Digital Fortress: Difference between revisions

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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 [[Title Drop|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 [[Did Not Do the Research|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).

 

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=== This book contains examples of: ===

* [[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]]

* [[Embarrassing Nickname]]: Hale is called "Halite" by his colleagues (he doesn't realize this is embarrassing though).

* [[Hollywood Hacking]]: Throughout the whole book (Read: [[You Keep Using That Word|mutation strings]]), but particularly egregious in the climax: {{spoiler|The clue that leads them to discover the password to shut off the virus is discovered by looking through the source code for "orphaned strings". It's impossible for them to have the source code to the virus; if they did, their hunt to "[[Red Herring|decrypt]]" Digital Fortress would have been redundant. They would have been able to see what it could do and add their backdoor whenever they felt like it. [[Deadpan Snarker|Maybe they were looking for his compiler?...]]}} Averted, surprisingly, when they look at {{spoiler|the worm's operating commands: if they were loaded into memory and they still had the ability to view their memory registers, they actually could interpret its instructions. Of course, figuring out machine code would probably take a significant chunk of time, [[Hand Wave|but this is the NSA we're talking about here.]]}}

* [[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 [[Character Filibuster|monologue about it]]).

* [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|Nice Job Breaking It Strathmore]]: While he may not be that heroic, {{spoiler|Strathmore having Tankado murdered ruins the latter's plan...by turning his casualty free plan [[Clear My Name|for vindication]] into a full on attempt to destroy the NSA's giant shiny computer and let any interested hackers march straight into their data system}}.

* [[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).