Short Summary Of Digital Fortress (Dan Brown) Essay

Dan Brown – Digital fortress
Susan Fletcher works for NSA, National Security Agency of USA. They are responsible for internet safety; they catch all sorts of information, like e-mail, and read it. Sometimes it’s nothing special, but sometimes they reveal terrorist attacks, bombs… To do that, they use a supercomputer worth $2 billion called TRANSLTR, made of 3 million processors, which generate the code to decrypt the information through brute force, trying every possible option from 1 and up. That took about 6 minutes. Ensei Tankado was working for NSA, but thought that reading through peoples e-mail was against their rights, so he quit his well-paid job and started programming an unbreakable code. He succeeded and the result of it was Digital Fortress, which switched the code from time to time. That made TRANSLTR work for 20 hours with no result. Commander Strathmore, who was head of the crypto facility which contained TRANSLTR, was Susan’s boss. Only he and she knew that there was an unbreakable code, the rest of the people that saw TRANSLTR’s Run-monitor thought there was a virus and were eliminated by Strathmore, but only he knew about it. Strathmore downloaded the file through Internet, like many others. Everyone who had the encrypted copy couldn’t open it unless they had a pass-code that Tankado planned to sell on an auction. But something came in the way, Tankado was killed. If he would die, he warned everybody that his friend, aka North Dakota, would publish the code on the Internet and that no company would be able to sell it or get profit from Digital Fortress. He and Tankado were the only two people in the world who had the code. When Tankado died, he gave away his code, engraved on a golden ring, and it was probably lost. While Susan and the rest of the main NSA team were trying to find out who North Dakota was, Strathmore sent David Becker, Susan’s fiancé, to find the Tankado’s original code, that was on the ring. That wasn’t the only one he sent....