Real Technology in Homeland

What I found really interesting and enjoyable about Homeland was that many of the things Doctorow mentions in the book actually exist in real life. If Little Brother was more about a projection of possible future technologies, Homeland is more rooted in the things that are going on today.

• Persona management software: as Aaron Swartz mentions in his afterword, persona management software exists and is being used by companies and corporate lobbyists to sway or misrepresent public opinion by amplifying one opinion into many voices. To what degree it is being used, I don't know, but it's something that I hadn't really thought about. 
• Student loans: student loans aren't erased or mitigated by declaring bankruptcy. 
• SDR & HERF: Software-defined radio and high energy radio frequency or directed energy weapons are also real tools in use today. 
• Burning Man: an annual festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert
• People's Mic: an absolutely ingenious idea which was used in Occupy Wall Street when NYC required permits to use amplification equipment
• Darknet:  an anonymizing network where connections are made only between trusted peers using non-standard protocols and ports
• Faraday pouch: also known as an antistatic bag, usually made out of PET, which shields electronics from electrostatic discharge

Although Homeland was more based on present day technologies and events, I still really enjoyed the science fiction aspect of lengthy explanations of exactly how everything worked even though some of it was well beyond my understanding.