> I misread the previous comment; I get the argument. I don't think the failure of export controls is a good indication of the capabilities of the state; in a sense, they served their purpose well, by ensuring that commercial products were sold in a default configuration that offered trivially breakable crypto.

Did they? I seem to recall that it was easy for international users to illegally download the "secure" 128-bit version of Netscape, and that most people did. I could be misremembering, though.