Paranoia is a useful code to live by in the digital age. Consider, every time you use a credit card, the Internet or your mobile phone, the one thing that stands between you and everyone else knowing your business is cryptography - the making of secret ciphers. Yet rather than safeguarding this fragile privacy, powerful government forces have been fighting since the 1980s to keep crypto under their control. But while the offical forces warn of unrestrained criminality and terrorism, those squared against them celebrate the possibility of a new era of empowered individuals benefitting from "crypto-anarchy". This text tells the inside story of the great "Code War". It is the story of privacy in the information age, a history that bears witness to the original dreams and nightmares of the digital revolution. Acclaimed technology writer, Steven Levy, charts the evolution of cryptography from a closely held government technology for keeping secrets to a potentially mass-market means for protecting them. At the centre of his narrative are the innovators and subversives who kicked off the revolution - an iconoclastic subculture of maverick mathematicians, brilliant hackers and fun-loving cyberpunks, willing to take on "Big Brother" to spread the tools of privacy throughout the world. This book poses important political questions throughout. Will the information age enhance our freedoms or snatch them away? Will secret codes empower crooks and international terrorists? Or will the lack of them cripple vital function like our financial systems or our electrical grid? Most important, who do we trust: the government's intelligence agencies who still demand access to our private transactions, or their rebel enemies?
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If the National Security Agency had wanted to make sure that strong encryption would reach the masses, it couldn't have done much better than to tell the cranky geniuses of the world not to do it. Author Steven Levy, deservedly famous for his enlightening Hackers, tells the story of the cyberpunks, their foes, and their allies in Crypto. From the determined research of Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman in the face of the NSA's decades-old security lock, to the commercial world's turn-of-the-century embrace of encrypted e-commerce, Levy finds drama and intellectual challenge everywhere he looks. Though he may write, "Behind every great cryptographer, it seems, there is a driving pathology", his respect for the mathematicians and programmers who spearheaded public key encryption as the solution to Information Age privacy invasion shines throughout. Even the governmental bad guys are presented more as hapless control fetishists lacking the prescience to see the inevitability of strong encryption as more than a conspiracy of evil.
Each cryptological advance made outside the confines of the NSA's Fort Meade complex was met with increasing legislative and judicial resistance. Levy's storytelling acumen tugs the reader along through mathematical and legal hassles that would stop most narratives in their tracks--even the depressingly silly Clipper chip fiasco is made vibrant by his words. Hard-core privacy nerds will value Crypto as a review of 30 years of wrangling; those readers with less familiarity with the subject will find it a terrific and well-documented launching pad for further research. From notables like Phil Zimmerman to obscure but important figures such as James Ellis, Crypto dishes the dirt on folks who know how to keep a secret. --Rob Lightner
About the Author
Chief Technology writer at 'Newsweek' and a regular contributer to numerous publications including 'Macworld' and 'Wired'.
--This text refers to an alternate
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By M. Henson
This potentially dry subject is given life by the way the key people in the stories are profiled and their struggles described. Other books can tell you more about the fairly difficult theory: this is where you get to meet the determined men who developed the public-key encryption that lets you use your credit card to pay on this site. They were not helped by governments and the author seems to deal with the difficult public policy issues fairly. I had no previous interest in the subject but read the whole book at one sitting: good journalism and an excellent read
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
The author tries to explain a couple of times on what mathematical basis new systems have been designed. He fails again and again. My maths teacher in secundary school explained it to the class about 35 years ago - much better. This book is a labyrinth of US internal politics, if it would have been written by a real author, such as Dava Sobel (Galilea's Daughter, Longitude), then I would recommend it to everyone. Now, I gave up after struggling through half of it... he has produced a chronological collection of anecdotal evidence without bringing any light to the theories behind all this.
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Crypto by Stephen Levy
17 Nov 2009
By Justin R. Doggett
- Published on Amazon.com
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Very great book, and thanks amazon for sending me the book in a reasonable amount of time
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