Digital Fortress

This is an interesting book to read. The story is about the appearance of an unbreakable mysterious code in National Security Agency at United State. NSA owns a powerful code-breaker machine, namely TRNSLTR. TRNSLTR is used to decipher Email in cases preapproved by the Justice Department. TRANSLTR was to include programming that called for passwords held in escrow by the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department in order to decipher a file. This would prevent the NSA from listening indiscriminately to the personal communications of law-abiding citizens around the globe. However, when the time came to enter that programming, the TRNSLTR’s staff was told that TRNSLTR has to be a free-standing decryption device whose day-to-day operation would be regulated solely by NSA.

This news has outraged one of the employee, Ensei Tankado. He saw TRANSLTR as a gross violation of human rights. The TRANSLTR can now open everyone’s mail and resealing it without their knowing. He quit on the spot from NSA and tried to publish the news to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and public. But NSA had stopped him. And now, he came back with an unbreakable code that makes the TRANSLTR fails to decipher it. Only he can decipher it, using his secret pass-key.

The sudden death of Ensei Tankado has aroused the conspiracy in NSA. The head of Crypto dept, Strathmore, called his head cryptographer Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician, to assist him to achieve his selfishly purposes without her knowing. He needs to find Tankados’s pass-key to decipher the code and save TRANSLTR’s pride. His ambitious has betrayed Susan, who battles to save the agency she believes in. When Susan realizes, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves…