That's a good thing for today's hackers and activists to review. It shows the long-term agenda of the government in wanting to have ubiquitous surveillance powers. And it shows you can win some of these battles.
Can you imagine a web without SSL? Today people openly call for all sites to do https all the time, but in the 90s, a web server (or even a web browser) that could do https in a non-broken fashion was officially a dangerous munition. To do this basic thing you had to cobble some open source software together, kind of like how people do it with ffmpeg and implementations of closed-source codecs today.
