Chapter One
Mary Fischer loathed Whitfield Diffie on sight. He was a type she knew all too
well, an MIT brainiac whose arrogance was a smoke screen for a massive
personality disorder. The year of the meeting was 1969; the location a hardware
store near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over his shoulder he
carried a length of wire apparently destined for service as caging material for
some sort of pet. This was a typical purchase for Diffie, whose exotic animal
collection included a nine-foot python, a skunk, and a rare genetta genetta, a
furry mongooselike creature whose gland secretions commonly evoked severe
allergic reactions in people. It lived on a diet of live rats and at
unpredictable moments would nip startled human admirers with needlelike fangs.
An owner of such a creature would normally be of interest to Mary Fischer, an
animal lover who at that very moment had a squirrel in her pocket. At home she
also had a skunk as well as two dogs, a fox, a white-wing trumpeter bird, and
two South American kinkajous. Diffie saw that she was buying some cage clips
and abruptly focused his attention on her.
In future years, Whit Diffie would be known-extraordinarily well known-as the
codiscoverer of public key cryptography, an iconographic ... read full excerpt from: Crypto ebook
