STEVEN LEVY has long been one of the most engaging and forward-looking technology writers around. Now Newsweek's chief technology correspondent, he is the author of  Hackers, Insanely Great, Artificial Life, and The Unicorn's Secret. His new book, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government -- Saving Privacy In The Digital Age, tells the thirty-year story of the encryption wars, from the invention of public key cryptography to the Clipper Chip. It's a story that resonates on a number of levels: the sheer intellectual pleasure of encryption breakthroughs; the decline of the National Security Agency's outdated ideas about individual privacy in the digital age; the long and sometimes torturous education of the Clinton-Gore administration on crypto issues. But most of all, it's a story of a techno-political movement, the "code rebels" of Levy's subtitle doing battle against the spooks and the bureaucrats. As Levy writes in the book's introduction:

"What if governments were not the only potential beneficiaries of cryptography? What if the people themselves needed it, to protect their communications and personal data from any and all intruders, including the government itself? Isn't everybody entitled to privacy?... This book tells the story of the people who asked those questions and created a revolution in the field that is destined to change all our lives. It is also the story of those who did their best to make the questions go away. The former were nobodies: computer hackers, academics, and policy wonks. The latter were the most powerful people in the world: spies, and generals, and presidents. Guess who won."

This conversation with Steven Levy marks the first in a new series of FEED Dialogs. Long-time readers will remember our older Dialogs as ongoing bulletin-board style discussions featuring special guests, with limited reader interaction. Now that we've launched our new discussion boards at Plastic, we'll be hosting week-long FEED Dialogs on Plastic. Our editors will help seed the conversation, but readers are more than welcome to jump into the fray with their own questions and comments.

-- Steven Johnson