Deconvolution wa first written up in the 1970s at the latest and first seriously used to deal with the Hubble telescope when first launched (before being fixed).

But these days deconvolution is pretty standard stuff for any amateur astronomer to use, even for photographers to use. I think the "Smart Sharpen" in Phtoshop is a deconvoluter and not a sharpener at all.

Undoing that takes a special "point spread function" - a swirl isn't like motion blur or defocus - but is no big deal once the cops realized how it had been done, and it's easier to get good reasults.

The down side is that deconvolution is easy to defeat if you try. And now people know to try. There was never any reason to say how they got the picture so why give away the secret?