Mr. Clarke said he was confident that corporations trying to develop complex technologies to encrypt information or otherwise halt the free sharing of computer data would ultimately fail.
Yet the technology used to encrypt e-mail is hardly new: in 1991, a hacker named Philip Zimmermann uploaded a free encryption program, modestly called Pretty Good Privacy, to the Internet.
Dell made its own move into the bring your own device market today with the acquisition of Credant Technologies and its data protection technologies designed to encrypt information from smartphones and other devices to servers and the cloud.
After analyzing the property of interpolation technology, a stream cipher is utilized to encrypt sample pixels and a specific encryption mode is designed to encrypt interpolation-error of non-sample pixels.
Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and other technology companies have taken action to encrypt more of their data to prevent the NSA from easily collecting and sifting through it.
Founder Pravin Kothari, who previously sold security company ArcSight to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion, said in an interview that the core value of the technology comes from the capability to encrypt data before it leaves the enterprise.
In the absence of better laws, Smith says technology companies will continue to innovate and continue to encrypt data – unless they are stopped.
Similarly, technologies are or will soon be in place to encrypt music so it can't be stolen easily and that make it convenient to pay for just the songs you want.
The technology exists to encode and transmit movies in digital form, to compress them for storage, and to encrypt them to stop illegal copying.
But the potential for a technology to be abused is no guide to whether it should be suppressed, said Phil Zimmerman, who invented an easy way to encrypt messages to stop them being spied on.
