Estimates of the future value of digital shopping malls vary widely but it is generally agreed that the one thing stopping most people from typing their credit card number into their computer, is the fear that someone, somewhere, could intercept it. But there is a technology already available which would render those fears meaningless. The trouble is, most governments don not want you to have it. It is called encryption and it encodes e-mails to make them uncrackable. The encryption debate has raged fiercely in the US between the government on one side, and the computer industry on the other.
Governments are worried about technology that allows people complete security.
Publicly they talk about its benefits to criminals, pornographers, paedophiles, terrorists and spies, privately though, they may be more worried about the potentially devastating effect on their tax revenues if people are allowed to secretly transfer money anywhere in the world. The US government was so concerned about encryption that it classified these programs as military hardware, severely restricting their export. Encryption works by using incredibly long algorithms to encode e-mails. Use of encryption is simplicity itself. The person e-mailing you encodes the message using the padlock, and only you have the key to decode it.