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:
History of cryptography
Encryption in modern times is achieved by using algorithms that have a key to encrypt and decrypt information. These keys convert the messages and data into "digital gibberish" through encryption and then return them to the original form through decryption. In general, the longer the key is, the more difficult it is to crack the code. This holds true because deciphering an encrypted message by brute force would require the attacker to try every possible key. To put this in context, each binary unit of information, or bit, has a value of 0 or 1. An 8-bit key would then have 256 or 2^8 possible keys. A 56-bit key would have 2^56, or 72 quadrillion, possible keys to try and decipher the message. With modern technology, cyphers using keys with these lengths are becoming easier to decipher. DES, an early US Government approved cypher, has an effective key length of 56 bits, and test messages using that cypher have been broken by brute force key search. However, as technology advances, so does the quality of encryption. Since World War II, one of the most notable advances in the study of cryptography is the introduction of the asymmetric key cyphers (sometimes termed public-key cyphers). These are algorithms which use two mathematically related keys for encryption of the same message. Some of these algorithms permit publication of one of the keys, due to it being extremely difficult to determine one key simply from knowledge of the other.