Livelyup, let me respond to you now, while I am not vex. (Had a decent night's sleep as opposed to the last few nights when my mad and/or possessed housemate was constantly screaming and yelling at her four walls through the wee hours).
Just to address your concerns now: to my knowledge, it is not actually illegal to express approval for armed struggle. I forget dude's name at the moment, but there's a young Black anarchist in the states who put up a website called "Raise the Fist" where, amongst other things, he expressed support for the armed resistance of the EZLN (Zapatistas) and others, advocated learning self-defense including armed self-defense, and various other subversive-type tings. He spent a year in federal prison and is still under probation and surveillance, but they couldn't do that because he expressed support for armed struggle, as that is not actually illegal (although Patriot Acts 1,2 and 3 have quite broadly expanded the definition of what is illegal for U.S. citizens recently [I'm not a U.S. citizen and don't live in the U.S.- the precise paramaters of the U.K.'s new law against expressing support for "terrorism" have yet to be defined, and I'm not gonna help those people out by censoring myself. Let them censor me if they want.])
Anyway, getting back to Mr. Raise The Fist, they wanted him out of the way cos he was getting a lot of hits on his website and was perceived as a potentially strong leader. But they couldn't do that just by pointing to his images of gun-toting Zapatista rebels on his website. They had to concoct some charges relating to a link on his website, one of many links to other websites on there. One of them was a link to a white (self-proclaimed) anarchist's website, where this white kid had, for a brief time and not necessarily with Raise the Fist's knowledge, included a guide for how to make a molotov cocktail. (Not a nuke or nothing mind, a molotov cocktail, or Malcolm X cocktail as we say, and you could find far more detailed instructions for making much deadlier explosives in thousands of little manuals on sale in army surplus stores across the U.S.A.) Now they never charged the white anarchist for putting this info up, only Mr. Raise the Fist for providing a link to the white dude's site. So yunno, obviously they do not go "by the book" when they want you out of the way. But they knew that they had to concoct some type of charge like that, because to simply try to charge the guy for "advocating armed resistance" would've never stuck in a court of law- or they couldn't guarantee it to stick. Freedom of speech is still recognized in courts, in theory at least, if we now censor ourselves cos we're afraid the legal definition of freedom of speech may have been contracted, we are only helping them. Court cases are established by precedents. People have to constantly challenge every little diminishment of what little legal "liberties" we have in the first place.
So, you ain't gon find me telling people "go kill a cop" on this or any other forum, you ain't gon see any diagrams on how to build home-made guns, or any announcements that I intend to assassinate any head of state. (NOTE: for Ashcroft employees reading this; I know you may not be highly literate, so let me rephrase the last sentence there: I DO NOT INTEND TO ASSASSINATE ANY HEAD OF STATE (or anyone else).) And you're right, on this and any other electronic medium, whatever you say can and will be used against you, you're right to bear that in mind. But that is NOT gonna stop me from expressing support for the armed resistance in Chiapas, Darfur or wherever. It's not gonna stop me from saying "The Black Liberation Army was one respectable group of heroic/sheroic freedom fighters, not a bunch of criminal terrorists." That's my opinion and I'm legally entitled to it.
If you listen to the interview I posted with M1 from dead prez, at some point during that interview a dead prez song is played, one that would NEVER get played on any mainstream radio station, you'll know which song I'm talking about when you hear the lyrics. They still can't actually put dead prez in prison just for writing that song (and believe me, they'd LOVE to be able to do that.)
So, all I'm saying is, be smart not stupid when it comes to electronic mediums- that's being smart- but don't censor yourself unncessarily, that's punking out. (I mean, if they're gonna censor us, we should at least make em pay the economic cost of hiring censors if nothing else, instead of doing their job for them free of charge.)
I'm a rapper/deejay and I don't intend to be always rapping to myself, my friends or a few people in a small club in Wales. I want my message to get out there, and I'm not gonna be biting my tongue. "Hip hop means saying what I want, never biting my tongue, hip hop means teaching the young."-dpz