Description
They “knew everything about us,” the grandmother told the Norwegian police investigators between her tears. Ten-year old Grete was going to meet her teacher in school. It all seemed so “normal” said the grandparents.
A hacker named Frank and a triad of Norwegian, Europol and FBI investigators convene to “find Grete.” There is more at stake that has mobilized the cross-Atlantic cooperation. What they don’t know is that they have opened the door to the game of power getting played in the new domain of cyberspace where real and virtual (cyber) space collide and the rules of trust need to be rethought. They “know everything about us” is how the game gets played.
Politics will get in the way and they will find Grete, just not alive. That is Frank’s fear. In a dizzying rush of hack and counter hack, the forces of good bring together an odd assortment of heroes. Monika learned her trade in Russia as one of the original Anons as in the Anonymous. Frank started hacking in the nineties and Jaime, now an FBI Special Agent leads the elite cyber squad from the NYC field office. The Norwegian lead investigator from KRIPOS is Fredrick Hansen who is nearing the end of his career. He remembers why it was that he had first joined. It means everything to “find Grete.”
A timely book that tells a story of fiction in the context of a present day international concern with privacy and security. It is a concern felt individually as in reputation and privacy and in the large stage of international commerce, national interests and the transition to all things electronic and virtual. Where does it stop? Are there any controls in place and can we have it both ways; have the social media applications and still control our individual privacy? Can we have an effective modern government and still retain the right of free speech to criticize those that govern by the will of the people. There are no larger topics facing society today.
The public is caught in the crosshairs. The President of Brazil spoke to this topic at the United Nations when she said that individual privacy is at the heart of a free democracy, you can't have one without the other.
eNikita takes this subject even deeper as the accelerating drive of technology harbors things that have seemed beyond the reach of the human endeavor. While the story is about the kidnapping of a young girl, the reader is constantly aware that something else is in play. Technology is power. This is where this story goes. It has a name, The Singularity, when humans transcend their own biology.
The young heroine, Grete, gives this complex story of power and technology a very real human face filled with all the human emotions and the thrill of what happens when good people put aside their personal agendas and the politics of things to battle the worst kind of evil that can exist.