He probably wouldn't have to meet Mulder in person, but everything else would have been the same. He would have probbaly stolen it on a thumb drive, plugged in into a laptop in a public WiFi, and used an anonymous email service via Tor to send it.

Internet speeds are faster, so unless he's sending a massive cache, he probbaly could have emailed it today.

Then he would have wiped the laptop, reinstalled it with something else, thrown out the thumb drive, and never touched any of that shit again. He'd have worn a baseball cap and generic clothing, as not to be well visible on cameras, chanted clothing in a bathroom with heavy traffic and disappeared into a crowd of normals exiting a coffee shop or leaving Bryant Park.

If you look at the Silk Road trial, or any other bust, the information security methods, encryption, Tor, were solid. It was ultimately the person making an operational failure that allowed law enforcement to move in. Ross Ulbricht literally kept a crime diary, encryption keys on his laptop, and worked in public so the Feds could grab his laptop and then decrypt everything. Tor, modern encryption, they were all solid.

As far as the government hacking you, they were doing it back then too. DES (Data Encryption Standard) was developed in the early '70s by IBM with the "help" of the NSA and was criticized at the time for being weakened by the NSA. Controls on exporting cryptography appeared at the start of the Cold War. It was done with the support of US allies against the Eastern Bloc. You still need to get approval from the US Deptartment of Commerce to export cryptographic technologies, though they loosened restrictions in the '90s. The IBM scientists in the '70s were right; the NSA intentionally weakened DES against brute force attacks, since they could afford the massive computers that were then necessary to break them. Cryptography and the devices around it count as munitions or dual-use goods. The one thing that irritates me about the infosec coverage is everyone's surprise, as if they weren't doing that. We were suspicious of it for years and now Snowden just went and proved it.