But that debate may be moot: Computers are getting so powerful that they will eventually be able to break any encryption.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a division of the Commerce Department that vets technology for the federal government, will be calling for proposals from industry and academic groups later this year to help create encryption that can beat the ever-growing abilities of advanced computers.

A report this month from the agency, which helped create the SHA3 and AES encryption standards that are widely used today, predicts that quantum computers will be able to break the popular public key encryption technology RSA by 2030 at a cost of a billion dollars. Quantum computers rely on qubits, which can simultaneously represent both a one and a zero, and can execute calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers.