(Spoilers ahead)
Digital Fortress is probably the book with the most bullshit representation of computers and cryptography ever. Dan Brown goes out of his way to do as little research as possible on subjects he's talking about. In Angels and Demons, the Illuminati want to blow up Vatican using jars with antimatter they stole from CERN. Jesus Christ. The Da Vinci Code is similarly flawed.
It baffles me how he manages to be so full of shit as to say that the descriptions, historical events and whatnot are accurate in his novels. In Digital Fortress he describes how the Spanish healthcare system is subpar and hospitals are filthy, when in reality it's ranked way above the US by some satisfaction index or whatever. Not to mention the NSA's supercomputer ("made by soldering together millions of processors over 10 years") which gets fed some ciphertext and a virus infects it... BECAUSE IT WAS ACTUALLY NOT A CIPHERTEXT BUT MALICIOUS CODE!!!11!1
I hate Dan Brown, dammit