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Review
Digital Fortress is a high energy techno-thriller that maintains Dan Brown as the king of page turners. Digital Fortress explores information age terrorism, and presents the question to readers: "Do national security efforts end up costing individual's their privacy?" Taken inside one of our government's most powerful agencies: The National Security Agency (NSA), readers are introduced to TRANSLTR: a super computer that is able to intercept and decode terrorist and private citizen email communications. While there are many within the NSA who believe this machine serves as the ultimate protection against terrorist attacks; there are others like Ensei Tankado (a former NSA agent) who feels that the machine violates individual privacy rights. To show his opposition, Tankado creates an unbreakable algorithm called Digital Fortress that completely incapacitates the machine, and which could permanently cripple the NSA. As characteristic of Dan Brown novels, the action starts in the first chapter as the creator of Digital Fortress and holder of it's code is murdered in Seville. From that moment on, the reader is taken on an adventure into a world where things are not always what they seem. As usual, the most intriguing thing about the novel is that Brown uses factual information as the foundation for this remarkable story. He mentions a quiet thank you to "The two faceless ex-NSA cryptographers who made invaluable contributions via anonymous remailers". Digital Fortress like other Brown novels, generates an uneasy feeling within the reader that I found to be truly addictive. This novel kept me guessing until the very end.
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