The Honorable Peter Swire served in privacy roles in the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Leading up to the filing deadline on the FCC's proposed rulemaking regarding privacy and ISPs, we spoke to Peter about a study released recently by the Institute for Information Security and Privacy at Georgia Tech.

Among the top findings of the study, Peter recalled the remarkable growth in encrypted data moving through networks.

“The biggest surprise is the role of encryption when it comes to the ISPs," he told CTC. "As recently as two years, only 13 percent of the bits that were going through the backbone in the United States were encrypted. That had jumped up to 49 percent by this January of this year. It’s estimated that 70 percent of the bits are going to be encrypted by the end of this year.”

Over 53,000 comments have been filed with the FCC on the proposed rulemaking, and the volume of comments at one stage reached such peaks that it caused the FCC comment portal to crash.

For more on the Institute's study on online privacy and ISPs, please CLICK HERE.

For more on the FCC's proposed rule and to file a comment, please CLICK HERE.

Listen to our conversation with Peter Swire here: