On September 17th, 1787, men gathered around a room to sign a document that will forever be a part of the United States. This document, known as the Constitution, has been the heart and soul of this country since its ratification in the 1790s. It has not been easy to interpret the Constitution, and it remains a controversial topic to this day. Specifically, the debate of freedom versus security. In the novel "Little Brother," by Cory Doctorow, one of the main themes is the idea of freedom versus security. The book main character, Marcus, has some of his freedoms stripped for the protection of the national security of the United States after the event of the worst terrorist attack that the US has encountered. In the novel, he strongly disagrees with this form of society where freedom is limited in order to increase our national security. The question that our society, as of recently, has tried to answer is, what’s more important, freedom or security? Marcus strongly believes freedom is more important; however, this is not true, security is the main protection our country should focus on. September 11th , 2001, will always be a day where our country will wallow in despair. In the novel, freedom was limited before the terrorist attack in the book in a way like freedom had been limited in the pre-9/11 era. In an online article written by the Sanford School of Public Policy, it quotes Robin Kirk, who was working for Human Rights Watch on 9/11. She said, “In human rights, everything changed. The U.S .went from being a leading defender of human rights to a leading violator.” Freedoms before 9/11 were more abundant and available and security was less. Security, moreover, was increased in places that needed to maintain safety; however, this was not enough. We can prove this from pre-9/11 evidence from an article written by Paul Sperry for the New York Post. Sperry stated that the terrorists responsible for the attack were testing security cameras months before the attack. Their activities were often of suspicious actions. These suspicious activities, however, were not taken care of; they were ignored. Maybe if the US had inserted more security into their policy, this attack and 3,000 lives would not be lost today. In the novel, moreover, we see the freedoms of the people in a school before the terrorist attack in the book. Freedoms before the attack were indeed limited. But, these freedoms were limited in a place where safety needs to be maintained at all times, just like an airport. There were cameras in the school and devices were often monitored to keep the safety. The novel states one of these limited freedoms in the school with a special kind of camera, “Gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are.” (Doctorow, ch. 1) Marcus later states, however, that it was very easy to go unnoticed in the program. Marcus often referred to putting pebbles in his shoes to differentiate his walk and go unnoticed. What is there to say that the outside world in the novel was much different from this? In a school, safety is a top priority due to the fact that we need to keep our children safe. A bridge, perhaps,