Question

the code book: the science of secrecy from ancient egypt to quantum cryptography by simon singh
pretty good privacy
just as whit diffie predicted in the early 1970s, we are now entering the information age, a post - industrial era in which information is the most valuable commodity. the exchange of digital information has become an integral part of our society. already, tens of millions of e - mails are sent each day, and electronic mail will soon become more popular than conventional mail. the internet, still in its infancy, has provided the infrastructure for the digital marketplace, and e - commerce is thriving. money is flowing through cyberspace, and it is estimated that every day half the worlds gross domestic product travels through the society for worldwide interbank financial telecommunications network. in the future, democracies that favor referenda will begin to have online voting, and governments will use the internet to help administer their countries, offering facilities such as online tax declarations.
however, the success of the information age depends on the ability to protect information as it flows around the world, and this relies on the power of cryptography. encryption can be seen as providing the locks and keys of the information age. for two thousand years encryption has been of importance only to governments and the military, but today it also has a role to play in facilitating business, and tomorrow ordinary people will rely on cryptography in order to protect their privacy. fortunately, just as the information age is taking off, we have access to extraordinarily strong encryption. the development of public key cryptography, particularly the rsa cipher, has given todays cryptographers a clear advantage in their continual power struggle against cryptanalysts, and rsa encryption is therefore effectively unbreakable. most important of all, public key cryptography is not
more than a hundred million e - mails are sent around the world each day, and they are vulnerable to interception. digital technology has added communication, but it has also given rise to the possibility of those communications being monitored. according to zimmermann, cryptographers have a duty to encourage the use of encryption and thereby protect the privacy of the individual.
a future government could inherit a technology infrastructure thats optimized for surveillance, where they can watch the movements of their political opposition, every financial transaction, every communication, every bit of e - mail, every phone call. everything could be filtered and scanned and automatically recognized by voice recognition technology and transcribed. its time for cryptography to step out of the shadows of spies and the military, and step into the sunshine and be embraced by the rest of us.
in the excerpt, the purpose of the statistic \more than a hundred million e - mails\ is to show that
encryption has been used by the military but not ordinary citizens.
digital information is widespread and available to monitoring.
most e - mails that are sent are not viewed by the government.
e - mail is a good way for people to communicate nowadays.

Explanation:

The statistic "more than a hundred million e - mails" is used to emphasize the large - scale use of digital information. Since a vast number of e - mails are sent daily, it shows that digital information is widespread and thus vulnerable to monitoring.

Answer:

digital information is widespread and available to monitoring