Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

Cryptography – the use of secret codes – was until recently the sacrosanct province of puzzle geeks and government spies. But just in time for the Internet explosion, a band of outsiders triggered a revolution in this once-cloistered field. In the words of Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, the powerful mathematical tools they created were “the most important technological breakthrough in the last one thousand years.” These mighty algorithms would solve the critical problem for all of us in the twenty-first century – how to talk to one another, do business, and keep our personal information private in a networked world. But this was a revolution that the spies and the Feds wanted to kill.