My Passport Essential and My Passport for Mac drives also feature user-selected password protection combined with military-grade 256-bit hardware encryption, which scrambles files before they are stored. Typically found only on much more expensive drive systems, the encryption acts as a virtual padlock to keep data secure.

I was looking at these at Fry's over the weekend and found that there was almost no information about the encryption on the box (it said there was encryption but not what kind or anything). I guess it's a sign that you're getting old when you expect manufacturers to talk about their products on the containers ...