Digital Fortress

Title: Digital Fortress

Author: Dan Brown

Pages: 372

Genre: Thriller

Grade: B+

Synopsis: The National Security Agency has a relative new top-secret supercomputer which allows them to break any code and any encryption standard known to man. A former employee claims to have a new encryption algorithm which is unbreakable by the equipment the NSA has. The head cryptographer and her boyfriend are pulled into a thrilling race against the clock to prevent this encryption scheme from crippling U.S. intelligence.

Why I Chose This Book: I love Dan Brown novels and was in the mood for a thriller.

My Review: This was an easy quick read. I started the book late Friday night and finished it Saturday evening (which is the exact reason why I don't usually read during the semester - I can't put books down). While the book was not nearly as good as Angels and Demons or the Da Vinci Code it was still a great read. Like his other novels, there are things that are simply unbelievable while most of the book just borders on believability. With my background in computers and engineering it was very easy to follow along in the book. I'm not sure how easy (or even how interesting) it would be for somebody not interested in this type of technology. This book was especially interesting because of the Patriot Act and all of the issues with government snooping private people right now (the book was published in 1998, before the Patriot Act was signed). The biggest downside of the book were the 20-30 pages preceding the climax. With my background in nuclear engineering I knew what they were looking for long before they found it. This caused me to really speed read what should have been the most exciting part of the book.

Disclaimer: This book definitely needs a disclaimer. There was a bit of foul language and a non-graphic love scene. In this it was nothing like Brown's other novels.

From the Book: "(p. 14) Founded by President Truman at 12:01 A.M. on November 4, 1952, the NSA had been the most clandestine intelligence agency in the world for almost fifty years. The NSA's seven-page inception doctrine laid out a very concise agenda: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept the communications of foreign powers.
"The roof of the NSA's main operations building was littered with over five hundred antennas, including two large radomes that looked like enormous golf balls. The building itself was mammoth--over two million square feet, twice the size of CIA headquarters. Inside were eight million feet of telephone wire and eighty thousand square feet of permanently sealed windows."

"(p. 174) Jabba resembled a giant tadpole, like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid. As resident guardian angel of all NSA computer systems, Jabba marched from department to department, tweaking, soldering, and reaffirming his credo that prevention was the best medicine. No NSA computer had ever been infected under Jabba's reign; he intended to keep it that way."