It is not unprecedented, but a lot of fools lauded moves like this when these kind of instruments were used with barely a legal net around them against islamic terrorism or cybercrime.
I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you. In this very year UN and ICJ officials have been targeted in a similar fashion though. When the pax americana ends like this, I don't know what else is needed for EU and Asia to raise tougher walls around the woes of any idiot hyped enough to be voted by USA citizens.
I think the same people who opposed a/i sanctions (not AI sanctions but they're really missing out by not exploiting that confusion) also opposed sanctions for """islamic terrorism""" and for """cybercrime""".
To some thin extent (opposition to racial profiling and big copyright), mayhaps. People protest against Guantanamo, not for ISIS, and protest against identification, not for looking at pedo porn.
> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't
That's certainly a take.
My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.
Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?
I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.
we've seen several websites that do not break US law get evicted by registrars, ISPs, DDoS protection services, and other Internet landlords. 4chan miraculously survived multiple mass hysteria periods of the past decade without (iirc) any major disruptions. same as Russian 2ch -- miraculously untouched by Russia's rapid North Koreaization even though its /pol/ is overwhelmingly anti-regime.
Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:
1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.
2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.
It's the logic of Jack Bauer taken to the end. "Come on, it's obvious who the bad guys are, who needs rules?" until suddenly it's not obvious anymore...
My conspiracy theory is that "24" was funded by the CIA (etc.) to build public support for measures like the Patriot Act. "24" debuted 11 days after the Patriot Act became law, so they were being worked on at the same time.
Yeah; how many times in 24 hours can one vigilante commit acts of thinly-narratively-justified but actually-illegal torture without audiences clueing in?
Don't forget the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. During its pilot episode, first airing March 4th, 2001, members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner and try to crash it into the World Trade Center, blaming anti-American terrorist groups in order to start a new global war on terrorism for the profit of defense industry contractors.
And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.
The series may have been produced preemptively in case something would happen. In fact several agencies did warn in the summer of 2001 that something was likely to happen but the warnings were shut down.
I'm not a truther, but boy they try hard to make you one ...
>And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.
I looked into this so I could call you out for spreading disinformation.
Except what I found was that this statement is factually accurate as far as I can tell. Each person had their own separate story as to why they didn't go that day.
What was their rate of last minute cancellations? I suspect people in that circle frequently change plans, sometimes at the last minute, so having changed plans on that day would be unremarkable had that day itself been unremarkable.
Not to mention the first plane hit at at 8:46 am. Looking at details, none of these seem remarkable, and wouldn't have been remembered or written about if they happened the day before...
Sarah Ferguson's meeting was scheduled fot 8:45, but she was delayed by traffic after coming from an interview. ... Morning traffic in New York on a business day is not unusual and busy people miss tightly scheduled meetings because of it.
Michael Jackson performed in a concert the day before and was reportedly up late talking on the phone. I didn't see a scheduled time for the meeting, but a missed meeting after a concert doesn't seem surprising to me. Concert started at 7:40 pm according to a ticket stub photo here [1]
Larry Silverstein was reportedly double booked and kept a dermetology appointment his wife had booked after he missed one a month prior. Stuff happens, your wife books medical appointments for you without checking your calendar and you don't miss them twice.
Lutnick took his eldest son to their first day of Kindergarten. Which is something you do if you can. I didn't see any indication that he had a meeting scheduled. I'm guessing there's no consipiracy or even reporting about him going to the first day of Kindergarten for his other three children, but he probably did.
I feel like it's just a statistical fact that many people used to visit and cancel visits there every day, but it's hard to say how unlikely this was without numbers.
Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg were famously supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11, and Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming a movie at the World Trade Center that very morning. I’m sure more near-brushes exist.
George Herbert Walker Bush and Richard Nixon were both in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. What should rational people make of that? Nothing, other than that people have very poor statistical intuitions ... see the work of Kahneman and Tversky.
Really? What is the actual probability attached to that word "likely", and what is the data is support of a Bayesian calculation to reach that conclusion?
I refer again to rational people. Bush was president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, and was meeting with local Texans to build support for his run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His presence had nothing to do with Kennedy. At the moment of the assassination he was in Tyler, 100 miles away.
Even if, contrary to all reason, Bush was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, there would not have been any reason for him to personally be in Dallas that day.
It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.
And just like stochaistic terror, it's a label you can apply to basically any media you don't like, that seems to support a political agenda you are opposed to.
Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.
> On October 23, 2001, U.S. representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced House bill H.R. 3162, which incorporated provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill, and a Senate bill introduced earlier in the month.[5] The next day, October 24, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66,[6] with Democrats comprising the overwhelming majority of "no"-votes.
> The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.
It’s a conspiracy theory in that there’s no evidence of funding, support, or even cooperation in the particular case of “24”.
The 24 pilot was filmed before 9/11. After 9/11, the show had to be modified because reality has become uncomfortably close to it. That included delaying the premiere and removing a scene involving an exploding passenger aircraft.
That article mentions that some of those shows relied on government consultation, with the CIA and FBI, to help with realism, etc. “24” was not one of them. “24” co-creator Joel Surnow is on record saying there was no government involvement.
Quote from the WP for context:
> Coming this fall [2001]: A new primetime drama series takes a close-up look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals.
> The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox.
Some years it's twenty-something sitcoms. Sometimes it's doctors, or vermin-oriented "reality" shows. This fall, the trend is Fed TV: No fewer than five new network series depict the exploits of people with civil-service pay grades, shiny employee ID badges and very large guns.
But it was “24” that did the most to normalize the “torture the bad guys till they reveal the plot” and other such right-wing wet dreams.
Torturing bad guys isn’t “right wing” lol. The second season came out my freshman year of college, and about a dozen of us in our dorm watched it religiously every week. I’m pretty sure only two of us were republicans. The show had universal appeal (to men). There’s like a dozen Bollywood knock offs of the show.
How many of those same people are Republicans today, because of various shifts in the political positions the different American political parties take with respect to demographic groups such as men?
24 was one of the highest rated shows on television, won 20 Emmy awards and was nominated for 68. People just like torturing and killing terrorists. Not just Americans either—it’s a popular Bollywood trope as well.
Show me someone who "likes torturing" and I'll show you someone who's a social media algorithm away from being MAGA or the local equivalent. "Right wing" is the correct term.
Briefly checking your comment history, it's the correct term for you as well, so what's the issue? You don't want to admit it?
I’m happy to admit it. But I think that there’s lots of democrats who are fine with it too—folks who agree on how to handle terrorists, but just want more generous social welfare. I don’t think its a real dividing line in the electorate.
Except people love torture anyway. Even people who say they're opposed to torture usually do so in terms of "it's bad to torture people, but like, it would totally work". It is a ludicrously common sentiment.
The actual conspiracy was the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty producers that the Intel to find bin Laden came from torturing a detainee, which was a straight up lie (namely: under standard interrogation he provided the intelligence they needed...then they waterboarded him over 100 more times which provided absolutely nothing).
Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.
You may be unaware, but the EU, India, and China have also engaged in their own versions of economically-pressured internet presence takedowns of international activists and dissidents they label subversive. The degree differs according to leverage and their constitutional reasoning, but there is no spirit of opposition to this type of policy if that’s what you’re imagining.
Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.
This isn't comparable to the legality issues in particular countries, a comparatively minor threat for FOSS software projects. If the US declares your organization as terrorist, you'll lose banking access globally by leveraging the SWIFT system. The US influence has always been problematic, but this is now blatantly abused for MAGA populism.
All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.
It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, we make technology that gets around the laws. Governments must increase their tyranny just to maintain the same level of control they had before. The result is either an uncontrollable population, or a totalitarian state.
I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate some crime because fully policing them would require crossing serious lines. It's becoming increasingly clear though that governments have no limits. There is no cost they are unwilling to pay in the name of maintaining their own power.
I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.
Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.
This is hardly unprecedented -- in fact, it looks like the US government has learned a thing or two from the anti-spam community. If you actually want to block e-mail or newsgroup spam at its source, you don't complain to the spammer themselves, but rather to their mail/news provider, and if that doesn't work, you escalate the issue to the upstream provider, the hosting company for the spammer's website, the registrar for the spammer's domain names, and so on. This is time-consuming but is sometimes effective. (Of course, dedicated spammers may then switch providers, or start employing distributed botnets of zombified residential devices, but knocking out their infrastructure at least temporarily does disrupt their operations for a time and drives up their cost of business to the point where they may reduce or even cease their activity.)
There is a balance that needs to be struck between freedoms and rule of law and it's quite rare to be able to actually have discussions about how to strike that balance because most folks willing to discuss have a simplistic but vaguely absolute position favoring one extreme or another and can never come to the point of deciding of where to draw the lines of enough freedom or enough control.
If you have real operational security concerns, your provider shouldn't know anything about you; should in fact have bilateral shielding between themselves and you to prevent either counterparty from learning stuff. That's how Signal works.
But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).
There's all sorts of things any service provider could do to sleuth out who its users are. The implication of this OFAC determination is that A/I didn't need to sleuth anything out; they are accused of knowingly and deliberately assisting the PKK.
Again: in every system there's always some kind of sleuthing you could do to attempt to identify a user. That's not the legal standard. The complaint against A/I is that they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK.
No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.
Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.
If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.
The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.
I don't have an opinion about the PKK. My broad take is: if Europe doesn't care, there's no reason for the US to be leading a sanctions effort. I'm confident like everybody else that this is largely pretextual.
