Book Review: Digital Fortress

Cover of Digital Fortress: A Thriller

Pale Comparison

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown; Corgi Books; Price: Rs.567; 510 pp

Dan Brown author of the Da Vinci Code which has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for an unprecedented three years is assured of a place of honour in book publishing history. This religious history thriller which advances an outrageous proposition, has spawned a cult following and several connected industries. To cash in on the outstanding success of Da Vinci Code, publishers not surprisingly reprinted his earlier works expecting newly won Brown fans to lap them up with the same enthusiasm.

This reviewer bought the reprinted Digital Fortress expecting a replay of the riveting plot which made Da Vinci Code a transnational bestseller. But unfortunately it pales in comparison. Digital Fortress (first published in 1998), though a la Da Vinci Code is a fast-paced thriller, is set in cyberspace and doesn’t have the same optimal mix of art, adventure, popular history and romance. In Digital Fortress Brown, a former English and creative writing teacher, explores the subject of internet security and how e-mail messages, popularly perceived as a never-before safe and secure mode of instant communication, can be accessed and read by enemy security agencies across the world. It’s a gripping techno-thriller alright, but likely to appeal only to technophiles and computer geeks.

The book begins with an emergency within the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) where its state-of-the-art advanced tech code-breaking computer ‘TRANSLTR’ with more than a million processors, encounters a mysterious code it can’t break. Trevor Strathmore, deputy director of the agency summons NSA head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician to break the mysterious code. What she uncovers sends shock waves through corridors of governmental power. NSA is being held hostage by software so complex that if not decrypted in time it will cripple America’s global intelligence gathering network. Thus begins a real or rather virtual war in cyberspace, where the ‘bomb’ (an encryption algorithm) will explode, exposing the entire American defence ministry’s intelligence data to any and everyone.

The villain in Digital Fortress is Ensie Tankado, a mathematics wizard, encryption software expert and former NSA employee, who scripts a coded algorithm with the potential to cripple NSA’s capability of accessing data transmitted on the information superhighway. It is this code which has stumped the TRANSLTR. Born with deformed fingers due to the effects of nuclear radiation his mother suffered when Hiroshima was nuked in 1945, Tankado grows up nurturing a deep-seated hatred of the United States. Later he reads about Japanese war crimes and Pearl Harbour and his hatred for America slowly fades. He starts learning about computers in his 12th year and by 20, Tankado is a cult figure among programmers and is offered a job in Texas by IBM. Thereafter, Tankado rides a wave of fame and fortune writing algorithms, prompting NSA to offer him a job in its crypto team.

A human rights activist, Tankado quits NSA when he learns that through TRANSLTR the agency can access and open every e-mail message and reseal it without anybody the wiser. A firm believer of the Latin aphorism quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guardians?) he tries to go public about TRANSLTR and its capability with the help of Electronic Frontier Foundation — an online group of people championing the right to privacy — but is captured, accused of spying and deported to Japan. To take revenge for his disgraceful exit from the NSA and US, Tankado designs Digital Fortress and unleashes it on TRANSLTR.

Digital Fortress holds the reader’s attention from start to finish, despite some elaborate descriptions of processors and code breaking algorithms which could put off technophobes. But everyone is likely to experience an uneasiness about the internet and e-mail after reading this book, a feeling born out of the realisation that somewhere across the world, someone may be reading your online correspondence. Technophiles on the other hand may get to work on evolving their own unbreakable codes to encrypt their e-mail, in the awareness that a TRANSLTR clone could be eavesdropping.

An updated version of Big Brother could be watching…