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The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency
The book chronicles the final week before security expert Professor Chad Davis is to testify before Congress on the security of a commercial e-voting software product made by a fictitious company, Advice Software, Inc.
Davis' testimony will ultimately determine if the software will be implemented for use during the United States' 2004 presidential election, and therefore create a huge windfall for the company. The company will do anything and everything it can to ensure that Davis provides positive testimony. Advice will stop at nothing to complete their mission; that means they'll engage in multiple murders, kidnapping and a slew of other nefarious activities. All of this is addition to simultaneously attempting to corner the video chip market, and create video drivers that send subliminal messages about which candidate to vote for.
As Albert Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." The plot could have been made much simpler to mimic reality and the current state of insecure e-voting systems. As in real life, the e-voting companies are getting away with providing insecure e-voting systems; under the nose of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and an unsuspecting and apathetic voting public. The idea that an e-voting software company would resort to murder is where the book demonstrates it is a novel.
The reason e-voting companies and their insecure software can run roughshod through the FEC is that voting-system flaws do not have the same immediate tragic consequences that other product failures can. Plane crashes and adverse drug effects spur the FAA and FDA to take drastic actions and often overreact to an event; poorly written and insecure voting software is clearly not as newsworthy as a burning jet.
Combine this with a public that is utterly apathetic to voting in general and the situation is ripe for the situation where e-voting can have a near hypnotic effect on most people involved. Because voter turnout for U.S. presidential elections is quite low (60% of eligible voters cast their ballots in the November 2000 presidential election), and most people are completely unaware of the dangers of insecure voting applications, an under-funded federal agency can be manipulated by the e-voting vendors to roll out insecure voting software.
The international intrigue of the novel takes the reader to the RSA security conference in Amsterdam, where Davis is given a cryptic CD-ROM by Baff Lexicon, a notorious international hacker. Lexicon suggests there is serious problems with the software and will brief Davis at midnight that night at the Amsterdam Hard Rock Cafe on the details. Unfortunately, Lexicon is being trailed by undercover agents from Advice, and is murdered a few hours later by a Yugoslavian hit man that the company seems to have on retainer.
Davis now has the difficult job of unlocking the cryptic information on the CD-ROM on his own. That same CD-ROM is included with the book, and the reader is invited to join Davis in attempting to decrypt the contents of the CD and the conspiracy that Advice Software is attempting to perpetrate; namely the outcome of the 2004 election.
(If you are not interested in buying the book, anyone can download the software without having to buy the book. The software is actually part of a contest and the winner will receive a free pass to the BlackHat 2005 conference.)
A good section of the novel then details how Davis attempts to decipher the secrets that Baff Lexicon was attempting to convey to him. The two authors of The Mezonic Agenda have, respectively, a PhD in applied mathematics and a Master's in chemical engineering, and write in a someone choppy style representative of their technical backgrounds. Occasional errors in grammar and spelling are excused, save for the egregious misspelling of Learjet on page 154.
The story concludes with a moral dilemma that Davis faces: with his wife and daughter kidnapped by the Advice Software hit man, does he provide favorable, yet dishonest testimony about the software and watch his family set free; or tell the truth and watch them die?
The novel itself takes up 240 of the books 370 pages, with the last five parts dedicated to a history of voting, reverse engineering, cryptography, buffer overflows and steganography.
As a standalone novel, the book (while entertaining and enjoyably readable) is somewhat overpriced at $34.95, especially since the enclosed CD-ROM is freely downloadable and the plot is somewhat thin. The non-fiction final section, though, is quite informative and effectively complements the novel.
This novel does a good job of explaining how software can be cracked, and provides the reader with a good overview of security concepts such as buffer overflows, reverse engineering, cryptography, and more. It is hoped that the book will find itself in the hands of members of Congress and the FEC, who truly need to be educated in such fundamental security topics.
As a novel, The Mezonic Agenda will not compete with books from Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum. But because insecure e-voting is one of the greatest threats to democracy today, it is a much needed title.
You can purchase The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
... a certain melodrama and fantasy element... Ha! As if the NYT's bias isn't filled with such!!
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
A troll? No, this is insightful with the continued exposure that pieces of software and books get on the front page.
There is absolutely no reason that Slashdot needs to be come a repository for Amazon.com book reviews. Maybe if someone in-house or even an avid Slashdot reader posted the review then it would be fucking relevant.
Keep the Slashvertising off the front page.
I'll wait till I've finished reading all the good books before I start on the second string. I only have a few thousand of those good ones to go.
See what I've been reading.
When my brain first saw "Mezonic" it couldn't decide if it was some weird reference to the Mesozoic era or something to do with the Masons. What the heck is "Mezonic"?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The problem with "real world" fiction such as this is that most people will either:
a) miss the point entirely (in this case that there is more to e-voting than pressing a button);
b) think "Way Off - can't happen here" (even when it has!);
c) ignore the book.
Maybe the way to do it is be more subtle (like Terry Pratchett, who wraps his attacks on society up in metaphor and allegory), or more gung-ho (like Dan Brown)
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I have not read the book, but what's above seems to be a synopsis of the entire plot. Shouldn't there have been some kind of spoiler warning? I'm not one of those people who consider the divulging of everything but the resolution of the final cliffhanger to be a non-spoiler.
novels are written, to briefly take such men, out of that quiet desperation, even for a short while. Novels therefore require a certain melodrama and fantasy element
Well, some novels, maybe. I've heard it said that there used to be a habit in the 19th and 20th centuries to write novels in order to provide knowledge or moral teachings to the reader.
However, I can't find either of those topics in wikipedia, so maybe not...
Utter rubbish. There are many many novels of extra-ordinary importance that have nothing to do with fantasy or melodrama. The parent is describing a certain middle to low brow sense of literature. People write and read stories for a multitude of reasons, and to say that books missing the aforementioned elements equate with reading the newspaper, just goes to show the parent's reduced sense of human existence and imagination as to what literature can be and do.
Also, the book he describes sounds terrible. I'll wait for the movie to come out and snag a torrent of it in a few years.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
rmeebemr taht as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lteetr of a wrod rneaims in the ccroert piitoosn, the oehtr leertts can be jbuemld and the rdaeer is sltil albe to siflwty fugrie it out.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis