This is the general problem with having a bunch of laws sitting around that allow the government to punish people for things ordinary people regularly do, but then exercise the "discretion" not to punish them until they do something the government doesn't like.
Because then you don't really have any rights. They can't formally punish you for speech but they can punish you for breaking the same unrelated law a million other people broke without knowing and that only you were prosecuted for, "coincidentally" right after you said something they didn't like.
They do have that right, but at the same time, a chaotic and vindictive adminstration can revoke the visa of, and then physically abduct, a non-citizen. They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
They can also contravene a number of other legal safeguards along the way, and disregard judges' orders.
It appears the US has elected an administration that wants to turn the country into a lawless shithole, where the powerful do whatever the fuck they want, and they deliberately fuck with laws and safeguards, and deliberately target their political enemies (e.g. student activists), to flex how powerful they are.
> They can then make statements that plainly make it clear they did that because of what the non-citizen wrote.
I kind of hate the thing where people want to make this the part that matters, because Trump is a massive outlier who doesn't care about that and says the thing he's not supposed to say.
But the people who still do the prosecution under the pretext and then don't admit to why are even worse, because they're doing the same thing and then lying about it on top of that. If all you do is punish people for not lying, that's not going to solve anything. You need to take away their ability to trump up charges against random people.
I wouldn't be surprised if publishing circumvention code would be argued in court to be violence against earning money for political oriented books (spending money is a necessary and inseparable part of political communication).
But yes, obviously serious threats of violence are not protected speech.