Digital Fortress is a silly, addictive book. Set in Seville, Spain and within the walls of the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, it unfolds the story of a seemingly unbreakable encryption algorithm and the NSA’s attempts to deal with it.

The technical underpinnings of the book are, in a word, shaky. I’d spoil the taut story line by giving out the details, so suffice it to say that no super-computing environment with even moderate security, much less the NSA, would be vulnerable to the “dangerous” code envisioned by Brown. In that sense, this is a silly story.

Brown does, however, put his finger on the real antagonism between many in the computing community and those who relentlessly push for data collection and centralization. Digital Fortress was written years before the Patriot Act, a knee-jerk legalization of surveillance that jibes with the views of one of the story’s NSA staffers:

Brown personifies the other side of the argument with a cryptographer whose motto is Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who will guard the guards?”).

Technology and ideas aside, there’s some good storytelling here. The chases, struggles, and in-fighting keep the story moving. I found the opening chapters a bit slow, but the tension builds quickly thereafter and rarely lets up.