"Cryptography - the use of secret codes - was until recently the sacrosanct province of puzzle geeks and government spies. But just in time for the Internet explosion, a band of outsiders triggered a revolution in this once-cloistered field. In the words of Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, the powerful mathematical tools they created were "the most important technological breakthrough in the last one thousand years." These mighty algorithms would solve the critical problem for all of us in the twenty-first century - how to talk to one another, do business, and keep our personal information private in a networked world. But this was a revolution that the spies and the Feds wanted to kill." "In this first full-scale account of the great Code War that shook the computer age, Newsweek technology writer and bestselling author Steven Levy outlines the development of a "people's" cryptography and its head-on collision with the U.S. government. Crypto is about privacy in the information age and about the nerds and visionaries who, over twenty years ago, predicted that the Internet's greatest virtue - free access to information - was also its most perilous drawback: a possible end to privacy."--BOOK JACKET.