State v. Levie
The main purpose of encryption is to change any data to a humanly unreadable form. Nowadays, encryption is seen as one of the key solutions to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of information. 
Companies and governmental entities have been spending time and money implementing ways to fight cybercrime and increase awareness between internet users and general public with the purpose to reduce the occurrence of crimes such as Identity theft. 
Mainly, one can say that encryption is about privacy. The right to a "safety zone" and privacy exists in the First and Fourth Amendment rights in the USA where a remarkable and recent privacy-based law has been approved, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. In Europe the Lisbon Treaty describes the protection of fundamental data as fundamental human right. 
While achieving privacy through the use of encryption seems to provide everyone with answers to decrease the disclosure of personal information, it benefits the possibility to conceal from authorities acts of terrorism, child pornography and others.
The use of encryption tools is becoming more and more disseminated; states are starting to make a crime "to use encryption". States like Illinois in USA are creating specific laws to handle this matter : "A person shall not knowingly use or attempt to use encryption, directly or indirectly, to:
Hyper-encryption
Hyper-encryption is a form of encryption invented by Michael O. Rabin which uses a high-bandwidth source of public random bits, together with a secret key that is shared by only the sender and recipient(s) of the message. It uses the assumptions of Ueli Maurer's bounded-storage model as the basis of its secrecy. Although everyone can see the data, decryption by adversaries without the secret key is still not feasible, because of the space limitations of storing enough data to mount an attack against the system.