Digital Fortress, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the true story behind Dan Brown's bestseller...

A prestigious prep school.
A powerful intelligence agency.
A minor indiscretion.
A major thriller.

In the Spring of 1995, on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, the U.S. Secret Service made a bust...

THE TARGET : A teenage student flagged by a government computer as being a threat to national security.

THE CRIME : Sending E-mail to a friend in which he said he thought President Clinton should be shot.

THE MISTAKE : The same mistake many Americans make every day...believing that what they say in E-mail is private.

In the wake of the incident, Dan Brown, an English teacher at the school, surprised by the government's apparent ability to "listen in", began researching the intelligence community's access to civilian communication. What he stumbled across stunned him...an ultra-secret, $12 billion a year intelligence agency that only 3% of Americans know exists.

This clandestine organization, known as the NSA (jokingly referred to as No Such Agency), employs over 20,000 code-breakers, analysts, technicians, and spies and has a 86-acre compound hidden in Maryland. Founded over half a century ago by President Truman, the NSA's technology is unrivaled. They have the ability to monitor all of our digital communications--cellular phone, FAX, and E-mail. They are bound by presidential directive to do whatever it takes to protect our national security... including "snoop" our most private conversations if necessary.

Brown coaxed two ex-NSA cryptographers to speak to him via anonymous remailers (an E-mail protocol that ensures both parties privacy), and the cryptographers, each unaware of the other, told identical stories...incredible accounts of NSA submarines that listened in on underwater phone cables, of a terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange that never went public, and also of a chilling new NSA technology--a multi-billion dollar supercomputer capable of deciphering even the most secure communications. Nonetheless, the cryptographers sang the praises of the NSA and insisted that ensuring our nation's security can only be done at the expense of civilian privacy.

"The battle between privacy and security," says Brown, "has no clear-cut answers. The stakes are enormous. All I know is that when I learned the truth about the NSA, I had to write about it."

If he disappears...we'll know who to blame.

DIGITAL FORTRESS
Only the most shocking parts are true.