Digital Fortress - Dan Brown

Digital Fortress is a good book. Though, not as good The Da Vinci Code nor Angels and Demons. The story revolves around the NSA( National Security Agency). The finest decrypting machine in the NSA has not yet decoded a certain message. The NSA fears that this could be their worst nightmare; a message employing the rotating clear text algorithm. Susan Fletcher works in the NSA and is suddenly summoned to work on the problem. Commander Strathmore heads the department in which Susan works. A Japanese guy, named Ensei Tankado claims to have implemented the algorithm; and the message. He threatens to make the code public by selling it to the highest bidder. David Becker, a ...

Despite hints from some people to the contrary, I am not a terrible book snob. I read crime, fantasy, s-f, thrillers and chick-lit quite frequently and historical romances from time to time. But even a `genre` book needs to have a modicum of quality. Sadly, `Digital Fortress` does not. It`s a debut novel of Dan Brown that has been re-issued due to the phenomenal popularity of the `Da Vinci Code` and it is a blatant, mercenary and seemingly successful (if judged by the number of reviews) attempt to discount that popularity and generate some more revenue from a an earlier effort. `Digital Fortress` is a thriller and thus I better start with ...

Beginning like a badly clichéd romance novel the story introduces two characters, Susan [Fletcher] and David [Becker] as they are about to be unexpectedly parted. The story delves into their past and how the met, Susan's history as a Cryptographer and realises the book to be that of codes and mathematics. Susan works for the NSA which is almost unheard of in the world but the strongest decoding facility breaking into worldwide e-mails and catching people like terrorists as they send encoded messages which are then decoded by NSA and they save the day. But something goes wrong when a code that is unbreakable enters circulation essentially meaning criminals could get away ...