History Literature / DigitalFortress

As with any Dan Brown book, ''Digital Fortress'' is infamous for some lapses of research, particularly some glaring flaws in its portrayal of cryptography and its portrayal of Seville as a poorly equipped city, with a medical service almost as bad as some in third-world countries. Despite this, it remains a readable book if you keep the MST3KMantra in mind (though opinions differ on this point).

** There does, however, exist an encryption method, the one-time pad, that is immune to brute force, and unbreakable if carried out correctly (doing so, however, is often logistically prohibitive). It's immune to brute force because with different keys you can get every possible message that has the same length as the one being sent, with no indication whatsoever of which possible decryption is the right one.
** Actually most modern digital encryption is resistant to brute forcing, in that it's theoretically possible to do it, but would likely take an impossibly long time, possibly billions of years, assuming you dedicate all of the worlds computing power to brute forcing that one key.
** Quantum computing can break current traditional encryption easily. However, it can also itself create a truly unbreakable code, which is basically a digital version of the one time pad.

* MyCountryRightOrWrong: Tankado went through a historical version in the backstory; as a child he was upset that the US used nukes on his country (and that he suffered deformities which caused his mother to die in childbirth and his father to abandon him), later in life he decided Japan was as at fault as the USA in WWII, dropped his grudge and even began working for the US government.

* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: The final chapter has the corrupt CEO Numataka discover [[spoiler: Tankado, the man he'd practically ordered the death of for profit, was the deformed son he walked out on.]]

* ThePasswordIsAlwaysSwordfish: Tankado's password is [[spoiler:the single digit '3']]. He even leaves clues just to make absolutely sure that everyone can guess it. Possibly justified in that Tankado may have wanted them to guess it. Which begs the question of why he even bothered with a password in the first place.
** Since he was trying to ransom the password off and [[spoiler:he expected to be alive to give it to them]] and clearly didn't expect them to guess it (it's made quite clear that the [[spoiler:fact he's dying is a massive OhCrap moment for him]]), it's fair to assume that we're supposed to believe this is an absolutely, positively ''fiendishly clever'' password with the clue being there to taunt them.
** Brown Fails Physics Forever, since [[spoiler:the "difference" in the clue is not 3]]. Also, it's axiomatic that cryptosystem security is exponentially proportional to key length. This key is approximately 8 bits long. Good job, guy.

* BigBrotherIsWatching: [[spoiler:Tankado's]] motivation to "bring down" the NSA is that he thinks they know too much of people's private lives. Downplayed because in in this story, the former is the villain and the Big Brother are the [[DesignatedHero good guys]].

%%ZCE * DanBrowned: TropeNamer

* {{Spexico}}: Creator/DanBrown's depiction of Spain as a Third World hellhole with rampant crime, corruption and poverty. He apparently confused some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico with Spain, which is a prosperous Western European country'.