All I care about is the claim that if they can do this to A/I they'll come for Signal next. That doesn't follow.
Right, I'm only moved to comment by the implications being drawn on this thread that Signal and WhatsApp are next. Different fact patterns and different legal standards.
This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.
Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..
Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.
This OFAC action isn't based on "antifa", though the press release predictably takes shots at it. It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
> It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.
The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.
The picture everyone is missing is voting in November is how this gets resolved. The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy. Theres no reason to put up with this, the other side of a 70% electorate opposition is prison for the lawless incumbent
> The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy.
And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.
I agree with you in that barring the above, there is no logical reason a vast majority of all elections should lean away from MAGA/GOP considering the state of the country.
Even if Barack Obama himself was re-elected and the Democrats gained a 102% supermajority, does anybody seriously believe this sanction in particular would be reversed?
You feel ambivalent about eg. HN not being held liable for some random user signing up and posting, say, a terroristic threat on it? You realise that if platforms/HN were legally punished for that, no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
You are mostly right about my ambivalence (re: liability) but wrong about the conclusion.
> no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
That does not follow. Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision. For example, a site might choose not to have anonymization and then liability passes through a KYC chain. If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public. I think this probably already happens in large extent where images are scanned to avoid bad things appearing on public sites and there is already liability around that.
I know that isn't a popular position. It would change the entire character of the Internet. And it couldn't just be thrust upon people since the current contract is one of promised anonymity (even if that is probably not true wrt state actors).
> Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision.
To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:
1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.
2. Most sites would not have any incentive to do it either, since knowing the original author's identity would not shield them from liability. In some cases it would increase their liability instead!
> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.
No, for most sites the opposite would occur.
One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does not create involvement and liability for the message. It means you can block things without becoming a sorta-co-author of the things that pass the filter.
Repeal that, and sites will be forced into either (A) basically no moderation so no liability or (B) blocking 99% and letting through the safest 1% they're willing to be liable for.
What doesn't follow? Who said we should repeal section 230? Or to do so without replacing it?
Not me, I said I was ambivalent about it; don't put words in my mouth. My words were: "there would have to be some similar provision [to KYC]". Similar, not the same. Not nothing.
Everything else sounds like you imagining/speculating about what some future provision would look like. And your imagined fears don't play into my ambivalence.
1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."
2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be ambivalent about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."
3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."
5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."
6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about that happening."
7. [Error: Recursion detected]
In other words, the thread was was steered into "what if Section 230 went away" (at #2) and your reply looks as if you recognized that and proceeded to build on it.
I'd look at the Prairieland Detention Center Case to understand how broadly and aggressively this government is using "terrorism" to go after political opponents.
Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years in prison for moving a box of magazines related to the protest. He wasn't even at the actual protest.
Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
It's very much not far fetched that you as an I2P node could get hit with a terrorism charge if some political enemy ends up using your node. That's on the same level of moving pamphlets for a protest.
> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.
> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.
Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.
Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.
I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.
I checked for an official PKK YouTube channel. I found that they don’t have one as they’re a designated foreign terrorist organization* and Google complies with that designation by not allowing them an official presence. Unsure about the others but I doubt any of those companies would allow an official account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.
* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
Have we forgotten Megaupload? Napster? Limewire? BitTorrent?
Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.
This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.
They're not being targeted for terrorist activity per se; they're being targeted for providing material assistance to terrorists.
Per the Treasury Department:
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
"Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism." https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
Per the State Department: "The A/I Collective provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. Many of these groups have relied on the A/I Collective’s digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiqués by U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure, along with instructions for building improvised explosive and incendiary devices – all routed through a network of foreign servers intended to conceal criminal activity from law enforcement." They then go on to list the specifics. (https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...)
> targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented
It is not unprecedented though. The US military empire always was supported
by the business empire and corruption empire. Trump and his BigBro Epstein
party-goers just make it much more obvious. In reality the terrorists are in
the US government primarily.
> Only months after Paranoia [their first server] went online, the G8 came to Genoa. Many A/I participants were also involved with Indymedia Italy. They helped construct the movement’s media center, laying cables, configuring servers and building workstations through which protesters could report what was happening across the city. What followed was historic: enormous demonstrations, the police killing of Carlo Giuliani, indiscriminate beatings in the streets, torture and abuse inside the Bolzaneto barracks and the nighttime raid on the Diaz school. Official narratives competed with photographs, recordings and firsthand testimony transmitted through independent infrastructure. Genoa became one of the earliest major demonstrations to be documented from nearly every direction by its participants rather than exclusively through institutional media.
Very curious. My latest submission is the video of Larry Ellison with the "The police will be on their best behavior[,] Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on". (It was triggered by a piece on TheOnion.)
Turns out, other people had been recording events, so that a covering narrative may not prevail over the truth.
The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:
a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:
> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.
b) And the issue U.S. has with them:
> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.
The only people who say this are people who don't actually know anyone who is antifascist. Hell, most of the people I've met who strait up identify as antifa are probably closer to democratic socialist than communist and they tend to be pretty dweeby.
>[The US State Dept's] examples include alleged railway and pipeline sabotage in Europe, attacks on energy infrastructure, Rose City Antifa, resistance to Atlanta’s proposed police-training center, Jane’s Revenge and publications carrying statements attributed to armed organizations.
At least one of these things is not like the others. Why are peaceful protests against "Cop City" (Atlanta's proposed police-training center) lumped in with violent attacks on infrastructure? This isn't the first time either - Samuel Tunick, the man who was charged with destruction of evidence for giving his duress pin to the CBP agents, was being investigated for his connection to the Cop City protests.[1]
And as others have said, what does it say about the current US admin that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists? I will say, at least unlike Cop City protests afaik, Rose City Antifa seems willing to use violence to accomplish their goals.[2]
> what does it say ... that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists?
it says that these so-called 'anti-fascist' groups are good at branding themselves?
Anyone can start a group and call it "Anti-Fascist" but it's silly to suggest that opposing that group means you're a fascist. Maybe you don't like their methods. Maybe you think they're full of shit in who they choose to oppose. Or maybe they do commit crimes and you call them criminals.
I clicked around a bit, read the manifesto, I still have no idea what these people do. I guess they claim to have been around for a while, but a bunch of the links don't work and the manifesto has definitely been updated to reflect 2026 opinions.
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.
The very first sentence on their about page says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
It also says their manifesto was written in 2002.
You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
they are a group of people providing services to activists. services include email, web hosting, chat, and other anonymity services. (see https://www.inventati.org/services/)
For what it's worth, the people I have known personally who talk like this don't actually do very much except talk like this. Then again, they have never been sanctioned by a government.
> The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
I don't see anything wrong with that. They make 0 money from this. It's 100% run by volunteers. They don't support any orgs that could afford to do it themselves.
It's like if a group of you and your friends got together and gave tech support to any orgs that care about something you're passionate about (e.g. ending FPTP voting)
Did I say there was something wrong with that? No. Let me repeat what I said: "In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly". Do you disagree with this statement?
Being against facism and racism is centrism, being part of an "anti-fascist" or "anti-racist" group is radical left. If you're part of a "group" that has stated goals of pushing something that is already a norm then its pretty clear what what you're doing is not pushing for what is already the norm as if it was the norm you wouldn't need to push for it.
No of course I don't. The State Department is alleging terrorism. In their own words they are alleging anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-war, anti-fascism, etc.
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
I suspect they have some "not mainstream" political views; although I think understanding what these views are requires more in-depth reading of the blogs that they host.
Yeah, that says pretty much nothing about what they do. It reads like an enterprise tech company webpage saying "we provide solutions to help transform your company into the digital age".
Will you just click the link? It's like 2 paragraphs and the very first sentence says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.
Autistici/Inventati is an Italian collective, active since around 2001, that runs free digital services for activists, grassroots groups and anyone who wants to communicate without being profiled.
It provides email accounts, mailing lists, blogs, websites, chat and VPN access.
Anyone that politically aligns with them. They say that explicitly:
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
They don't receive any money for this. It's 100% volunteer services.
Then they are an activist group, not an “infrastructure provider” as claimed elsewhere in this thread, and holding them responsible for what their members do with the accounts they give them seems entirely fair.
Obviously not to fascists, and if you look at their website they make it very clear that you need to align ideologically and explain why and how you will use their services
It can't be because of a PKK link because then the US would have to designate themselves as terrorist. They literally armed and supplied to YPG to fight ISIS. The Kurds proved to be the most effective at stopping ISIS
> The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.
> The move is part of the Trump administration’s fight against what it calls a “resurgence of far-left political terrorism” worldwide, a focus that many security experts say is disproportionate.
> In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.
a/I collective in the OP is the third on this list.
> based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world
Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable). Masar Badil supports "armed struggle". One of the other groups ("hammer") recently designated a terrorist group (and linked to A/I Collective in another article I read ) got its name by attacking people in Germany with hammers.
Designating A/I Collective a terrorist group is different as it is not directly supporting violence, but it is providing free services to people who do, and it says it provides services to groups its aim is to "provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with.". On the other hand their terms forbid "military use" which is broadly defined enough to rule out terrorism.
I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups, n the other hand, unless they have been going out of their way to support violence in some way I do not see reasonable grounds for banning them. Lots of commercial services have dodgy users. My fear is that is is heading in the direction of "if you do not hand info to the US authorities on demand you will be deemed a terrorist"
Here's my "nuanced" take: If a pro-zionist group were officialy designated as terrorists for spraying paint into a jet-engine I would find that ridiculous too.
Spraying paint into the jet engine of a military aircraft is not "terrorism". It may be criminal, but it was not in any way a violent crime. Given that it disabled the aircraft, it counts as more than mere vandalism, but calling this an act of terror is outrageous.
The logic seems to be that Hamas has committed terrorist attacks against Israel, and is also the government of Palestine, so anyone fighting for the human rights of Palestinian people is actually materially supporting Hamas terrorism against Israelis. That does not really track if you know anything at all about what's going on in Palestine right now, or what people's actual criticisms of Israel are.
You have a very nuanced take that I broadly agree with. I would add that they were probably targeted for political reasons, it's not like the current administration is going out of their way to tackle right wing "terrorism".
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable).
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".
This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.
There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.
Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".
The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.
Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft
This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.
Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades. I would say the case for targetting military equipment is stronger than for damaging most other things.
> This is simply armed conflict.
Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
> Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades.
Does that include property in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon? Because if the people who spray painted something are "terrorists", I want to know what the people who wiped Rafah off the face of the earth are called.
Well the definition is flawed, or as the British say, the law is an ass.
Terrorism is widely understood to be the deployment of military force against civilian populations. Of course states do this all the time, but 'state terrorism' is basically dependent on whether politicians in country A align with country B or not; if they don't, they'll call out state abuses in country B as state terrorism, if not they'll say it's law and order.
Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
"Any kind" is quite the load bearing argument there. Let me remind you Europe is under an ongoing land invasion, which is why fucking with its defensive capabilities is unlikely to solicit much sympathies.
> Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.
Damaging military equipment is a military end, not a political one. If it were otherwise, then a military attacking a military would definitionally be terrorism. At that point, you've removed the utility of the word "terrorism" from English and made it synonymous with "armed conflict."
Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.
Contrast with 9/11, where symbols of American capitalism, filled with civilians, were attacked in order to terrify people who have nothing to do with those buildings into supporting changes in policy that hurt the US.
I suppose the UK could declare Palestine Action as combatants and hunt them down and shoot them.. but that doesn't seem very uh, appropriate. I sort of prefer them being arrested and going through courts.
Note that the UK would be committing war crimes in this case, since you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers, you are supposed to capture them and put them in POW camps.
Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…
That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.
To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.
> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens
I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.
> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.
I hope no one takes this seriously.
If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.
The labeling of groups as "terrorist" is intended to justify authorization for military action against those groups, where, prior to the Global War on Terror, state affiliation or outright sponsorship was typically needed for a military response.
I am not an expert on the legalities. My impression is that, if they are terrorists, you kind of have to catch them in the act, or preparing to act, or providing support for actions. An army, in wartime, can be attacked in broader circumstances.
"The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure. The group has become a key node in a transnational campaign by violent and criminal far-left networks to destabilize the United States and its partners across Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond...."
"The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide."
So the argument is that it's a communication platform? With such "specifically designed" tools to enable "terrorist activity", such as "encrypted messaging" and other dual-use technologies such as: "a website", "an email".
With such strong proof as "A far-left extremist media group ... relies on A/I ... to publish official communiqués and calls to action for [various organizations]" This is what we in the business call a direct proof A/I materially supports Hezbollah terrorist actions. Clear direct link, simply because all alternate explanations are impossible. Everyone is happy that americans saved the day, again!
State Dept so in the clear that in this "This same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices." they don't name the group nor the "terrorist" because if one would check, improvised explosive device would turn out to be a molotov.
So Casey Goonan throws molotov at a police car -> Abolition Media (the unnamed group) publishes some claims about the attack -> A/I, a comm platform provider on another continent now suddenly provides "material support for violent extremism" in the US, just because Abolition Media used its blog infra. Cool story. Despite both links being tenous at best.
And such it will be with lot of other claims in there, given that US is led by absolute clauns and psychos currently.
I think the registrar makes the difference:
autistici.org was registered via Gandi, but noblogs.org registrar is Tucows Domains Inc., which points[1] to njal.la, an "offshore" domain hoster that should be more resilient, but isn’t really usable for email hosting, since domains at such a hoster will land on blacklists almost immediately.
This administration is on a witch hunt for anything they can identify as "antifa" when no such central organization insists. Instead it's being used as an over broad label to attack organized opposition to it's broadly unpopular policy agenda.
(If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
Smart enough to reject abusive little word games?
I see "fascism" and "antifascism" more like "matter" and "antimatter" - pretty much the same thing, just there's a violent reaction when the two collide.
It's not an organized group. It's a label being used as a cudgel to attack anyone who doesn't like the current president (who also happens to have the world's most fragile ego/thinnest skin/whatever his soul crushing pathology actually is).
It's not a group. There are several smaller orgs that call themselves antifascist but there's no such centralized group or political structure. It's not even a specific ideology. It's just oppositional to fascism
Exactly. Antifa is short for "opposed to fascism". Which, you know, is the bad thing where you hurt a lot of people just because they are different from the "group" you defined, with the aim of spoliating the outsiders to enrich the members, or make them an inferior cast, etc...
Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...
Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.
Nomenclature alone is meaningless. Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which professes anti-fascist messaging and motives both democratic and anti-fascist? I wouldn't assume every "antifa" group is principled and accurate in its diagnosis of what fascism is and who are acceptable targets for their outgroup directed aggression.
Perhaps not, but this administration is in no way principled or accurate in its diagnosis of anything so their labelling of any group doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
NK is a dictatorship. I don't know where you got the misunderstanding that they would be "anti-fascist".........
Anti fascist => anti dictatorship.
Anti fascist means that you don't like fascism and that you are not going to let it happen passively.
(Tired of explaining the obvious. But I guess that somebody has to.)
A dictatorship mechanically leads to a situation where the governing group is working for their own wealth, thus in this case the "group" is the governing class. The extent and definition of that class is voluntarily limited so that wealth and power converges to them.
Now you see it? Yes that is a fascism, meaning that:
dictatorship => fascism
And the reverse stems from the "groupism" (i.e. tribalism) of fascism, which entails that you need exclude large portions of the population from the political system.
As this "group" definition becomes narrower and narrower (in order to make more wealth converge to the alleged "true humans" of its center), it becomes a harsher and harsher dictatorship, and finally a strongman regime.
The point is that people who proclaim themselves "antifa", be they in dictatorial power over half of Korea, or merely a band of organized activists, are not automatically due credibility and trust because of some grammatical fixation that magically guarantees alignment. Do you only become skeptical when the message is twisted after winning power?
"Antifa" factions in the Spanish Civil War ultimately did not win and accidentally enable a Spanish DPRK, but they still were perfectly capable of being and doing evil, such as committing mass rape and shooting of nuns.
You are probably thinking about the Communist factions among the Republican forces opposed to Franco.
ALL of the Republican factions were opposed to Franco and to fascism, not only the Communists.
And, besides, nobody was calling themselves "antifa" at that time, because that was damn obvious that if you were in the Resistance, you were opposed to that despicable tyrant. But they were absolutely anti fascists, all of them and not only the Communists.
If this wasn't so poorly written I'd have assumed it's GPT-3 slop.
OP's point is that a group's name does not necessarily hold any link to their activities, so an "anti fascist" group could very well be doing fascist activities themselves, name notwithstanding.
And if a Christian group is doing Demonic stuff that's a problem.
And seeing slop where there is not, you are being rude to me without purpose.
Not everybody is born in an English-speaking country.
I laid down the ideas logically, maybe that is what sounded foreign to you.
By the way you are the person writing nonsensical stuff such as "Antifa is a terrorist organization", while everybody is repeating tirelessly that it is just an adjective meaning to be opposed to fascism:
No any such organization exists. It is a movement, and a description one can describe one's self or actions: "anti-fascist".
But of course, their logic for sanctioning-by-association would mean that they all - Trump, Bessent, Rubio etc. - with their innumerable contacts with "violent terrorist groups and regimes" everywhere around the world, and just themselves really - should have been sanctioned, arrested, tried, or just disposed of like the US does with so many it dislikes.
Yes. The president fomented a violent insurrection and then pardoned its participants (who should all still be in prison). He shouldn't be in office and you could similarly sanction his own social media platform, X and any other number of their supporters.
> A/I (Autistici/Inventati, pronounced [au’tistiʧi]-[iŋ’vɛntati], or [iŋvɛn’tati]) was born in 2001 from an encounter of individuals and collectives of the autonomous anticapitalist movement interested in technology and active in the digital rights struggle. We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible. We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals.
> All of our services are provided for free, without any form of control or commoditization of the personal user data. We don’t receive any form of compensation for our work. We are volunteers exploiting the experiences we accumulated over years of technological, political and legal research while doing radical activism, and we are motivated and inspired by the principles of solidarity and self organization.
From their about page:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements. Our principles are fairly straightforward: the world should not be run on money, should be rooted in solidarity, community, mutual help, equal rights and freedom, and social justice. Easy, isn’t it? We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
Given administration's obsession with Antifa being in the room with them at all times, it's impossible to take anything they say in relation to this as even close to factual.
As far as I can tell, there were no credible criminal charges against this group, except that they are effective organizers on the opposite side of political spectrum. In the White House’s deranged logic, this qualifies them to be officially designated as domestic terrorists [1].
Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
Their infrastructure and services were used in domestic terrorist attacks on pregnancy centers in the United States, by the CHAZ operation in which two black teenagers were lynched, attempts to crash police helicopters, attempts to burn police officers alive.
Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
The current United States government is very keen on pushing the idea that there is a vast and shadowy international left-wing conspiracy waging war on it.
And - the list of people that were originally put in this category when G.W. Bush issued this executive order has 29 people/organizations: Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaida, and various affiliated/related organizations.
So, yesterday it was Bin-Laden, today it is some Italian left-wing tech guys, and tomorrow it might well be you or me. Get ready to be branded a terrorist at some point.
Remember, Trump and his cultists are symptoms -- not the cause. I.E. Cuba's embargo was in place long before the orange buffoon, and that is the same force at play here. Fear that the people will get a taste of a fairer, more just alternative.
> “are you antifa or are you fa?”
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism."
How quaint. The MEK (Iranian People's Mudjahheddin) were designated as a terrorist organization but collected money in EU streets all the time. Now they are useful against Khamenei.
The US would also like to use the equivalent of the PKK in the large Kurdish part of Iran against Khamenei.
Nothing to say of using the PKK rebranding of SDF in Syria as well as receiving "global terrorist" Al Jolani in the White House.
US sanctions mean if you trade with the santioned org.. YOU get sanctioned (lose access to trade or financial systems controlled by US or US companies like Visa)
In the USA - the consequences should be only related to USA pertinent actors. The newspapers in Italy say, "there is no judgement against them in Italy".
SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium. Only 2 banks out of the total 24 on the board of directors is US banks. Unless there's a hostile takeover of the SWIFT organisation by the US, I think this is a bit of a stretch. (Plot-twist: Italy is on the board of directors.)
• Bank accounts and payment processing.
• U.S.-linked donations and fundraising services.
• Hosting, cloud infrastructure and upstream network services.
• Domain registration and related technical services.
• Certificate, security and email-delivery accounts.
• Software and communications services.
• Relationships with non-U.S. providers frightened by American secondary sanctions.
• Access for people in the United States who currently use A/I’s services.
No, because they don't want to be banned from banks. With few exceptions, the US has power over all global financial systems. Also tier 1 ISPs (even the European ones), which trickles down to all ISPs.
> Our financial strategy relies exclusively on voluntary donations.
That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term. Sure after this news they will get lots of donations, but long term it is not something that is realistic.
Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
[0] *Unless you now know why this collective needs crypto more than ever.
That's not how US sanctions work. When the US sanctions something, nobody is allowed to donate to them. Basically any country that trades with the US (most) has to follow according to their trade deals. Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers
> Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers.
Given that SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and Italy's major bank is one of the 24 banks on the SWIFT board, how does this "blockade" in SWIFT happen? Is the inference that all of the banks bow down to the US, even though the US only represents 2 out of the 24 banks on the board?
Everyone’s missing the big picture here which is that this targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented and concerning: https://decode39.com/16319/autistici-inventati-case-sets-a-n...
If a radical group sets up shop on I2P, are I2P users and devs now terrorists? This is a problem.
What about Monero users/devs? Veilid? Tox? Signal?
It is not unprecedented, but a lot of fools lauded moves like this when these kind of instruments were used with barely a legal net around them against islamic terrorism or cybercrime.
I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you. In this very year UN and ICJ officials have been targeted in a similar fashion though. When the pax americana ends like this, I don't know what else is needed for EU and Asia to raise tougher walls around the woes of any idiot hyped enough to be voted by USA citizens.
I think the same people who opposed a/i sanctions (not AI sanctions but they're really missing out by not exploiting that confusion) also opposed sanctions for """islamic terrorism""" and for """cybercrime""".
To some thin extent (opposition to racial profiling and big copyright), mayhaps. People protest against Guantanamo, not for ISIS, and protest against identification, not for looking at pedo porn.
8chan's /pol/ wasn't any different than 4chan's. the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't.
> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't
That's certainly a take.
My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.
Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?
I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.
we've seen several websites that do not break US law get evicted by registrars, ISPs, DDoS protection services, and other Internet landlords. 4chan miraculously survived multiple mass hysteria periods of the past decade without (iirc) any major disruptions. same as Russian 2ch -- miraculously untouched by Russia's rapid North Koreaization even though its /pol/ is overwhelmingly anti-regime.
The pirate bay is still up despite being taken down, is this now also a honeypot?
The Pirate Bay has had legal issues, been raided and taken down in the past. Has 4chan has any issues like this?
Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:
https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole
That article tells me 4chan wasn't a honeypot but used by Epstein for his chaos or at least he thought about using it.
Only that 8 was and is just a giant astroturfer for Watkins.
I wonder why Epstein was communicating with 4chan's founder in 2011...
1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.
2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.
Yeah That fucking cunt Brenton Tarrant was just ruffling feathers…
It's the logic of Jack Bauer taken to the end. "Come on, it's obvious who the bad guys are, who needs rules?" until suddenly it's not obvious anymore...
My conspiracy theory is that "24" was funded by the CIA (etc.) to build public support for measures like the Patriot Act. "24" debuted 11 days after the Patriot Act became law, so they were being worked on at the same time.
Yeah; how many times in 24 hours can one vigilante commit acts of thinly-narratively-justified but actually-illegal torture without audiences clueing in?
Don't forget the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. During its pilot episode, first airing March 4th, 2001, members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner and try to crash it into the World Trade Center, blaming anti-American terrorist groups in order to start a new global war on terrorism for the profit of defense industry contractors.
You’re missing something else that happened right before 24 debuted on November 6, 2001.
I’m not missing it, I thought that was obvious. See my other longer comment in this thread.
And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.
The series may have been produced preemptively in case something would happen. In fact several agencies did warn in the summer of 2001 that something was likely to happen but the warnings were shut down.
I'm not a truther, but boy they try hard to make you one ...
>And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.
I looked into this so I could call you out for spreading disinformation.
Except what I found was that this statement is factually accurate as far as I can tell. Each person had their own separate story as to why they didn't go that day.
Huh. Not sure what to make of this.
> Not sure what to make of this.
What was their rate of last minute cancellations? I suspect people in that circle frequently change plans, sometimes at the last minute, so having changed plans on that day would be unremarkable had that day itself been unremarkable.
Not to mention the first plane hit at at 8:46 am. Looking at details, none of these seem remarkable, and wouldn't have been remembered or written about if they happened the day before...
Sarah Ferguson's meeting was scheduled fot 8:45, but she was delayed by traffic after coming from an interview. ... Morning traffic in New York on a business day is not unusual and busy people miss tightly scheduled meetings because of it.
Michael Jackson performed in a concert the day before and was reportedly up late talking on the phone. I didn't see a scheduled time for the meeting, but a missed meeting after a concert doesn't seem surprising to me. Concert started at 7:40 pm according to a ticket stub photo here [1]
Larry Silverstein was reportedly double booked and kept a dermetology appointment his wife had booked after he missed one a month prior. Stuff happens, your wife books medical appointments for you without checking your calendar and you don't miss them twice.
Lutnick took his eldest son to their first day of Kindergarten. Which is something you do if you can. I didn't see any indication that he had a meeting scheduled. I'm guessing there's no consipiracy or even reporting about him going to the first day of Kindergarten for his other three children, but he probably did.
[1] https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/michael-jackson-30t...
It would be strange in 2001 for a father to take his kids to their first kindergarden. It would be stranger in a Jewish family.
> Not sure what to make of this.
Not much as the sample has (literally) survival bias.
I feel like it's just a statistical fact that many people used to visit and cancel visits there every day, but it's hard to say how unlikely this was without numbers.
Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg were famously supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11, and Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming a movie at the World Trade Center that very morning. I’m sure more near-brushes exist.
George Herbert Walker Bush and Richard Nixon were both in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. What should rational people make of that? Nothing, other than that people have very poor statistical intuitions ... see the work of Kahneman and Tversky.
Bush being there likely wasn't a coincidence.
Really? What is the actual probability attached to that word "likely", and what is the data is support of a Bayesian calculation to reach that conclusion?
I refer again to rational people. Bush was president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, and was meeting with local Texans to build support for his run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His presence had nothing to do with Kennedy. At the moment of the assassination he was in Tyler, 100 miles away.
Even if, contrary to all reason, Bush was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, there would not have been any reason for him to personally be in Dallas that day.
Same with Homeland. How many times do you see Carrie stymied by the law and cheer when she eventually breaks it?
I was going to say the same about James Bond, but it turns out they literally boast about helping in its production on their website, so it's not really a conspiracy theory https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-cia-and-pop-culture/
It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.
And just like stochaistic terror, it's a label you can apply to basically any media you don't like, that seems to support a political agenda you are opposed to.
Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.
And it was a Fox production. Using the most obvious shill isn't very covert.
The democrats introduced the patriot act...
except that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
> On October 23, 2001, U.S. representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced House bill H.R. 3162, which incorporated provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill, and a Senate bill introduced earlier in the month.[5] The next day, October 24, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66,[6] with Democrats comprising the overwhelming majority of "no"-votes.
> The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.
Depends what counts as "introduced", the Patriot Act was based on the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act written by Joe Biden.
This is something Biden was proud of, and confirmed in his own words many times
https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-joe-b...
The surveillance state has bipartisan support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
Don't scare people with an article explicitly calling it Marxist! They'll have a fit!
