StandingWater Creations

I just finished reading, ?Digital Fortress? by Dan Brown. Some of you may have heard of Dan Brown. He wrote this little book called, ?The Da Vinci Code,? about a code left behind by Leonardo Da Vinci before he died and spread throughout his works. From what I hear, that book is a smash hit and, hands down, has made Dan Brown a very wealthy man. I?ve never read it.

Several months ago, maybe a year, I did pick up a copy of, ?Angels and Demons,? which deals with the same character from, ?The Da Vinci Code,? but covers different aspects to the Catholic Church. I liked, ?Angels and Demons.?

However, I was recently in the market for something new to read. Something I hadn?t picked up before, and I am not certain that Dan Brown was the right author to work through a certain literary malaise. In short, he was highly suggested to me and in the end I discovered that I did not enjoy what I was reading. Granted, he is a talented author, but the book, ?Digital Fortress,? had far too many tells for my tastes. In short, I picked the villain at about page fifty or seventy and then had to slog through 370 pages of filler to prove that I was right. Okay, maybe not 370 pages, but it was pretty darn close. You find out, conclusively, who the antagonist is before the end of the book; but the moment there was a code that had to be cracked and a number taken from the code?. I?m getting ahead of myself here.

?Digital Fortress,? follows the exploits of two or three characters. The one we start with is Susan Fletcher ? a brilliant mathematician working for the NSA (National Security Agency) as a cryptographer in a super-secret section that runs a computer with a million processors. Coincidentally, this computer can crack any encryption code in a matter of minutes. Throw enough power at it and you win, right?

She, coincidentally, is in love with David Becker who is a professor of languages at Georgetown University. He?s young, so is she, they are both at the tops of their fields and met when David was brought into the NSA to help decipher some supposed Mandarin Kanje code that was being transmitted. Susan stopped him to offer him a job and fell in love; she never offered him the job.

Two years later, David is being shipped off on a special assignment to Spain to retrieve some personal belongings of a, now dead, ex-operative of the NSA. The Deputy Director of Operations at the NSA felt that a civilian was best suited to handle the task ? rather than getting actual agents of the NSA?s hands dirty and potentially dragging in an highly covert organization into the middle of something that could potentially explode and cause international attention.

The premise for the book is digital encryption. There are a lot of products on the market that give people the ability to digitally encrypt their e-mail and send it, in the clear, to the intended recipient. Dan Brown is playing a fools game when writing about this technology. The fools game is that technology is constantly advancing and changing. In this case, the premise is that someone, an ex-NSA employee, has discovered a way to make all encrypted data unbreakable by ?rotating? the clear text that is being decrypted. A ?brute force? attack on a password, or encryption key, basically requires the software to notice subtle changes in the text that is being interpreted. When it changes from garbage to something clearly divisible by certain algorithms, then the password, or encryption key, has been breached and the encryption on the file is no longer valid.

This process takes a VERY long time for most computers with single processors to handle. Imagine throwing a million processors at it and then taking that same time, working in tandem, to brute force the same encryption key. You can do it a lot faster. I don?t know that it?s practical. The practicality was actually the one thing that seemed real to me, throughout the book: Uncle Sam throwing billions of dollars just to crack encryption keys.

What caught my attention throughout the book was the, now dead, programmers matra, ?Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? or ?Who will guard the guards.? That?s really the key here, ?Who will guard the guards?? Who will watch organizations like the NSA or CIA or FBI or the White House or Congress when they begin the slow encroachment on our rights? Who watches them?

The answer is simple, and it?s sort of presented in the book, but not well. The answer is the public watches the guards; or the public is the guardian of the guards. Another check and balance to a system that can, through time, be abused.

One of the characters in the book, Greg Hale, ex-military, ex-marine, now working as a cryptographer for the NSA, says something to the extent of: How can the public, at large, stand up for themselves when the government can monitor, and shut down, all forms of private communication?

There are no answers in the book. Just a lot of clues and dead ends. The author doesn?t answer the question as to. ?Who will guard the guards?? That was the purpose of the book. Will the best among us, the scholars and geniuses, watch out for the common man, or will they, in the end, decide it is for our own good whether or not we, as a people, decide it?s for our own good.

Public sentiment. That?s what the book misses. Sure, it?s a techno-thriller that takes one character to Spain and back again, but at the same time, it?s a techno-thriller that falls short because, you never worry about the protagonists and by the time the principle antagonist (and his minion) get it all you can say is, ?Thank, freakin?, goodness. It?s about damn time.?

As I said, Dan Brown is a talented writer. However, this book is probably not one of his better attempts at creating a page turner. It read more like someone who was writing for the movies. Not a book I?d suggest you run out and buy.