Works similar to Cryptonomicon and Mother Earth Motherboard

December 30, 2016 5:20 PM

I recently read Mother Earth Motherboard by Neal Stephenson and enjoyed learning about modern telecommunications hardware. I've also enjoyed reading Cryptonomicon for its investigation of game theory and crypto. Do you know of any similar works that delve into modern secure communication?

Specifically, I'm looking for something nonficition that deals with a the theory and recent history of modern secure communication.

For example, modern secure communication can deal with the fact that all my emails are read by every government, how they do that, how one might thwart that, and the specific technical description of each of those processes.

Grab bag of things I'd like to learn about:
Why is encryption good for us?
Why is it bad?
Is it hard?
What's the politics around encryption?
What about mass surveillance?

posted by lalunamel to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

As background that nearly everything else will reference, The Transparent Society, thinking through what might happen if we can't maintain privacy; The Puzzle Palace, a history of the NSA; and The Pentagon Papers and Snowdon's leaks.

For a shortest recommendation, practically anything by Bruce Schneier, from his collections of essays to Cryptography Engineering if you want to *know*.
posted by clew at 6:07 PM on December 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Liars and Outliers is probably the best one Schneier's works to read as far as understanding how cryptography practically effects our lives as a layperson.
posted by Candleman at 6:51 PM on December 30, 2016

Best answer: The Code Book, by Simon Singh is one of the classics in this field. It is non-fiction, but extremely well-written and full of compelling narratives. Its best focus is probably the WW2 chapters, but it covers everything up to the late nineties timeframe (it came out in the same year as the Cryptonomicon). It will at least give a comprehensive historical context to most of the questions you want answers for.
posted by bonehead at 9:03 PM on December 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Best answer: +1 to Singh’s Code Book.

The Dead Hand (about Soviet weapons programs) and Countdown To Zero Day (about the Stuxnet worm) both focus more on military communications, but those topics are heavily intertwined with encryption and communications.
posted by migurski at 9:37 PM on December 30, 2016

For a historic perspective of hacking and various 80s-90s cryptopunkery, there's Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown and Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.
posted by sukeban at 3:02 AM on December 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think I have an extra copy of the Singh book (which is very good) at work; MeMail me your address if you want me to pop it in the mail.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:37 PM on January 2, 2017