Word: crypto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...country in a beat-up Datsun 510 thinking about cryptography, the study of codes and ciphers. His discovery was a revolutionary technique called public key encryption that would rescue personal privacy in the Internet era by allowing data to be encoded quickly and easily. Steven Levy's meticulous Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (Viking; 356 pages; $25.95) is the story...
...leaning computer hackers realized how easily the government could eavesdrop on their data and how important it was to get cryptography away from the Man and into the hands of the People. Diffie's breakthrough did just that. Throughout the '80s and '90s a ragtag group of like-minded crypto fiends built on his work and distributed it over the Internet, end-running the agency and ensuring that everyday citizens could keep their e-mail to themselves...
...great David-and-Goliath story--humble hackers hoodwink sinister spooks --but the complexity of the subject matter makes Crypto a slow read: encryption algorithms, export regulations and copyright wrangles, all of it crawling with abbreviations (when PKP takes on the NSA over RSA vs. the DSA, don't say we didn't warn you). Levy, the chief technology writer for Newsweek, has also chosen a difficult hero in Whit Diffie. For all his brilliance, the shy, secretive math geek remains a cipher...
Snatch ups the ante and goes international. This time the Cockneys and Afro-Brits are joined by crooks Russian, Hasidic-American and crypto-Irish Gypsy (a funny, blarney-spewing Brad Pitt). The big prize is a diamond the size of Ritchie's narrative ambitions. And the winners? They're the few blokes left alive...
...does most of the upfront p.r. in the anti-crypto effort. The FBI doesn't like the prospect of losing some wiretaps. That's just the FBI; it would say the same thing about telepathy if it had it. The true secret mavens of crypto are at the NSA. Spy-code breakers such as Alan Turing invented electronic computers in the first place, so the NSA has a long-held hegemony here. The NSA sets the U.S. government's agenda on crypto, and it will not fairly or openly debate this subject, ever...