Michael Martone
There are some wonderful pieces in this collection of essays about the landscape and peoplescape of the Midwest. Martone’s writing is strongest when he uses his own experiences as a Midwesterner as points of departure. It’s always nice to stumble upon a great little, little known book like this one - it was a pleasure to read.
Steven Levy
There are three major tales in “Crypto”: the invention of public-key cryptography, the spread of public-key crypto with the release of Phil Zimmermann’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and the pathetic attempt by the Clinton administration to mandate the Clipper chip, the crypto system developed to allow government access to encrypted messages. The first story is the most interesting, and Levy does a good job of tracking it to it’s beginnings. Zimmermann ends up looking more like a intellectual property thief than a freedom fighter. The Clinton administration is presented as an enthusiastic but inept would-be Big Brother. The unifying theme is the emergence of private sector cryptography and the federal government’s attempts to restrict the spread of strong cryptography.
Levy’s writing can be overly flip (what is a “semi lapsed Mormon” and why do we need to know that about a cryptographer?), but the extent of his research is obvious and he lucidly explains cryptographic concepts while maintaining a historical, rather than technical, perspective.
I wish Levy had devoted more space to the story of David Chaum, the man who developed a crypto system that supports secure, anonymous digital payment. Levy blames the failure of the system on Chaum’s inability to deal with potential customers, but I wonder if there isn’t more to the story. Levy also gives short shrift to Europe, where concerns tend to be about corporate, as opposed to government threats to privacy.
It’s not clear who the “code rebels” of the subtitle are. That phrase may refer to the so-called “cypherpunks”, but the book shows just how unimportant they were to the popularization of crypto compared to academic and commercial cryptographers and to companies such as Lotus who lobbied to repeal cryto export laws. As to “saving privacy in the digital age”, the book - which covers little since the mid 90’s - doesn’t really make, or - to be fair - try to make, a case that privacy has been saved by “code rebels” or by anyone else.
