The Importance of Encryption

"I acknowledge there are future technological problems that may undo all of our current state of encryption," he says. "We can certainly say like stuff encrypted today could be quite trivial for a quantum computer years from now to unencrypt." The NSA has not told us about any secret quantum computers, but an individual on their own computer can encrypt files in a way that it makes them essentially unavailable for the rest of time, presuming no massive technological changes.