

Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making, standards-setting and regulatory and legal battles in countries all over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World Economic Forum\'s \"Young Global Leaders\" and one of Forbes Magazine\'s top 25 \"Web Celebrities.\"

Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout. He now resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter, where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom and the future.

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