It’s a conspiracy theory in that there’s no evidence of funding, support, or even cooperation in the particular case of “24”.
The 24 pilot was filmed before 9/11. After 9/11, the show had to be modified because reality has become uncomfortably close to it. That included delaying the premiere and removing a scene involving an exploding passenger aircraft.
The Washington Post reported on a trend of shows about counter-terrorism and spies, on August 4 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/08/04/...
That article mentions that some of those shows relied on government consultation, with the CIA and FBI, to help with realism, etc. “24” was not one of them. “24” co-creator Joel Surnow is on record saying there was no government involvement.
Quote from the WP for context:
> Coming this fall [2001]: A new primetime drama series takes a close-up look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals.
> The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox. Some years it's twenty-something sitcoms. Sometimes it's doctors, or vermin-oriented "reality" shows. This fall, the trend is Fed TV: No fewer than five new network series depict the exploits of people with civil-service pay grades, shiny employee ID badges and very large guns.
But it was “24” that did the most to normalize the “torture the bad guys till they reveal the plot” and other such right-wing wet dreams.
Torturing bad guys isn’t “right wing” lol. The second season came out my freshman year of college, and about a dozen of us in our dorm watched it religiously every week. I’m pretty sure only two of us were republicans. The show had universal appeal (to men). There’s like a dozen Bollywood knock offs of the show.
How many of those same people are Republicans today, because of various shifts in the political positions the different American political parties take with respect to demographic groups such as men?
More than a few—this was Georgia Tech and these are all southern white guys—but not the majority.
That’s quite the Overton window you’re living with.
> Georgia
Ah yes, I see.
24 was one of the highest rated shows on television, won 20 Emmy awards and was nominated for 68. People just like torturing and killing terrorists. Not just Americans either—it’s a popular Bollywood trope as well.
Show me someone who "likes torturing" and I'll show you someone who's a social media algorithm away from being MAGA or the local equivalent. "Right wing" is the correct term.
Briefly checking your comment history, it's the correct term for you as well, so what's the issue? You don't want to admit it?
I’m happy to admit it. But I think that there’s lots of democrats who are fine with it too—folks who agree on how to handle terrorists, but just want more generous social welfare. I don’t think its a real dividing line in the electorate.
Except people love torture anyway. Even people who say they're opposed to torture usually do so in terms of "it's bad to torture people, but like, it would totally work". It is a ludicrously common sentiment.
The actual conspiracy was the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty producers that the Intel to find bin Laden came from torturing a detainee, which was a straight up lie (namely: under standard interrogation he provided the intelligence they needed...then they waterboarded him over 100 more times which provided absolutely nothing).
Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.
A conspiracy theory without a shadowy government organization is just a conspiracy.
Fair!
Frankly EU India and China need to take a tougher stand here or see themselves getting harassed in future.
You may be unaware, but the EU, India, and China have also engaged in their own versions of economically-pressured internet presence takedowns of international activists and dissidents they label subversive. The degree differs according to leverage and their constitutional reasoning, but there is no spirit of opposition to this type of policy if that’s what you’re imagining.
Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.
They will only catch the amateurs. But they can pat themselves on the back I guess that did something.
It does more than catch amateurs, it's a heavy blow against the adoption and usefulness
Sounds better and better!
Poor government has to fight crime the old fashioned way.
Ridiculous.
This isn't comparable to the legality issues in particular countries, a comparatively minor threat for FOSS software projects. If the US declares your organization as terrorist, you'll lose banking access globally by leveraging the SWIFT system. The US influence has always been problematic, but this is now blatantly abused for MAGA populism.
All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.
It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, we make technology that gets around the laws. Governments must increase their tyranny just to maintain the same level of control they had before. The result is either an uncontrollable population, or a totalitarian state.
I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate some crime because fully policing them would require crossing serious lines. It's becoming increasingly clear though that governments have no limits. There is no cost they are unwilling to pay in the name of maintaining their own power.
I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.
Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.
This is hardly unprecedented -- in fact, it looks like the US government has learned a thing or two from the anti-spam community. If you actually want to block e-mail or newsgroup spam at its source, you don't complain to the spammer themselves, but rather to their mail/news provider, and if that doesn't work, you escalate the issue to the upstream provider, the hosting company for the spammer's website, the registrar for the spammer's domain names, and so on. This is time-consuming but is sometimes effective. (Of course, dedicated spammers may then switch providers, or start employing distributed botnets of zombified residential devices, but knocking out their infrastructure at least temporarily does disrupt their operations for a time and drives up their cost of business to the point where they may reduce or even cease their activity.)
The anti-spam community can’t throw you in jail or fine you.
There is a balance that needs to be struck between freedoms and rule of law and it's quite rare to be able to actually have discussions about how to strike that balance because most folks willing to discuss have a simplistic but vaguely absolute position favoring one extreme or another and can never come to the point of deciding of where to draw the lines of enough freedom or enough control.
If you have real operational security concerns, your provider shouldn't know anything about you; should in fact have bilateral shielding between themselves and you to prevent either counterparty from learning stuff. That's how Signal works.
But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).
There's all sorts of things any service provider could do to sleuth out who its users are. The implication of this OFAC determination is that A/I didn't need to sleuth anything out; they are accused of knowingly and deliberately assisting the PKK.
Signal will allow traffic analysis. You send the message to signal, if they wish they can write down to whom they send it on.
It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.
Again: in every system there's always some kind of sleuthing you could do to attempt to identify a user. That's not the legal standard. The complaint against A/I is that they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK.
No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.
Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.
If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.
The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.
I don't have an opinion about the PKK. My broad take is: if Europe doesn't care, there's no reason for the US to be leading a sanctions effort. I'm confident like everybody else that this is largely pretextual.
All I care about is the claim that if they can do this to A/I they'll come for Signal next. That doesn't follow.
Impossible for a public thing though, noblogs.org will always be traceable to where noblogs.org is hosted because that's how the packets get there.
You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.
Well, a fast broadcast at least. Of you're willing to wait for a pocket switched network to spread the signal, you can hide the source pretty well.
Right, I'm only moved to comment by the implications being drawn on this thread that Signal and WhatsApp are next. Different fact patterns and different legal standards.
Signal and WhatsApp are already required to give your communications to the government.
Signal and WhatsApp don't have the plaintext of your communications to begin with.
This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.
Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..
Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.
This OFAC action isn't based on "antifa", though the press release predictably takes shots at it. It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
PKK is the pretext, there is no evidence.
The US does not give a damn about PKK. They used the Kurdish sister organizations in Syria and Iran. They condemn PKK because Erdogan wants it.
The US would have zero issues with a Kurdish state comprising parts of Turkey and Iran that splinters the region even more.
I don't think US cares about the PKK either, but that's not my point.
> It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.
The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.
But decide for yourself, if "Antifa Ost" deserves US anti-terrorism attention to the extent of OFAC sanctions, or if it's maaaybe populist action... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_left-wing_extremism_tr...
Incidentally, funny how the NSU isn't on that list, hm?
It's neither an explanation nor a tautology; it's an element of US law.
So if those prior sentences or yours are not related, your argument is part wrong, part irrelevant/nonsensical. Good talk.
The picture everyone is missing is voting in November is how this gets resolved. The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy. Theres no reason to put up with this, the other side of a 70% electorate opposition is prison for the lawless incumbent
> The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy.
And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.
I agree with you in that barring the above, there is no logical reason a vast majority of all elections should lean away from MAGA/GOP considering the state of the country.
Even if Barack Obama himself was re-elected and the Democrats gained a 102% supermajority, does anybody seriously believe this sanction in particular would be reversed?
If the Dems get the House and Senate, expect a lot of reversals.
I would imagine we might even have some "settlements" with the "DOJ" before the end of Trumps term
I believe there is a double standard here compared to section 230 of the communications act.
Platforms can't be held liable for speech on their platforms for a reason. For full disclosure: I feel ambivalent about that.
I don't know of an equivalent legal protection for I2P-like infrastructure.
You feel ambivalent about eg. HN not being held liable for some random user signing up and posting, say, a terroristic threat on it? You realise that if platforms/HN were legally punished for that, no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
You are mostly right about my ambivalence (re: liability) but wrong about the conclusion.
> no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
That does not follow. Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision. For example, a site might choose not to have anonymization and then liability passes through a KYC chain. If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public. I think this probably already happens in large extent where images are scanned to avoid bad things appearing on public sites and there is already liability around that.
I know that isn't a popular position. It would change the entire character of the Internet. And it couldn't just be thrust upon people since the current contract is one of promised anonymity (even if that is probably not true wrt state actors).
> Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision.
To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:
1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.
2. Most sites would not have any incentive to do it either, since knowing the original author's identity would not shield them from liability. In some cases it would increase their liability instead!
> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.
No, for most sites the opposite would occur.
One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does not create involvement and liability for the message. It means you can block things without becoming a sorta-co-author of the things that pass the filter.
Repeal that, and sites will be forced into either (A) basically no moderation so no liability or (B) blocking 99% and letting through the safest 1% they're willing to be liable for.
_______________
Useful links:
* "Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?) " https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/29/everything-you-know-abou...
* "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act " - https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
What doesn't follow? Who said we should repeal section 230? Or to do so without replacing it?
Not me, I said I was ambivalent about it; don't put words in my mouth. My words were: "there would have to be some similar provision [to KYC]". Similar, not the same. Not nothing.
Everything else sounds like you imagining/speculating about what some future provision would look like. And your imagined fears don't play into my ambivalence.
