Everyone’s missing the big picture here which is that this targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented and concerning: <a href="https://decode39.com/16319/autistici-inventati-case-sets-a-new-counterterrorism-precedent-irdi-says/" rel="nofollow">https://decode39.com/16319/autistici-inventati-case-sets-a-n...</a><p>If a radical group sets up shop on I2P, are I2P users and devs now terrorists? This is a problem.<p>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.<p>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.
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<p>That's certainly a take.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole" rel="nofollow">https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole</a>
Michael Tracey, we really need you here...
That article tells me 4chan wasn't a honeypot but used by Epstein for his chaos or at least he thought about using it.
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It's was mostly a slightly more edgy 4chan with actually some more varied boards and wider range of political views (/leftypol/) was a thing If I remember. So mostly dumb teens and later the whole Q-Anon mentally ill boomers who took over once the board was brought by one of them much to displeasure of the edge teens. In short if that is a threat to a government and a society it's a weak government and society, comparing it to Al-Qaeda or some kind of comparable threat to anything government or nation is crazy.
Only that 8 was and is just a giant astroturfer for Watkins.
1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.<p>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.
I wonder why Epstein was communicating with 4chan's founder in 2011...
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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.
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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...
There is an endless supply of fools that can be hyped to become the next US president
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.
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The British case was overturned on appeal. (Crazy that it had to go that far though.)<p>I can't find much left or right coverage of it, there's so much news coverage in the way.
There is a difference between failing to condemn something and gloating/supporting attacks on liberty simply because one's favored political team is now doing it.
I believe the point is the unsurprising result.<p>That said:<p>> Canada debanked right wing truckers<p>Who were participating in the illegal blockade: <a href="https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/general/fca-upholds-2024-ruling-that-liberal-government-unreasonable-invoked-emergencies-act-to-clear-convoy/393592" rel="nofollow">https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/general/fca-upholds-2...</a><p>The government also exceeded their authority, but there's a gap between "I don't like (left/right)" and "blockade".<p>> multiple American platforms coordinated to silence Trump in 2021<p>After this happened and he was impeached twice for his performance regarding it: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_shows_men_beat,_drag_officer_into_savage_mob.webm" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...</a><p>(No comment on BBC link save for this not being novel by
UK standards nor specific to left/right: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial</a>)
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Any western /b/ and /pol/ is or has been a church for an ideology of fascism and pedophilia, furthermore politicians and cops LOVE to blame the platform when someone posts a manifesto and then exit the house to kill people with guns. They tend to spot this pattern because they disrupt grassroots movement just like that: agent provocateurs or controlled places will work to ensure that the status quo will not change no more than what is tolerated.
My limits for free speech are very broad and would certainly tolerate a lot of 8chan, but don't ask me to close my eyes and don't ask me to be sympathetic
Erm, but what about saying mean hateful words??<p>That makes them, like, the bad guys, don't you think?!
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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 <i>something</i>.
Poor government has to fight crime the old fashioned way.<p>Ridiculous.
>It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity.<p>Not really, unless exchanges don't let you withdraw coins into your own wallet? It's trivial for someone to buy another coin like BTC/ETH then use it to purchase Monero via defi.
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.<p>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.<p>I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate <i>some</i> 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. <i>People voted for this</i>, 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.<p>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 <i>abject failure</i> 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.
It can ban you from the internet though. The whole internet, all of it, no joke. I've been blocked by Cloudflare and Cloudfront several times today, and it's not because of spam, it's because I'm not identifiable through my IP address and therefore offer no advertising value.
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 <i>how</i> 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).
I don't understand what you mean by all this. Obviously your phone number is tied to your Signal account and Signal knows that linkage at all times - no special action is necessary for them to know it. Signal does not provide anonymity beyond what a phone number provides, and isn't designed to.<p>Signal's design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil" which makes it good for the average user. If you actually want Session or SimpleX, which sacrifice usability for even more privacy, then you know where to find those services.
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.<p>It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.
I noticed that more are using Session now and not Signal (no phone number or email required)<p><a href="https://getsession.org" rel="nofollow">https://getsession.org</a>
They don't have to do that because accounts are associated one-to-one with phone numbers.
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.<p>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 <i>all</i> nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.<p>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.<p>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, <i>he wins</i>); 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 <i>not be a terrorist organization</i>.
> No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.<p>I don't think that's true.<p>There are two possibilities: If you're proposing that dummy messages are in addition to normal messages, then dummy messages add noise to the signal, but over a long enough time, for known noise distribution, it is possible for the signal to be statistically significant. That depends on there being enough signal, but then things depend on signal traffic patterns, there are no guarantees.<p>The second possible design is that the node-to-node communication volumes for any pair of nodes is truly independent of the signal - i.e. the statistical model decides how much traffic flows from a node to another node, and that fixed amount of flow is either used for signal or for noise, and if there is more signal, it's dropped or waits. Encryption makes it impossible to distinguish signal from noise without the key known between the pair of nodes. That is secure against a passive adversary who doesn't participate in the network. However, if network users are anonymous and mutually untrusting, then the adversary can use active methods without much risk (i.e. lots of users and nodes can actually be the adversary). Every packet/message delayed or dropped also allows inference about network traffic by other users.<p>These methods can harden a network and make analysis harder, but they don't guarantee it is not possible.
