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Except for the fact that it has the tacit approval of the authorities and is monitored by volunteers for pornography or political discussions. The Xnet system in "Little Brother" was feasible because it was working on top of a well-established existing infrastructure. A system like Snet could not operate in defiance of the authorities because it could easily be dismantled by taking down the key links and arresting the operators.

They're definitely different, I forget _all_ the technical details of Xnet, having last read the book a couple years ago, I was mostly talking about the show of human ingenuity.

Xnet was certainly "informally monitored", though.

Wow, pretty shitty that I was downvoted for this comment, when I personally upvoted the one before it.

#discourse

In Citizenfour, Snowden had a copy of the sequel, Homeland, while he was in Hong Kong. Kind of a surreal moment.

Right down to the name, SNet (it was called Xnet in Little Brother).