Here's my paraphrased view of the comment chain:
1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."
2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be ambivalent about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."
3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."
5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."
6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about that happening."
7. [Error: Recursion detected]
In other words, the thread was was steered into "what if Section 230 went away" (at #2) and your reply looks as if you recognized that and proceeded to build on it.
I2P don't ideologically vet their users nor does Signal. A/I Collective does. That's kind of the pointe of all this.
It's just incredible how spiteful the federal government is towards its constituency
Not really. It's not like they're going after actual terrorists.
What sort of logic is this? I use I2P and no one sanctioned me or labeled me a terrorist.
I'd look at the Prairieland Detention Center Case to understand how broadly and aggressively this government is using "terrorism" to go after political opponents.
Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years in prison for moving a box of magazines related to the protest. He wasn't even at the actual protest.
Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
It's very much not far fetched that you as an I2P node could get hit with a terrorism charge if some political enemy ends up using your node. That's on the same level of moving pamphlets for a protest.
> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.
> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...
Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.
Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.
From supporters of the defendants:
https://prairielanddefendants.com/what-really-happened-at-pr...
I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.
Isn't it just as likely they are using facebook, instagram, and tiktok?
I checked for an official PKK YouTube channel. I found that they don’t have one as they’re a designated foreign terrorist organization* and Google complies with that designation by not allowing them an official presence. Unsure about the others but I doubt any of those companies would allow an official account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.
* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
In a much lighter but similar move, Suno is now associating exporting generated music with the behavior of "bad actors."
Signal is a honeypot
I agree that ultimately they'll try to target Signal. Meredith (Whittaker) has a tough job on her hands. Much admiration.
Have we forgotten Megaupload? Napster? Limewire? BitTorrent?
Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.
This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.
They're not being targeted for terrorist activity per se; they're being targeted for providing material assistance to terrorists.
Per the Treasury Department:
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
"Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism." https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
Per the State Department: "The A/I Collective provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. Many of these groups have relied on the A/I Collective’s digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiqués by U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure, along with instructions for building improvised explosive and incendiary devices – all routed through a network of foreign servers intended to conceal criminal activity from law enforcement." They then go on to list the specifics. (https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...)
> targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented
It is not unprecedented though. The US military empire always was supported by the business empire and corruption empire. Trump and his BigBro Epstein party-goers just make it much more obvious. In reality the terrorists are in the US government primarily.
> Only months after Paranoia [their first server] went online, the G8 came to Genoa. Many A/I participants were also involved with Indymedia Italy. They helped construct the movement’s media center, laying cables, configuring servers and building workstations through which protesters could report what was happening across the city. What followed was historic: enormous demonstrations, the police killing of Carlo Giuliani, indiscriminate beatings in the streets, torture and abuse inside the Bolzaneto barracks and the nighttime raid on the Diaz school. Official narratives competed with photographs, recordings and firsthand testimony transmitted through independent infrastructure. Genoa became one of the earliest major demonstrations to be documented from nearly every direction by its participants rather than exclusively through institutional media.
https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10083/2
Very curious. My latest submission is the video of Larry Ellison with the "The police will be on their best behavior[,] Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on". (It was triggered by a piece on TheOnion.)
Turns out, other people had been recording events, so that a covering narrative may not prevail over the truth.
There is also an article on we will free us [1] if you want to dive deeper into that rabbit hole.
[1] https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...
The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:
a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:
> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.
b) And the issue U.S. has with them:
> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.
Just a helpful reminder that "antifascist" just means communist.
No, it doesn't. That there are different words for it should be a hint it's different things.
Not at all. The Republican party loves to throw both labels at anything it doesn't like, but most people who are against fascism are not communists.
Most people who label themselves anti-fascists are, though.
The only people who say this are people who don't actually know anyone who is antifascist. Hell, most of the people I've met who strait up identify as antifa are probably closer to democratic socialist than communist and they tend to be pretty dweeby.
>[The US State Dept's] examples include alleged railway and pipeline sabotage in Europe, attacks on energy infrastructure, Rose City Antifa, resistance to Atlanta’s proposed police-training center, Jane’s Revenge and publications carrying statements attributed to armed organizations.
At least one of these things is not like the others. Why are peaceful protests against "Cop City" (Atlanta's proposed police-training center) lumped in with violent attacks on infrastructure? This isn't the first time either - Samuel Tunick, the man who was charged with destruction of evidence for giving his duress pin to the CBP agents, was being investigated for his connection to the Cop City protests.[1]
And as others have said, what does it say about the current US admin that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists? I will say, at least unlike Cop City protests afaik, Rose City Antifa seems willing to use violence to accomplish their goals.[2]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-pro...
[2]: https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/statment-on-strategy-and...
> what does it say ... that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists?
it says that these so-called 'anti-fascist' groups are good at branding themselves?
Anyone can start a group and call it "Anti-Fascist" but it's silly to suggest that opposing that group means you're a fascist. Maybe you don't like their methods. Maybe you think they're full of shit in who they choose to oppose. Or maybe they do commit crimes and you call them criminals.
What's your favorite flavor of boot leather to suck on?
Go back to Reddit
> violent attacks
> on energy infrastructure
that's not violence
When it's -30c outside and your house hasn't had heating for days, you might disagree.
Seems like this should be a/the top level link
I clicked around a bit, read the manifesto, I still have no idea what these people do. I guess they claim to have been around for a while, but a bunch of the links don't work and the manifesto has definitely been updated to reflect 2026 opinions.
What is this?
The "About" page seems fairly clear:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.
The very first sentence on their about page says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
It also says their manifesto was written in 2002.
You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
i thought the page says it pretty clearly.
they are a group of people providing services to activists. services include email, web hosting, chat, and other anonymity services. (see https://www.inventati.org/services/)
For what it's worth, the people I have known personally who talk like this don't actually do very much except talk like this. Then again, they have never been sanctioned by a government.
They host blogs and email used by many activists.
including the noblogs site which is used by many anarchist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, etc groups
Maybe a honeypot?
Most likely a honeypot.
It is intentionally vague. From the State Dept:
> The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
I don't trust the US State Department to tell the truth. At this point, it's like citing a Wikipedia edited entirely by bad faith actors.
In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly: https://www.inventati.org/about
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
I don't see anything wrong with that. They make 0 money from this. It's 100% run by volunteers. They don't support any orgs that could afford to do it themselves.
It's like if a group of you and your friends got together and gave tech support to any orgs that care about something you're passionate about (e.g. ending FPTP voting)
> I don't see anything wrong with that.
Did I say there was something wrong with that? No. Let me repeat what I said: "In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly". Do you disagree with this statement?
Opposing fascism and racism is not "radical left". It's centrism.
The State Department's words are not A/I's.
Being against facism and racism is centrism, being part of an "anti-fascist" or "anti-racist" group is radical left. If you're part of a "group" that has stated goals of pushing something that is already a norm then its pretty clear what what you're doing is not pushing for what is already the norm as if it was the norm you wouldn't need to push for it.
No of course I don't. The State Department is alleging terrorism. In their own words they are alleging anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-war, anti-fascism, etc.
How could you possibly equate those?
Did you click on https://www.inventati.org/about ? (I also tried reading the manifesto first.)
From it:
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
I suspect they have some "not mainstream" political views; although I think understanding what these views are requires more in-depth reading of the blogs that they host.
Yeah, that says pretty much nothing about what they do. It reads like an enterprise tech company webpage saying "we provide solutions to help transform your company into the digital age".
Solutions to help individuals live through the digital age. Very different - for-profit vs for-survival (etc.).
Will you just click the link? It's like 2 paragraphs and the very first sentence says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
How much more specific can you get?
> some "not mainstream" political views
I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.
Anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-militarism?
Good?
> Good?
That will depend on what the bearers will want to mean with it, as usual.
> "not mainstream" political views
Yeah we should ban any non-mainstream political views and designate them as terrorist
It’s a sad day when antifascism is considered not mainstream
The US govt is trying to brand "antifascism" as a terrorist ideology. They host antifa stuff.
Autistici/Inventati is an Italian collective, active since around 2001, that runs free digital services for activists, grassroots groups and anyone who wants to communicate without being profiled.
It provides email accounts, mailing lists, blogs, websites, chat and VPN access.
Is it truly anyone, or only anyone that politically aligns with them?
Anyone that politically aligns with them. They say that explicitly:
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
They don't receive any money for this. It's 100% volunteer services.
Then they are an activist group, not an “infrastructure provider” as claimed elsewhere in this thread, and holding them responsible for what their members do with the accounts they give them seems entirely fair.
being selective about who you provide free services to makes you an activist group?
You want them to be "held accountable" for supporting groups that don't align with the ideology of the US whitehouse.
Obviously not to fascists, and if you look at their website they make it very clear that you need to align ideologically and explain why and how you will use their services
Could the persons that mention the PKK all over this thread kindly find links now that noblogs.org is partly dysfunctional and autistici.org is down?
Google Search yields a very small amount of third party support for the PKK, all unreachable now.
I cannot find any evidence at all and neither can LLMs that this organization has ever directly supported the PKK or hosted a PKK website.
It can't be because of a PKK link because then the US would have to designate themselves as terrorist. They literally armed and supplied to YPG to fight ISIS. The Kurds proved to be the most effective at stopping ISIS
For those like me who don't have context, here is the New York Times article on this recent news / event
https://archive.fo/e8Gss
> The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.
