"The Teeth of the Tiger" by Tom Clancy
Review Copyright 2004 Robert M. Slade
It is interesting to note, reading the reviews on Amazon, that even
die-hard Clancy fans are starting to lose faith. Clancy has moved from
curmudgeon to outright maverick in this work. The plot doesn't just
depend on bending the rules, but by going completely outside them and
playing God. (In which regard, I'm fairly sure that quite a few Catholics
would take issue with the assertion that as long as you *think* you are
doing the right thing, God can't say anything about it.) The "good guys"
luck out a lot, but are extremely sloppy, and any group that did operate
in this manner would tend to kill a lot of innocent people. Despite very
brief crises of conscience, none of the characters in this tale are
attractive or sympathetic: they all seem to be pretty thin. But that
isn't what we are here to talk about.
Clancy demonstrated in "The Bear and the Dragon" that he didn't understand
cryptography, and he proves his lack of comprehension again here. Sun
makes good workstations, but they aren't supercomputers. Single pass DES
(Data Encryption Standard) has fallen to brute force attacks, but serious
users have plenty of algorithms to choose from that haven't. Clancy has
moved the myth of the NSA providing encryption standards with backdoors
built into it slightly out of the house, but it's still a myth. Yes, the
NSA does have smart people, but the one time they did really try it, with
the Clipper/SKIPJACK key escrow system, it failed. Ironically, the
failure didn't lie in their ability not to get caught, since they were
completely open about it, but in a weakness that meant the escrowing
system could be broken. As far as getting everyone to buy into a
proprietary, unreviewed encryption system and use it pretty much
universally for several years without anybody twigging as to what was
going on, forget it. There are a number of players in the crypto market,
everybody serious enough to study the field knows not to buy s**** oil,
and anyone following the security field at all knows that backdoors get
found every day.
Just because you use the same accounting system as someone else doesn't
mean that you can read all their files. In fact, if you are breaking in
to someone's system, it is often easier to grab the data files themselves
and process them with your own tools. There is no discussion about
getting access to files on remote systems at all: Clancy just seems to
assume that it can be done. Admittedly, he is assuming a backdoor into
Echelon, and assuming that Echelon can, in fact, collect all the
transmission of voice and data anywhere in the world. (We'll leave that
tall order for the moment, since it isn't inherently impossible, however
unlikely.) The data under investigation, however, isn't in transit: it
resides on a bank computer.
This book has annoying errors in technology, flat characters, a shaky
premise, and very little of the old Clancy flair.
%A Tom Clancy
%C 10 Alcorn Ave, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M4V 3B2
%D 2003
%G 0-399-15079-X
%I Penguin Putnam
%O U$27.95/C$40.00 416-925-2249 Fax: 416-925-0068 service@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039915079X/robsladesinterne
%O http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/039915079X/robsladesinte-21
%O http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/039915079X/robsladesin03-20
%P 431
%T The Teeth of the Tiger
|
