Not that bad. Review on Digital Fortress - Dan Brown

The first book of Dan Brown which I read was obviously Da Vinci Code (DVC). Then it was Deception Point, Angels and Demons; and in the last Digital Fortress. Most of the Authors have their own area of specialization and their own style of writing. Most of the time after reading a particular book you can recognize the author. In terms of Dan Brown the similarity between his works is more pronounced. Later I came to know that Digital Fortress, Deception Point was one of his initial works and Da Vinci Code was the recent publish of all his other works (a beautiful marketing trick of his Publishers).So I ended up reading the books in reverse order of their publishing date. Reading all the four books I conclude that Dan Brown improved his writing as each of his works were published and its effect was seen in the sale and popularity of DVC.

So if you have read Da Vinci Code then you won’t find this book as captivating as DVC. It is apparent that amount of research done for this book was less then it was done for DVC. Research was enough to convince the readers who have good knowledge of Software. And as a result many people have got opportunity to point out number of flaws in the book. Go to any site (or mouthshut.com itself) and read review for Digital Fortress, you will find that most of them have criticized the book as and some even have gone to the limits of branding the book as a piece of s***. Dan Brown had done a lot of research for DVC and he had proofs supporting every fact that he had mentioned in the book. After reading DVC, people expected the same credibility in Digital Fortress. In most of the reviews you get people mentioning that there’s nothing like Bergofsky Principle, Mutation Strings, TRANSLTR etc and therefore the research on cryptography is weak and book is stupid. They fail to understand that Digital Fortress is a Fiction Novel and not a Text Book and hence all the things mentioned in the book may not be true. I am sure hard core Software developers and Cryptographers must have laughed at the book; but it does make sense to people who are not much into Software.

After reading many reviews about this book, I would say that anyone wants to show that he is a smart a**, blames the book for all the theories mentioned in it.

I do agree that in the ending , the way NSA people break the puzzle was stupid( with all that U235 stuff). For the book as whole; its worth reading.

I will surely recommend this book for leisure reading.

Excerpts and Plot:

The Story revolves around NSA, Susan Fletcher, David Becker, Cryptography, TRANSLTR among others.

Following are the excerpts:

About NSA

“Not only did the NSA exist, but it was considered one of the most influential government organizations in the world. It had been gathering global electronic intelligence data and protecting U.S. classified information for over half a century. Only 3 percent of Americans were even aware it existed.

Everyone in cryptography knew about the NSA; it was home to the best cryptographic minds on the planet. Each spring, as the private-sector firms descended on the brightest new minds in the workforce and offered obscene salaries and stock options, the NSA watched carefully, selected their targets, and then simply stepped in and doubled the best standing offer. What the NSA wanted, the NSA bought.”

TRANSLTR

“Pushing through the center of the floor like the tip of a colossal torpedo was the machine for which the dome had been built. Its sleek black contour arched twenty-three feet in the air before plunging back into the floor below. Curved and smooth, it was as if an enormous killer whale had been frozen mid breach in a frigid sea.

Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface. Its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down—a rocketlike hull surrounded by a winding maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing exhaust from the freon cooling system. The power generators at the bottom droned in a perpetual low-frequency hum that gave the acoustics in Crypto a dead, ghostlike quality. TRANSLTR, like all great technological advancements, had been a child of necessity. During the 1980s, the NSA witnessed a revolution in telecommunications that would change the world of intelligence reconnaissance forever—public access to the Internet. More specifically, the arrival of E-mail.”

Cryptographers:

“For the first hour, the cryptographers seemed unaware Becker was even there. They hovered around an enormous table and spoke a language Becker had never heard. They spoke of stream ciphers, self-decimated generators, knapsack variants, zero knowledge protocols, unicity points. Becker observed, lost. They scrawled symbols on graph paper, pored over computer printouts, and continuously referred to the jumble of text on the overhead projector.

Eventually one of them explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code—a “cipher text”—groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers’ job was to study the code and extract from it the original message, or “cleartext.” The NSA had called Becker because they suspected the original message was written in Mandarin Chinese; he was to translate the symbols as the cryptographers decrypted them.”