> The move is part of the Trump administration’s fight against what it calls a “resurgence of far-left political terrorism” worldwide, a focus that many security experts say is disproportionate.
> In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.
a/I collective in the OP is the third on this list.
> based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world
Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable). Masar Badil supports "armed struggle". One of the other groups ("hammer") recently designated a terrorist group (and linked to A/I Collective in another article I read ) got its name by attacking people in Germany with hammers.
Designating A/I Collective a terrorist group is different as it is not directly supporting violence, but it is providing free services to people who do, and it says it provides services to groups its aim is to "provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with.". On the other hand their terms forbid "military use" which is broadly defined enough to rule out terrorism.
I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups, n the other hand, unless they have been going out of their way to support violence in some way I do not see reasonable grounds for banning them. Lots of commercial services have dodgy users. My fear is that is is heading in the direction of "if you do not hand info to the US authorities on demand you will be deemed a terrorist"
Here's my "nuanced" take: If a pro-zionist group were officialy designated as terrorists for spraying paint into a jet-engine I would find that ridiculous too.
Sabotage of military aircraft is political violence.
> I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups
The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.
Spraying paint into the jet engine of a military aircraft is not "terrorism". It may be criminal, but it was not in any way a violent crime. Given that it disabled the aircraft, it counts as more than mere vandalism, but calling this an act of terror is outrageous.
The logic seems to be that Hamas has committed terrorist attacks against Israel, and is also the government of Palestine, so anyone fighting for the human rights of Palestinian people is actually materially supporting Hamas terrorism against Israelis. That does not really track if you know anything at all about what's going on in Palestine right now, or what people's actual criticisms of Israel are.
Terrorism is often defined as actions designed to invoke political change.
There's no actual requirement for violence for it to be terrorism.
You have a very nuanced take that I broadly agree with. I would add that they were probably targeted for political reasons, it's not like the current administration is going out of their way to tackle right wing "terrorism".
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable).
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".
This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.
There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.
Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".
The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.
Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft
This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.
Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades. I would say the case for targetting military equipment is stronger than for damaging most other things.
> This is simply armed conflict.
Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
> Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades.
Does that include property in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon? Because if the people who spray painted something are "terrorists", I want to know what the people who wiped Rafah off the face of the earth are called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah
Colinizers?
Well the definition is flawed, or as the British say, the law is an ass.
Terrorism is widely understood to be the deployment of military force against civilian populations. Of course states do this all the time, but 'state terrorism' is basically dependent on whether politicians in country A align with country B or not; if they don't, they'll call out state abuses in country B as state terrorism, if not they'll say it's law and order.
Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
>any kind of property
"Any kind" is quite the load bearing argument there. Let me remind you Europe is under an ongoing land invasion, which is why fucking with its defensive capabilities is unlikely to solicit much sympathies.
> Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.
You cannot hide behind convenience.
> Damaging property for political ends
Damaging military equipment is a military end, not a political one. If it were otherwise, then a military attacking a military would definitionally be terrorism. At that point, you've removed the utility of the word "terrorism" from English and made it synonymous with "armed conflict."
Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.
Contrast with 9/11, where symbols of American capitalism, filled with civilians, were attacked in order to terrify people who have nothing to do with those buildings into supporting changes in policy that hurt the US.
I suppose the UK could declare Palestine Action as combatants and hunt them down and shoot them.. but that doesn't seem very uh, appropriate. I sort of prefer them being arrested and going through courts.
Note that the UK would be committing war crimes in this case, since you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers, you are supposed to capture them and put them in POW camps.
Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…
PA was armed.
> you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers,
That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.
To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.
> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens
I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.
An artillery crew is armed with the cannon.
POWs don’t have attorneys, but they do have rights. Limiting food and medical aid is a war crime.
Of course, everybody routinely violates the rights of POWs, and only the losers ever get prosecuted.
> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.
I hope no one takes this seriously.
If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.
Terrorism used to be defined as attacking civilian targets to aid in political messaging.
Attacking military targets is somewhere between an insurgency, partisanism, or an armed conflict.
If we let terrorism mean “any act against the state”, then people who burn police cars are the same as people who plant bombs in shopping malls.
Are you sure you want to say it's armed conflict? That makes it legitimate to kill members of Palestine Action.
The labeling of groups as "terrorist" is intended to justify authorization for military action against those groups, where, prior to the Global War on Terror, state affiliation or outright sponsorship was typically needed for a military response.
Do you think that's a different understanding of the situation than the one that the state currently has?
Is it not "legitimate" in the same way to kill terrorists?
I am not an expert on the legalities. My impression is that, if they are terrorists, you kind of have to catch them in the act, or preparing to act, or providing support for actions. An army, in wartime, can be attacked in broader circumstances.
Corrections welcome if I am wrong.
The US has murdered around 220 people at sea over the last year for the act of travelling like they are "narco terrorists".
Thank you! Kind of nuts they posted this with that title but no explanation.
Well, the State Dept is anything but vague about its argument:
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
"The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure. The group has become a key node in a transnational campaign by violent and criminal far-left networks to destabilize the United States and its partners across Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond...."
"The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide."
So the argument is that it's a communication platform? With such "specifically designed" tools to enable "terrorist activity", such as "encrypted messaging" and other dual-use technologies such as: "a website", "an email".
With such strong proof as "A far-left extremist media group ... relies on A/I ... to publish official communiqués and calls to action for [various organizations]" This is what we in the business call a direct proof A/I materially supports Hezbollah terrorist actions. Clear direct link, simply because all alternate explanations are impossible. Everyone is happy that americans saved the day, again!
State Dept so in the clear that in this "This same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices." they don't name the group nor the "terrorist" because if one would check, improvised explosive device would turn out to be a molotov.
So Casey Goonan throws molotov at a police car -> Abolition Media (the unnamed group) publishes some claims about the attack -> A/I, a comm platform provider on another continent now suddenly provides "material support for violent extremism" in the US, just because Abolition Media used its blog infra. Cool story. Despite both links being tenous at best.
And such it will be with lot of other claims in there, given that US is led by absolute clauns and psychos currently.
I guess bombing them got some pushback.
Everyone's a terrorist nowadays.
In times like these...
Do I see "Free palestine" in the corner there?
seems like PIR (the .org registry) now also suspended their main domain: https://www.whois.com/whois/autistici.org (it is on serverHold)
Interesting to see that their most important domain, noblogs dot org, seems unaffected.
I think the registrar makes the difference: autistici.org was registered via Gandi, but noblogs.org registrar is Tucows Domains Inc., which points[1] to njal.la, an "offshore" domain hoster that should be more resilient, but isn’t really usable for email hosting, since domains at such a hoster will land on blacklists almost immediately.
[1]: https://tucowsdomains.com/provider-result/
> We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible
This is like straight out of every evil villains mouth.
Actual link: https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076
Title: A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
This administration is on a witch hunt for anything they can identify as "antifa" when no such central organization insists. Instead it's being used as an over broad label to attack organized opposition to it's broadly unpopular policy agenda.
(If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
Smart enough to reject abusive little word games?
I see "fascism" and "antifascism" more like "matter" and "antimatter" - pretty much the same thing, just there's a violent reaction when the two collide.
This is a terrible take.
Were the Allied powers antifascist?
Biggest antifa "rally" in history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?
You cant judge a group by its name. Otherwise, Make America Great Again is great, the National Socialist German Workers' party seems fine, etc.
It's not an organized group. It's a label being used as a cudgel to attack anyone who doesn't like the current president (who also happens to have the world's most fragile ego/thinnest skin/whatever his soul crushing pathology actually is).
It's not a group. There are several smaller orgs that call themselves antifascist but there's no such centralized group or political structure. It's not even a specific ideology. It's just oppositional to fascism
Exactly. Antifa is short for "opposed to fascism". Which, you know, is the bad thing where you hurt a lot of people just because they are different from the "group" you defined, with the aim of spoliating the outsiders to enrich the members, or make them an inferior cast, etc...
Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...
Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.
Nomenclature alone is meaningless. Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which professes anti-fascist messaging and motives both democratic and anti-fascist? I wouldn't assume every "antifa" group is principled and accurate in its diagnosis of what fascism is and who are acceptable targets for their outgroup directed aggression.
Perhaps not, but this administration is in no way principled or accurate in its diagnosis of anything so their labelling of any group doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
NK is a dictatorship. I don't know where you got the misunderstanding that they would be "anti-fascist".........
Anti fascist => anti dictatorship.
Anti fascist means that you don't like fascism and that you are not going to let it happen passively.
(Tired of explaining the obvious. But I guess that somebody has to.)
A dictatorship mechanically leads to a situation where the governing group is working for their own wealth, thus in this case the "group" is the governing class. The extent and definition of that class is voluntarily limited so that wealth and power converges to them.
Now you see it? Yes that is a fascism, meaning that:
dictatorship => fascism
And the reverse stems from the "groupism" (i.e. tribalism) of fascism, which entails that you need exclude large portions of the population from the political system.
As this "group" definition becomes narrower and narrower (in order to make more wealth converge to the alleged "true humans" of its center), it becomes a harsher and harsher dictatorship, and finally a strongman regime.
fascism => dictatorship
The point is that people who proclaim themselves "antifa", be they in dictatorial power over half of Korea, or merely a band of organized activists, are not automatically due credibility and trust because of some grammatical fixation that magically guarantees alignment. Do you only become skeptical when the message is twisted after winning power?
