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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