I'm getting tired of reading frequent news stories about laptop computers lost, stolen, or left in the back seats of cabs by company or government employees, supposedly exposing untold thousands of social security numbers, insurance records, or other sensitive, private information to identity thieves and other miscreants. What those news reports usually fail to mention is whether the missing data files were securely encrypted.

<http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/15/news/companies/aig_theft/>

Making Your Private Data Useless (Except to You) -- Encryption is a mathematical method of scrambling information - one the United States government once tried to classify as a non-exportable munition - so that it can only be unscrambled with the correct password. The best encryption methods make it essentially impossible to decrypt data without that password, no matter what trickery or brute-force methods are applied.