Crypto

Cryptography -- the use of secret codes -- was until recently the province of puzzle geeks & gov't. spies. But a band of outsiders triggered a revolution in this once-cloistered field. In this first full-scale account of the great Code War, Levy outlines the development of a people'sÓ cryptography & its head-on collision with the U.S. gov't. CryptoÓ is about privacy in the info. age & about the nerds & visionaries who, over 20 years ago, predicted that the Internet's greatest virtue -- free access to info. -- was also its most perilous drawback: a possible end to privacy. There is also the first behind-the-scenes account of what the NSA really had in mind when it created the controversial Clipper Chip.Ó