Digital fortress door Dan Brown

The Author I've read the fascinating, exhilarating thriller "Digital Fortress", written by Dan Brown. He impressed me a lot with his best-selling book: "The Da Vinci Code" and became one of my favourite authors. He still doesn't beat brilliant Ben, but all of his books (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Daemons, Deception Point and Digital Fortress) have earned a place on my bookshelf. He and Ben Elton changed my opinion about books forever. They thought me that books can be funny, educative, exciting and as good as movies (or even better) and certainly not a waste of my spare time. The book pleased me greatly and drew my attention all the time because the main topic was cryptography (even more than in "The Da Vinci Code" - and more modern cryptography). Plot The topical subject of this book is an attack on the National Security Agency's top-secret supercomputer, TRANSLTR. TRANSLTR is one hell of a beast: more than 2000 processors are linked parallel which makes it the world's most powerful, code-breaking computer. The NSA is part of the U.S. intelligence. Its job is to snoop data all around the globe and scrutinise it (This is not fiction -- they really can tap every single phone call you make, believe me!). On the other hand, the NSA has made great efforts in the past (they made World War II end), but they are still at my bad side. They bump up against my personal ethics: everyone has a right for privacy and Dan Brown's favourite sentence which appeared a couple times in the book: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes -- Who Will Guard the Guards" demonstrates that the ones in power can abuse their power. But so far my personal opinion about the NSA. The story is set mostly in NSA building and switches continuously to Spain. The plot is well thought of with many plot twists and exciting turns. Unfortunately a little bit too much for my poor memory. The plot is very difficult to understand because people are getting betrayed by all sides. The main character is Susan Fletcher; a brilliant, beautiful 'blonde with a 170 IQ' (fiction? damn sure it is...) mathematician. She's in love with David Becker (a linguist who wants to propose to her). Too bad, his plans to propose to her were postponed by Trevor Strathmore. He’s the director of NSA-crypto department and Susan is his favourite employee. The story takes off when Susan enters the NSA building a Saturday morning and notices that TRANSLTR is acting weird. It has been deciphering a code for 16 hours. This is scarifying because the beast is usually able to decrypt most codes within 3-5 minutes. So she started thinking of an unbreakable algorithm. She contacted Strathmore immediately, who reacted in oblivion. He had actually worked out a brilliant plan, but that particular plan seemed to turn against him. As I mentioned above, the NSA has the power to read everything, everywhere and everyone... Strathmore had been abusing this privilege to read an ex-employee’s mail. His name is Ensei Tankado and he’s a Jap who quitted NSA because his ethics didn't correspond to the NSA's. According to him, people have the right for privacy (damn well they have). Ensei Tankado was a clever person and had a brilliant plan to take revenge on the NSA. He of course knew the NSA is snooping the whole World Wide Web and he made an ironically advantage of this. He sent an email to an imaginary friend, called North Dokato (anagram of ‘Ensei Tankado’) whom he kept in touch with about his latest algorithm (an algorithm is a set of instruction to accomplish something -- in this case to encipher clear text into gibberish). The imaginary friend auto-forwarded the mail back to him. So it looked like he was corresponding with a real person. The topics of the mails were all about a new unbreakable algorithm. Strathmore was stunned about this. Foolishly he downloaded the data from the email account and sent it through TRANSLTR, who would attempt to decipher it. One little caveat was that Strathmore hadn't thought of foul play; the algorithm was not an encryption-algorithm but was rather a virus. As desperate Strathmore was, he turned off the virus-filters because TRANSLTR wasn't moving on. This was when the Tankado’s virus came to life. The virus infected the main databank and chaos was spread inside the NSA building. There was only one man that could save the NSA, David Becker. He was sent earlier that day to Spain by Strathmore in order to find a mysterious ring. It was the ring Ensei Tankado was wearing before he was killed by Hulatato, a deaf assassin. Strathmore thought that on the ring, the password to break the algorithm (earlier in the plot when he still thought it was an encryption algorithm) had been engraved. In the meantime Strathmore snapped. His dream that he could implant a backdoor in the encryption algorithm and control the whole world changed into a nightmare. In disbelief and a megalomaniac state he killed 2 employees. In desperation he tried to shut down the power of TRANSLTR but died in an accident when all 2000 processors ignited. It’s was all up to Susan now, only she could save the main databank from malicious hackers who were out for the U.S. secret archives. She was welcomed by the prime director and informed him about everything that had happened. Among a team of technicians she scrutinised the algorithm and found some clues that Ensei Tankado had left behind deliberately. After solving the riddles with the help of David (who was witnessing the chaos through a live-video conversation via satellite) there remained only one question to be answered. What was the prime difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki? They looked up information about the H-bombs on the internet. Of course I knew the answer all along. Ensei Tankado was struck by one of the shards of the bomb and had only 3 fingers. And because the input had to be numeric, it was too obvious. So it was a happy ending after all.