You die if your seatbelt doesn't work and companies charge for seat belts. You don't die if your encryption is weak and you aren't paying for it.
But otherwise, super useful analogy.
> You don't die if your encryption is weak
This really depends on the business you're in.
The laws were different back then. The State Dept changed the rules a decade or more ago, I forget when, and AES 256 has been the default cipher ever since. Encryption is listed as a munition. I would have gone to jail if I put anything greater than 40-bit encryption on the shareware sites. Look what happened with Phil Z with PGP.
The law was changed a year before your story takes place.