"Antifa" factions in the Spanish Civil War ultimately did not win and accidentally enable a Spanish DPRK, but they still were perfectly capable of being and doing evil, such as committing mass rape and shooting of nuns.
What somebody says != what somebody does.
If somebody says something nice and does nothing, that's good.
If at the same time somebody does something bad, that's bad.
That does not remove the evaluation (nice or bad) of the speech alone.
Saying "I am against this thing that is objectively despicable" is GOOD.
So, saying to be anti fascist is good.
Saying to be anti fascist and doing fascist things is bad.
I don't know how much more obvious things I am supposed to explain...
I guess there is no limit to it.
You are assigning this magical reality and then getting mad about it.
Anti-fascists are not concerned with the magical weight of this in-group designation. They are concerned with all things non-fascist.
And you are factually wrong.
You are probably thinking about the Communist factions among the Republican forces opposed to Franco.
ALL of the Republican factions were opposed to Franco and to fascism, not only the Communists.
And, besides, nobody was calling themselves "antifa" at that time, because that was damn obvious that if you were in the Resistance, you were opposed to that despicable tyrant. But they were absolutely anti fascists, all of them and not only the Communists.
If this wasn't so poorly written I'd have assumed it's GPT-3 slop.
OP's point is that a group's name does not necessarily hold any link to their activities, so an "anti fascist" group could very well be doing fascist activities themselves, name notwithstanding.
And if a Christian group is doing Demonic stuff that's a problem.
And seeing slop where there is not, you are being rude to me without purpose.
Not everybody is born in an English-speaking country.
I laid down the ideas logically, maybe that is what sounded foreign to you.
By the way you are the person writing nonsensical stuff such as "Antifa is a terrorist organization", while everybody is repeating tirelessly that it is just an adjective meaning to be opposed to fascism:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483072
> when no such central organization insists
No any such organization exists. It is a movement, and a description one can describe one's self or actions: "anti-fascist".
But of course, their logic for sanctioning-by-association would mean that they all - Trump, Bessent, Rubio etc. - with their innumerable contacts with "violent terrorist groups and regimes" everywhere around the world, and just themselves really - should have been sanctioned, arrested, tried, or just disposed of like the US does with so many it dislikes.
Yes. The president fomented a violent insurrection and then pardoned its participants (who should all still be in prison). He shouldn't be in office and you could similarly sanction his own social media platform, X and any other number of their supporters.
Well, maybe that too, but I meant the Gaza genocide and the slaughter of civilians in Iran, Yemen, on Venezuelan boats etc.
Or the long tail of bodies that will come out of the USAID cuts.
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
Communist parties around the world killed 80+ million civilians, and were also vehemently anti-fascist, will opposing that make you fascist?
While we're doing hypotheticals, what does Elon Musk's destruction of USAID and the downstream deaths resulting from it make him?
If someone is opposed to Communism they should oppose Communism, not anti-fascism. Seems pretty straightforward
Oddly the US is very cozy with some modern Communists!
the group: https://web.archive.org/web/20260101085655/https://www.autis...
> A/I (Autistici/Inventati, pronounced [au’tistiʧi]-[iŋ’vɛntati], or [iŋvɛn’tati]) was born in 2001 from an encounter of individuals and collectives of the autonomous anticapitalist movement interested in technology and active in the digital rights struggle. We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible. We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals.
> All of our services are provided for free, without any form of control or commoditization of the personal user data. We don’t receive any form of compensation for our work. We are volunteers exploiting the experiences we accumulated over years of technological, political and legal research while doing radical activism, and we are motivated and inspired by the principles of solidarity and self organization.
From their about page:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements. Our principles are fairly straightforward: the world should not be run on money, should be rooted in solidarity, community, mutual help, equal rights and freedom, and social justice. Easy, isn’t it? We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
I'm bothered by their incorrect use of the root word 'autistic' - That's just a poor choice on their part. Very bad look.
Same. I wonder if there's something I don't understand here? But afaict it doesn't seem to involve autistic people in particular?
Given administration's obsession with Antifa being in the room with them at all times, it's impossible to take anything they say in relation to this as even close to factual.
@dang at this point this is either Hacker News or anti-capitalist. I think this all should be banned.
The biggest free speech violation I can imagine.
As far as I can tell, there were no credible criminal charges against this group, except that they are effective organizers on the opposite side of political spectrum. In the White House’s deranged logic, this qualifies them to be officially designated as domestic terrorists [1].
Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
The first amendment only applies inside the US. The US is allowed to cancel the speech of foreigners.
And murder foreigners, of course. It's allowed in the Constitution!
Yes, which is why the 2013 drone strikes crossed a line by openly murdering Americans.
Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.
There is the absolutely perfect Supreme Court case that ruled against your theory.
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
Their infrastructure and services were used in domestic terrorist attacks on pregnancy centers in the United States, by the CHAZ operation in which two black teenagers were lynched, attempts to crash police helicopters, attempts to burn police officers alive.
Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
The current United States government is very keen on pushing the idea that there is a vast and shadowy international left-wing conspiracy waging war on it.
This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.
And despite it being transparent garbage, millions of Americans are eagerly lapping up Red Scare 2.0
Related discussions:
US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
Links to the actual announcements of sanctions:
* https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
* https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
And - the list of people that were originally put in this category when G.W. Bush issued this executive order has 29 people/organizations: Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaida, and various affiliated/related organizations.
So, yesterday it was Bin-Laden, today it is some Italian left-wing tech guys, and tomorrow it might well be you or me. Get ready to be branded a terrorist at some point.
Don't worry guys, fascist are always looking out for free speech.
What was that...
muummuummmmemmmeuuuu...
BANG
Remember, Trump and his cultists are symptoms -- not the cause. I.E. Cuba's embargo was in place long before the orange buffoon, and that is the same force at play here. Fear that the people will get a taste of a fairer, more just alternative. > “are you antifa or are you fa?”
https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076 - Direct link to the sanctions declaration.
The actual Treasury Announce here - https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism."
How quaint. The MEK (Iranian People's Mudjahheddin) were designated as a terrorist organization but collected money in EU streets all the time. Now they are useful against Khamenei.
The US would also like to use the equivalent of the PKK in the large Kurdish part of Iran against Khamenei.
Nothing to say of using the PKK rebranding of SDF in Syria as well as receiving "global terrorist" Al Jolani in the White House.
US cynically removed them from the Terrorists list in 2012.
MEK is probably just 300 really old guys now, they have strict rules against marrying outside the org.
What does it entail, in practice?
They are sanctioned, okay, and? What happens practically.
US sanctions mean if you trade with the santioned org.. YOU get sanctioned (lose access to trade or financial systems controlled by US or US companies like Visa)
They will become pariahs financially speaking. Nobody will be authorized to wire money to/from them. It's brutal.
> Nobody
In the USA - the consequences should be only related to USA pertinent actors. The newspapers in Italy say, "there is no judgement against them in Italy".
The same mechanism that was used to sanction Russia, Iran - will be used to sanction A/I Collective.
If Italy doesn't shut down their services, the Italy itself will be shut out of SWIFT.
> Italy itself will be
Because of a decision from the USA administration? ?!
>...then* Italy itself will be shut out of SWIFT.
SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium. Only 2 banks out of the total 24 on the board of directors is US banks. Unless there's a hostile takeover of the SWIFT organisation by the US, I think this is a bit of a stretch. (Plot-twist: Italy is on the board of directors.)
SWIFT abides by international law and local laws. Including those against processing money transfer requests for terrorist organizations like A/I.
> SWIFT abides by international law and local laws. Including those against processing money transfer requests for terrorist organizations like A/I.
A US sanction is neither a local (to all of SWIFT) or international law. The question still stands.
If you donate to them from the US, you probably get put on a no-fly list at a minimum. Maybe even a friendly visit from the feds at your home!
Anything between having their google profiles deleted to abducted and tortured at a CIA blacksite.
in this case, it mostly means trouble getting money, as they are funded via donations
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479122
The consequences may include the loss of:
https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...My question now is whether European hosting providers sprouting up in the face of the US CLOUD act will step up to provide those services.
No, because they don't want to be banned from banks. With few exceptions, the US has power over all global financial systems. Also tier 1 ISPs (even the European ones), which trickles down to all ISPs.
Do you think many banks worldwide would enjoy declaring themselves the enemies of the US government in order to assist left-wing lunatics?
You misplaced "lunatics" in your sentence, though sadly the likely answer remains the same.
> Our financial strategy relies exclusively on voluntary donations.
That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term. Sure after this news they will get lots of donations, but long term it is not something that is realistic.
Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
[0] *Unless you now know why this collective needs crypto more than ever.
>That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term
they've been around 25 years, which is nothing to sneeze at
> Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
There are many of us who do not live in the US, so many still can. Just not through paypal.
That's not how US sanctions work. When the US sanctions something, nobody is allowed to donate to them. Basically any country that trades with the US (most) has to follow according to their trade deals. Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers
> Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers.
Given that SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and Italy's major bank is one of the 24 banks on the SWIFT board, how does this "blockade" in SWIFT happen? Is the inference that all of the banks bow down to the US, even though the US only represents 2 out of the 24 banks on the board?
Maybe they should try couping the Italian government, rename themselves to Ragazzi Orgogliosi. That should help.
Look up Operation Gladio
The question stays the same: “are you antifa or are you fa?”