I have the honor of knowing Phil personally. He's a great guy and PGP was a wonderful little program. For a while I was on the PGP International development team. In fact, I still use PGP.
Too bad that nowadays it has been mostly replaced by GnuPG, which is a humongous pile of crap, full of bugs and incompatibilities.
In fact, the latest version of it completely dropped support for PGP 2.x - meaning that you simply can no longer use GnuPG to communicate with a PGP 2.x user. (Before it was only impossible to sign-only for a PGP 2.x user and sign-and-encrypt was horrendously awkward and needed 5 different commands.)
I don't think that Phil used the "free speech" argument. He mostly used the "I've never broken the law" argument - i.e., that he never exported PGP (the program) from the USA without a license. He did, however, publish its source in a book, using a special OCR-friendly font. The book was then scanned outside the USA and the result was the basis of the PGP International version. But this was done after a grand jury investigation was launched against Phil. He was never indicted, which suggests that the grand jury never found any evidence for illegal activities from his part.
The "free speech" argument was used by somebody else, although I can't remember his name right now. He printed on a T-shirt the source of a Perl program that did basic encryption and crossed the US border while wearing it, claiming that it was his 1st amendment right to do so. Although he was harassed several times, I don't think that he was ever indicted of any wrongdoing, either.
Finally, there was another funny case. At that time, because of the silly US export law, Unix machines were exported without the code for the crypt(1) program. However, they still contained some cryptographic code necessary to hash the passwords. Another cryptographer (Peter Gutmann, I think; another friend of mine) proved the equivalence between encryption and hashing (i.e., if you have a cryptographically secure hash function, it is possible to construct a cipher based on it, and if you have a cipher, you can use it to produce cryptographically strong hashes) and used the Unix functions for password hashing to produce an encryption program.
Ah, those were the days... (Gosh, I feel old...)
To return to your question, I don't see much sense in it. First of all, it is only governments that "classify" thins like that. To the best of my knowledge, no government has classified Bitcoin as munitions. Besides, Bitcoin is based in signing and hashing and although that's equivalent to encryption in a mathematical sense, no government is smart enough to make the connection and classify it as encryption. Finally, only certain kinds of things can be classified as free speech. The source of Bitcoin core (or any other program) is certainly free speech. Bitcoin itself is not, just as the number on a US dollar banknote isn't. Finally, by far not all countries recognize the concept of "free speech" (let alone have it embedded in their constitution), while Bitcoin is international and knows no borders.
