Digital Fortress

Digital Fortress is the first novel by Dan Brown.

Susan Fletcher, star of the NSA's cryptography division, is called in by NSA Deputy Director Trevor Strathmore after TRANSLTR, the NSA's code-breaking computer, encounters a code that it can't break. This code, called Digital Fortress, was created by Ensei Tankado, a disgruntled NSA operative. When Tankado is found dead in Seville, Spain, Strathmore dispatches David Becker, Fletcher's fiancée, to investigate in the hope of finding a clue to breaking the code, while Fletcher and Strathmore investigate Tankado's mysterious partner "North Dakota", who unknown to them is in talks with a Japanese corporation to release the Digital Fortress code publicly. But as in any Dan Brown novel, all is not as it seems...

As with any Dan Brown book, Digital Fortress is infamous for some lapses of research, particularly some glaring flaws in its portrayal of cryptography and its portrayal of Seville as a poorly equipped city, with a medical service almost as bad as some in third-world countries. Despite this, it remains a readable book if you keep the MST3K Mantra in mind (though opinions differ on this point).

Compare The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Deception Point and The Lost Symbol. Contrast with Cryptonomicon. -


 * Anti-Villain: Ensei Tankado. Sure he.
 * As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Ensei Tankado is not a real Japanese name.
 * Attempted Rape: Subverted twice., then.
 * Batman Gambit / Kansas City Shuffle:
 * Big Bad:
 * Big Brother Is Watching: Except in this story, Big Brother are the good guys.
 * Clear My Name:
 * Cool Plane: David gets to ride in one for his trouble.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Japanese businessman who Strathmore plans to sell/distribute the modified digital fortress encryption protacol (with a back door) to.
 * Dan Browned: Trope Namer
 * Did Not Do the Research: Cryptography (particularly brute force attacks),, the Kingdom of Spain in general and the city of Seville in particular.
 * Embarrassing Nickname: Hale is called "Halite" by his colleagues (he doesn't realize this is embarrassing though).
 * Hollywood Hacking: Throughout the whole book (Read: mutation strings), but particularly egregious in the climax:  Averted, surprisingly, when they look at
 * I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: A subversion. A character takes what looks like the MacGuffin off a dying character, but actually, the character was
 * Informed Ability: The main character's intelligence.
 * Love Makes You Crazy:
 * McGuffin: Tankado's ring, which everyone believes has the Digital Fortress decryption code on it.
 * Mistaken for Gay: Becker, briefly at the hotel.
 * Mistaken for Junkie: At first David believes that is one.
 * Murder the Hypotenuse: plan.
 * My Country, Right or Wrong: Tankado went through a historical version in the backstory; as a child he was upset that the US used nukes on his country (and that he suffered deformities which caused his mother to die in childbirth and his father to abandon him), later in life he decided Japan was as at fault as the USA in WWII, dropped his grudge and even began working for the US government.
 * The protagonists fit this trope as well, being NSA employees who are perfectly fine with all manner of immoral or even outright illegal things as long as it's in the national interest (they occasionally monologue about it).
 * My God, What Have I Done?: The final chapter has the corrupt CEO discover
 * Nice Job Breaking It Strathmore: While he may not be that heroic,.
 * Playful Hacker: Greg Hale was somewhere in between this and The Cracker (on the one hand, he causes damage and has a political agenda, on the other hand said damage was discovering an illegal backdoor the NSA planted in some encryption software).
 * Psycho for Hire: As is traditional for a Dan Brown book, we have an assassin with a Red Right Hand in Hulahot, the assassin hired by to kill Tankado  and recover the Digital Fortress key.
 * Recruiting the Criminal: How Hale was originally hired. While what he did-- find a back door they left in an encryption algorithm-- wasn't exactly illegal, it certainly did negatively impact his future employers. Possibly Tankado as well, considering he was quite anti-American before he got over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (although he didn't get around to committing any crimes because of it).
 * Red Shirt: The computer tech who turns comes in by chance and gets suspicious. Also
 * Red Herring Mole:
 * Significant Anagram:
 * Spanner in the Works:
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish: Tankado's password is . He even leaves clues just to make absolutely sure that everyone can guess it. Possibly justified in that Tankado may have wanted them to guess it. Which begs the question of why he even bothered with a password in the first place.
 * Since he was trying to ransom the password off and and clearly didn't expect them to guess it (it's made quite clear that the ), it's fair to assume that we're supposed to believe this is an absolutely, positively fiendishly clever password with the clue being there to taunt them.
 * Brown Fails Physics Forever, since . Also, it's axiomatic that cryptosystem security is exponentially proportional to key length. This key is approximately 8 bits long. Good job, guy.
 * Viewer-Friendly Interface: A rare literary example.
 * Who Watches the Watchmen?: The entire conflict is down to Tankado feeling that TRANSLTR gives the NSA too much control and not enough oversight (since they decided to just use it to decrypt everything they could find rather than go through some sort of requisition process). He's quite fond of the orinal Latin phrase as well  Hale also seems to think about this a lot.