[4] Mike Godwin, then of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, claimed that journalists have played a key role in linking the creation of "bombs" with "the Internet" in the public conscious.
[6][7] Most American websites offering bomb-making instructions would not face civil liability, since Hess v. Indiana and Waller v. Osbourne determined that free speech restrictions can only be applied if the goal was "producing imminent lawless conduct" among a single target group – which is not the case for a website available to a large swath of the population – making the situation comparable to music advocating violence or suicide in its lyrics.
[9] In 1994, a thread was made on the bulletin boards of the National Rifle Association of America by a user named Warmaster that detailed how to make bombs out of baby food jars.
[10] When Mohammed Usman Saddique was arrested in 2006, he was charged with "possessing a document or record containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" for having a copy of the manual on CD-ROM.
Police claimed that they found printed copies of bomb-making instructions downloaded from the Internet in the bedroom of Anthony "T.J." Solomon, the perpetrator of the 1999 Heritage High School shooting.
[19][20] In 2003, Jeremy Parker of the Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan posted detailed bomb instructions on the internet in response to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, stating "sure would hate to see anything happen".
[32] In 2004, German authorities forced a seventeen-year-old to shut down his Web site, entitled Der Abarisch Sturm after he posted detailed instructions of how to build a bomb.
"[12] A 2007 attempt by the European Commission to suppress bomb-making websites by making ISPs criminally liable for allowing a user to view such a page was ridiculed by The Register as "fantastically ignorant of internet realities"[28][33] Web sites offering advice on the construction of explosives are labelled as "Refused Classification" in Australia, as it is deemed to violate "all acceptable community standards".