Levy, Steven. Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. 356 pages.

Steven Levy is a cyber pundit who has never met a nerd he didn't like. Since 1995 he has been working for Newsweek in addition to his freelancing. In the 2002-12-16 issue of Newsweek, he praised Google for being so wonderful, and only in passing mentioned that "privacy takes a hit when anyone can browse through your life in half a second." How does Levy reconcile the subtitle of this book with his love for Google? It's easy: the cypherpunks were geeky, and Google is full of geeks. Nerds can do no wrong. Levy often misses the nuances of the big picture (we recall him touting "Hackers" some years back), but he writes rather well. It is uncertain which of these characteristics qualifies him to be Newsweek's chief technology writer.

This book is all about the battle between the National Security Agency and the community of geeks and engineers who emerged with the personal computer. The NSA tried everything to stifle the development of computer algorithms that were difficult to crack. In this thirty-year war between the spooks and the geeks, citizens slowly won the right to use strong crypto. But since 9/11, and the Patriot Act, and Total Information Awareness (the book was finished earlier), many suspect by now that the battle has merely shifted to a new playing field, where the stakes are much higher.
ISBN 0-14-024432-8

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