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