Finished this during the past week and I couldn’t put it down. I definetely recommend it to anyone interested in technothrillers.

The National Security Agency has been working for years on a method to intercept and crack any code or encrypted message sent via E-Mail across the globe. They finally developed a machine so powerful that it can decode even the toughest messages in just a matter of minutes. The machine is dubbed TRANSLTR.

The existence of TRANSLTR is threatened when a bitter, crippled Japanese programmer threatens to release an encryption method that TRANSLTR can’t crack: Digital Fortress. Digital Fortress is placed up on the web, encrypted in itself so that only those with the passcode can unlock it. The NSA learns the programmer is working with a partner as a safety measure. If he should die, the partner will publish the passcode within 24 hours.

The programmer is found dead in Spain and the NSA must race the clock to obtain both passcodes before it is too late.

The whole idea that keeping Digital Fortress out of the hands of the public was a life or death situation seemed a little too weighty for me. I believe the basic idea of Digital Fortress is that the encryption was constantly revolving, making it impossible for a computer to guess when the correct passcode had been entered. Anyone in the computer world knows that everything has a workaround. It may be that Digital Fortress would make TRANSLTR extinct, but necessity is the mother of invention and people would eventually figure out how to break into a file encrypted by Digital Fortress.

Therefore, the book seemed a little bloody to me. People were taking the issue WAY too seriously.

If you put the absurdity of the subject matter aside, I still enjoyed the book. I’m really starting to like Dan Brown’s work. I’ve also read the Da Vinci Code and both books are filled with information you may not have previously known (such as where the term “sincerely” really comes from). They were also both written in real-time. I absolutely love books written in real-time. No skipping ahead three months and losing a portion of the person’s life. No thought or detail left unattended.

It was a good, dark read that I really enjoyed. I can’t wait to delve into some of Dan Brown’s other works.

This book is hardly worth a review. Suffice it to say, Digital Fortress is not nearly as interesting as The Da Vinci Code. The plot here is much less compelling, with fewer twists and turns. The book might have been interesting at half the length; as it is, so many scenes were drawn out that I kept thinking “will this ever end?”

I was worried this was going to be a carbon copy of the previous books, but although Digital Fortress uses similar building blocks (Dan Brown really likes his central characters to be sexy young super-hyper-intelligent women set against older yet more worldly wise super-hyper-intelligent father figure type men) to Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, it somehow manages not to follow exactly the same formula this time around. Pretty good.

Good beach reading. REad in mexico. It is better if you are a geek like me.

Not very good, actually. Brown must have written this before he really hit his stride, because it’s a very bland action book that could have been written by any number of other authors (Clive Cussler, bleah, comes to mind). I wish I had the hours of my life back that I spent reading this dreck.