The period from 2007 to 2015 was defined by Doctorow's most politically explicit fiction and his emergence as a nonfiction writer on information policy. The anchor event was little-brother-published-2008, which brought his ideas about surveillance, civil liberties, and adversarial-interoperability to a mass young adult audience and won the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction.
little-brother introduced Marcus Yallow, a teenage hacker who fights back against post-9/11 surveillance overreach in San Francisco. The novel was adopted in schools, libraries, and hacker spaces around the world, and its sequel homeland extended the story into the Occupy era. Both novels are essentially manuals for thinking about digital-rights-management-critique and security culture, wrapped in coming-of-age narratives.
This era also produced for-the-win, about gold farmers and labor organizing in online games, and pirate-cinema, about UK copyright enforcement and youth resistance. All of these novels share a structure: young protagonists discover that the systems they inhabit are designed to exploit them, learn the technical and political mechanisms of that exploitation, and organize collectively to push back. The fiction was doing pedagogical work that Doctorow would later do more directly in nonfiction.
Doctorow's transition away from electronic-frontier-foundation staff (see leaving-eff-staff) gave him more time for writing while maintaining the EFF relationship. His nonfiction voice sharpened during this period, culminating in information-doesnt-want-to-be-free (2015), which laid out his theory of the cultural economy of the internet in accessible form. edward-snowden's 2013 revelations about NSA surveillance gave urgency to the themes he had been writing about since little-brother.