This is basically a stunt. The reality is, export controls really did make it a giant pain to ship software, they really did weaken crypto for everyone (by prompting vendors to ship "export-grade" crypto versions), and the policy was genuinely effective despite nerdy moves like "printing the code in a book". Meanwhile, the underlying science of cryptography was published in academic journals and free to the world; the only people who suffered were developers and end-users.
