Of course it is freedom of speech. The only thing that was distributed was text: an encoding of an idea. The act of using that idea to build something to defrau

Of course it is freedom of speech. The only thing that was distributed was text: an encoding of an idea. The act of using that idea to build something to defraud someone is the criminal act. Jurisdictions censor all kinds of speech, and maybe you think this kind of speech should be censored, but at least in the USA you would have to argue incitement which is a stretch. The historical example was the publishing of the PGP source code in book form to distribute it. You might consider the software to be "military grade arms" but describing to someone how to build it is just an idea. Certainly the US government might want to reign in this interpretation and might love to create a new exception, but there is no intrinsic reason for a rational individual to insist upon that interpretation.