To make data indecipherable. The term scramble stems from the early days of cryptography, which camouflaged analog transmissions by combining them with secret frequency patterns. Restoring the original frequencies was called "descrambling." Today, cryptography is digital, and the 0 and 1 bits of digital data are mathematically rearranged into a different sequence. The terms scramble and "unscramble" evolved into "encrypt" and "decrypt." See
cryptography and
encryption.