Little Brother

goofing around giving everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing around a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we were smarter then them; we're there pretty much every night and we never get caught.
    > So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us. They'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest.
    > The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.
    > At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing anything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for a while.
    > Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME JESUS CHRIST WE'VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU'VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON'T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU ALL.
    > A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up your minds!
    > We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There are undercovers everywhere, believe. If you're jamming, be open-eyed and get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to wait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go.
    > We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there because we'd jammed them. So jam on!
    I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people — kids I'd never met — they nearly went away forever because of something I'd started.
    Because of something I'd told them to do. I was no better than a terrorist.

    The DHS got their budget requisition approved. The President went on TV with the Governor to tell us that no price was too high for security. We had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. My Dad cheered. He'd hated the President since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a complete disaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dynamic the new guy was.
    "You have to take it easy on your father," Mom said to me one night after I got home from school. She'd been working from home as much as possible. Mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her to answer emails from mystified British people across the country who are totally confused by how freaky we Americans are. She explains Americans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see any Americans or talk to them.
    I don't have any illusions about Britain. America may be willing to trash its Constitution every time some Jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as I learned in my ninth-grade Social Studies independent project, the Brits don't even have a Constitution. They've got laws there that would curl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. Now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evidence to prove it? How'd they get that sure? Did they see you committing terrorist acts in a really vivid dream?
    And the surveillance in Britain makes America look like amateur hour. The average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day, just walking around the streets. Every license plate is photographed at every corner in the country. Everyone from the banks to the public transit company is enthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you're remotely suspicious.
    But Mom didn't see it that way. She'd left Britain halfway through high school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married a boy from Petaluma and raised a son here. To her, this was