Susan fletcher digital fortress6/6/2023 ![]() ![]() I personally would have ended the book halfway through, and just made Hale the bad guy. ![]() And not without reason! Everyone suspects him of being a turncoat (while simultaneously giving him access to their most important secrets, go figure.) Then to cap off the job experience, he’s horrifically murdered. ![]() The character in the book is named Greg Hale (single syllables, get it?) But we know he’s Matt Blaze because he single-handedly discovered a backdoor (“a few lines of cunning programming”) in the Skipjack cipher, one that would have let the NSA “read the world’s email”.For his efforts, Blaze/Hale is rewarded with a thankless job at the NSA which he hates. ![]() Where to begin? Let me just hit some of the high notes: But don’t worry about it because (a) you shouldn’t read this book, and (b) the plot is so predictable that I doubt it can really be spoiled.) (Before I go further, I should warn you that there are huge spoilers below. Miraculously, the end result is so ridiculous that it’s almost tolerable. I’m hoping so, anyway, because the alternative - that Dan Brown spent time learning about cryptography and this is what came out - is too terrible to contemplate. Needless to say, Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress is not one of those books. They’ve made us all a little bit smarter. Once in a while I run into a work of dramatic fiction that takes such a powerful, realistic look at modern cryptography - and its implications for our national security - that we should all be grateful to the author. ![]()
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