Digital Fortress

Digital Fortress is a thriller. It bears some resemblance to the spying issue that Snowden leaked to the country. However it is told from the NSA's point of view. The NSA people are the good guys who protect America from the bad guys by hacking messages. They have a supercomputer that they use for brute force decryption. However, a former NSA employee claims to have created a super algorithm that cannot be solved be brute force. He has released an encrypted version of this online and claims to be auctioning off the key to decrypt it to the highest bidder. He essentially dares the NSA to try to decrypt it. The head of the crypto department takes the bait. However, he hatches another scheme to let the NSA get the key, then modify it to give it a secret backdoor before releasing it to the highest bidder. However, things go wrong, lots of people get killed, the supercomputer is destroyed, a major data breach is barely averted and finally the main characters get to go on a date.

If you ignore the technical inaccuracies, this can be a great book. However these technical issues get really annoying. The main climax of the book is occurs because there is a worm in some code that the supercomputer is attempting the decrypt. The worm worm shuts down the defences of the NSA's data store (which is connected to the supercomputer.) The worm is being run because the head of crypto disabled the security "guantlet" that everything must be passed through before it is sent to the computer to decrypt. The holes:
1) How would a decryption spread a virus? These guys have some bad programming if they are trying to execute code as it is decrypted. Even if the computer was trying to crack computer code (by executing it), the code would be sandboxed before it is run. And even if there are other issues, they wouldn't be running code on the datastore, they would just pass stuff there.
2) If the programmer has not created an uncrackable code, why did the NSA's computer spend so much time chugging away at it? It should have either determined that it couldn't decrypt or that it was total garbage.
3) A head of crypto in the NSA can authorize the deaths of many people? And he would be so bold as to ask for the fiance of one of this workers to be killed so that he can have her?

That is just the start of the issues. It could go on. However, if you just sit back and suspend brain, this book can be entertaining.

Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol works well as a thriller. However, it spends a little too much time trying to breach Dan Brown's version of Deism. In this story, the famed "symbologist", Robert Langdon gets a call to urgently come to Washington D.C. to fill in for a lecturer who couldn't make it to a very important lecture. However, this turns out to be a charade to get him to help unravel some deep secrets held by the Masons. The plot goes through a number of different twists and turns, with plenty of impressive escapes before the world is saved. Then it rambles on for a number of chapters on philosophy. Being a modern thriller, the hero runs in to a some archetypal government agents, and (of course) manages to get connected with a heroine who is at his side for much of the quest. He barely manages to escape many close encounters, but also manages to get caught a few times when we think he is on the verge of escaping. There is just enough variety to keep things interested without being too predictable (or too over the top.) The Masons are portrayed sympathetically, and the philosophical ramblings seem to espouse the masonic view as preferable to mainstream science and religion. (However, you have to wonder how well that represents what the Masons really think.) Just about every Washington D.C. conspiracy theory imaginable finds its way in to this book, along with plenty of geographical details of the city. (This would make it interesting for anyone very familiar with the area.) However, where the book excels is in the action. Unfortunately, a little too much additional time is used to "preach", distracting from a good story.