I sure hope it’s true.Near the end of the book the NSA’s “firewall” goes down for a few minutes, and within seconds the EFF sharks are circling.

Did you know that the National Security Agency (2011 ops budget: $9 bazillion) lives in constant terror of the “sharks” over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (2011 ops budget: $67.34, mostly spent on construction paper)?I did not know this. I personally would have ended the book halfway through, and just made Hale the bad guy.

And not without reason! Everyone suspects him of being a turncoat (while simultaneously giving him access to their most important secrets, go figure.) Then to cap off the job experience, he’s horrifically murdered. The character in the book is named Greg Hale (single syllables, get it?) But we know he’s Matt Blaze because he single-handedly discovered a backdoor (“a few lines of cunning programming”) in the Skipjack cipher, one that would have let the NSA “read the world’s email”.For his efforts, Blaze/Hale is rewarded with a thankless job at the NSA which he hates. Where to begin? Let me just hit some of the high notes: But don’t worry about it because (a) you shouldn’t read this book, and (b) the plot is so predictable that I doubt it can really be spoiled.) (Before I go further, I should warn you that there are huge spoilers below. Miraculously, the end result is so ridiculous that it’s almost tolerable. I’m hoping so, anyway, because the alternative - that Dan Brown spent time learning about cryptography and this is what came out - is too terrible to contemplate. Needless to say, Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress is not one of those books. They’ve made us all a little bit smarter. Once in a while I run into a work of dramatic fiction that takes such a powerful, realistic look at modern cryptography - and its implications for our national security - that we should all be grateful to the author.

Digital fortress book review