I don't think he was arguing that things weren't more secure after the export controls were dropped. I feel like that's why he was arguing to drop them at the time. He's just saying that all the signs point to Amazon/internet commerce becoming a behemoth either way. So we'd just end up in the same situation wrt what the talk sees as the current state of things, but with compromised cryptography.
He was right about export controls. Nobody disagrees with him. I don't even think Meredith Whittaker does. But many times, I've come across a folk belief that strong cryptography was rare in North America before export controls were eliminated; it was not.
