From Library Journal
When new lawyer Harry Garnet unknowingly delivers a bomb disguised as a floppy disk to a professor working on encryption devices for the Internet, he enters a bewildering world of hackers, the FBI, and computer professionals, all intent on ensuring?or preventing?any private communications on the net. Harry joins up with the professor's daughter, Annie, to discover the computer genius who is killing anyone trying to prevent him from putting his plans into effect. The authors, journalists who write about computers for a variety of magazines, also wrote the well-reviewed Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace (HarperCollins, 1995). They would be well advised to stick to nonfiction. One-dimensional characters, a plot riddled with coincidences, and a pedestrian writing style make this up-to-the-minute cyberthriller an unnecessary purchase for most libraries.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The authors of the true-crime cyberthriller
The Masters of Deception (1995) have teamed up for their first novel, a technologically sophisticated adventure about antigovernment computer hackers and the mad bomber who is offing them. After Harry Garnet, a soon-to-be corporate lawyer, is caught in a blast that kills the mathematician-father of Annie Ames, a prospective girlfriend, he infiltrates the Crypto Urban Militia, an underground organization opposed to the government's plans for public-key cryptography, a system whereby the state has unlimited powers to eavesdrop on all private electronic communication (a plan not unlike the government's proposed Clipper Chip). In their investigation, Annie and Henry learn that Annie's father was murdered because of his discovery that the government's plan has a major flaw that would greatly jeopardize privacy; they also unearth her father's secret virtual life in a MUD, a role-playing environment on the Internet. Although terms like
key escrow are a bit overused,
Flame War remains a rollicking jaunt through the world of computers and cryptography.
Benjamin Segedin
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
