Digital Fortress

Dan brown

Book review 2

Introduction:

Digital Fortress is a book written by the author Dan brown. It is about an organization called the NSA (National Security Agency) that monitoring and protecting the America. It use a multi-million dollar machine computer call the “TRANSLTR” that can decode an encrypted message in almost no time, from anywhere in cyberspace. This allows the Government to get information and plans from terrorists and drug cartels. This allows the Government to fight back and defend its country. But when someone comes up with an unbreakable encryption, it is a race to time to find it before it gets out.

A character that I found interesting is Susan. She is an smart, selfless, intelligent woman who does her work to the full without complained. She does not let personal matters interrupt her work and always on the job. For example when she was about to go on holiday she got a call and was asked to come to work , without arguing she got ready and came down straight away. This deaddiction is also shown when she stayed at her own work space working day and night to try and solve the code.

The message I got from the Book was that people’s privacy matters, in a world where technology is changing it is important to respect people. The TRANSLTR could decipher people’s email even if encrypted, this is a breach of privacy, but is it good through. If we looked through people’s emails, to save hundreds of thousands of lives, doesn’t that outweigh the  bad. We are taught that people have a right of privacy, that you should not look through their personal life, but in the new world, everyone can look you up, you have lost the right to be forgotten. Say something embarrassing was posted about you, it would stay in the internet forever, but back in the old days, if something happened, they would talk about it for a while and forget. We have lost this and in the fast pace world of social media, it is important to be responsible. I feel that they should of not done this, even though it is saving the lives it is still looking into people’s personal life and it is wrong. I strongly believe that they should of not done this, I believe that they should get authorisation from a separate organization and that they should only open and decode ones have a 90 percent possibility that links the owner and receive of the email to crime of plans or acts of terrorism.

The difficulties I found for the main character was trying to impress Sarah’s boss. He was asked to go to Spain, to look for a ring, it could have been anywhere, on anyone but he still looked. Langton had respect for her boss and I believe that he had exploited this to get his own way. He did find the ring at the end of the day, but then was hunted by an assassin who was trying to kill him. I believe that the commander (Sarah’s boss) could have ordered a team to look for it. But instead got him. I believe that he knew that there was a lot of risked and I think he even knew about the assassin. I believe that this is poor judgment from him and that he wanted Sarah to himself at the end at the expense of Langton. This relates to people in command, some have no respect for the men in his or her in command and some are commanded to do some horrible or bad stuff following orders.

One of the actions I question from the commander was at the base. When one of his lower employees figured out that the code the computer was trying to process was a virus, instead of an unbreakable code, he tried to save the computer and turn it off. But the commander believe that it was an code that was unbreakable. The lower employee tried to turn it off, but the commander pushed him off and he fell and died.  This was a sad because the employee was trying to help and the commander killed him without hesitation. I can relate this back to religion, where groups like ISIS believe it is right to kill for there religion when it is never okay to kill people and it is wrong to do this. Sometimes people can be arrogant when they believe that they are right when they are wrong. It is sometimes impossible to change their mind and they can hurt people.

If I could change the title, I would change it to Cyber War. I believe that this is better than the Digital Fortress because it gives more of an insight into what is happening compared to the original one. Because there is a war over a code, that could change the world of tech.

I rate this book 9/10, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was written well. It kept me interested throughout and had a good plot to it that made me have no idea what would happen next.

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