2033: A maverick tech billionaire leads a group of journalists, videographers, writers, editors and hackers — some ex-military — as they fight a United States government determined to control public access to news and information ... and a U.S. marshal (the billionaire’s former love interest) determined to stop them.

SYNOPSIS:

The year is 2033. A series of devastating domestic-terrorism events from the late 2020’s has stunned the United States of America. And those terrorist events, their origins in social media and the wider Internet, the resulting unprecedented public outcry and a compliant president all gave a xenophobic Congress the pretext to dismantle the Federal Communications Commission and assume its regulatory authority on the grounds of national security.

With passage of the Disinformation Control Act, the electronic monitoring and surveillance of American citizens, well underway in the years after 9/11, accelerates, moving from major cities to the nation’s smallest municipalities as the United States government seeks to limit or control the universal enabler: Information itself.

Thom Farallon, the brilliant founder of ArcTechnologies, is disgusted with the government’s surrender to the fear that emerged after the attacks. And Farallon, a computer expert and former Marine, is privately haunted: His company’s infrared imaging technology, previously acquired by the government for peacetime use, has been weaponized by the military and used in a conflict in which thousands were killed.

Farallon sells his huge stake in Arc, forms the Bandwidth, a pro-information social movement; and launches CounterNews, with the assistance of sympathetic overseas satellite operators. The rogue news network is staffed with journalists, videographers, editors, artists, hackers and social-media specialists -- some with military and intelligence experience gained during America’s long foreign deployments.

Farallon and his team of journalists dodge the relentless pursuit of U.S. Marshal Anne Gilroy, a federal investigator with a high-tech background — a woman who shares a romantic and professional past with Farallon, the man she’s tasked with capturing ... or killing. A former high-ranking Arc official, she knows Farallon, his moods and quirks, like no one else. Keeping her past with Farallon a secret from superiors, Gilroy harbors her own rage, believing that his infidelities destroyed their relationship years earlier. For her, stopping him is both civic duty and private obsession.

Farallon and associates work with groups of like-minded “pro-info” partisans around the country to counter the government’s official, approved sources of information. At odds with a government set to stop or destroy them, they seek to push back on a government on the threshold of applied science meant to predict human behavior — making citizens presumptive criminals, and acting accordingly.