No, you always send a dummy message the appointed time.<p>If you have a real message, or a network maintenance message, that substitutes for a dummy message. You never send messages other than at the appointed time.<p>Delayed or dropped messages won't matter, since you only send a message at the appointed time. So the network is literally indistinguishable from one where you have sent no messages to all participants and to even someone with complete control of the network.
Do messages have a visible receiver address of any kind? In that case, you're out of luck. The only way to do make this statistically sound would involve an insane amount of messages, rendering it impossible.
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.<p>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.
The issue is complicated.<p>Many EU governments care, because Turkey cares, but the problem is that Turkey's position that they're terrorists is legally iffy, so a lot of European courts disagree, and this creates a schizophrenic situation where politicians hold that they're terrorist and will claim that it's the government position, while the actual government position in the courts is that they mostly aren't and that it's a case-by-case question.
A problem with sending dummy messages on something like Signal, is that waking up phones unnecessarily is really bad for battery life. It also doesn't work for the voice/video call feature, since that needs to be realtime.
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.<p>You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.
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.
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.
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.<p>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..<p>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.
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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.<p>And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.<p>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?
There is no resolving this until at least the maga generation dies off.
A 30% approval rating means ~75-80% of Trump's base is still fully behind him. A two-party system will only very rarely produce figures with over 50% approval, because roughly half of voters disapprove on GP. The apathy of the 40-50% who don't vote is also a product of a system that only allows for two choices and not something to blame the apathetic for. It really makes no difference whether they vote or not, because there are only two choices and neither represents them.
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Are not they sanctioned because of Free Palestine label?<p>Any sanctioned org for just being p2p/crypto so far?<p>Seems you misdirect reasons.
In a much lighter but similar move, Suno is now associating exporting generated music with the behavior of "bad actors."
a lot of fools beleive that if they facilitate the means somehow they will be free to do so.<p>Your rights do not matter.
Laws do not matter.<p>If your technology is used by someone for bad, then someone trying to prevent that bad will some day come knocking. Law or not. Rights or not.<p>The only thing you can thus do is protect yourself. If you get taken out, that is you relying on your Rights and Laws. They dont exist and wont protect you.
It's just incredible how spiteful the federal government is towards its constituency
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 <i>official</i> account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.<p>* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
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I believe there is a double standard here compared to section 230 of the communications act.<p>Platforms can't be held liable for speech on their platforms for a reason. For full disclosure: I feel ambivalent about that.<p>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.<p>> no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?<p>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 <i>not</i> 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.<p>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.<p>To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:<p>1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.<p>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 <i>increase</i> their liability instead!<p>> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.<p>No, for most sites the opposite would occur.<p>One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does <i>not</i> 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.<p>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.<p>_______________<p>Useful links:<p>* "Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?) " <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/29/everything-you-know-about-section-230-is-wrong-why/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/29/everything-you-know-abou...</a><p>* "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act " - <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...</a>
What doesn't follow? Who said we should <i>repeal</i> section 230? Or to do so without replacing it?<p>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.<p>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:<p>1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."<p>2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be <i>ambivalent</i> about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."<p>3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."<p>5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."<p>6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about <i>that</i> happening."<p>7. [Error: Recursion detected]<p>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.
Why are you leaving out the important details:<p>You can't as an ISP prevent malicious actors from using your service, but you do can assist the government - in the case of the recent attacks on Berlins electricity that caused a fatality the German - to hand over the data to help assist law enforcement.<p>If US state-department's claims [1] are true, did noblogs.org do so – help German authorities track Terrorists or did it cover for them?<p>Because their statement does say nothing about the claims made by the state department.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...</a>
I2P don't ideologically vet their users nor does Signal. A/I Collective does. That's kind of the pointe of all this.
Have we forgotten Megaupload? Napster? Limewire? BitTorrent?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-north-texas-sentenced-100-years-prison-terrorist-attack-ice" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...</a><p>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.<p>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.
> and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest."<p>He did not, he shot at an officer and missed. He was also the only one of the protestors that shot.
From supporters of the defendants:<p><a href="https://prairielanddefendants.com/what-really-happened-at-prairieland/" rel="nofollow">https://prairielanddefendants.com/what-really-happened-at-pr...</a><p>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.
Signal is a honeypot
So true, please use random no-name services with unvetted E2EE crypto or mainstream services with none instead.<p>Much better than Signal, the platform of choice for politicians, feds, and security researchers for their personal and private communications.
Haha, no, EncroChat and Anom were. The official clients (Android and iOS) which use it contain known vulnerabilities.
I think you have to assume any USA/5 eyes based org is compromised.<p>But only NSA/CIA level access and local law enforcement or politicians. So unless you are a terrorist or high level threat it wouldn't be accessed.
They're not being targeted for terrorist activity per se; they're being targeted for providing material assistance to terrorists.<p>Per the Treasury Department:<p>"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.<p>"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." <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/" rel="nofollow">https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/</a><p>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. (<a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...</a>)
What about software projects (such as anonymous messengers) with political stances, who state the kinds of people their software is intended to help? Is that material assistance?<p>How is Signal not providing material assistance if someone alerts them that “terrorists” are now using their platform?<p>Sanctioning providers who host political groups, even if it’s extreme politics, is something new. It’s reminiscent of the Bush admin going after Indymedia, which was a huge violation of free speech and was obviously politically targeted. It’s extra ridiculous because we fund and supply the PKK (via their YPG affiliates), which makes this look like a fig leaf for the real goal of disrupting left politics. I don’t like the radical left, but I don’t think this is constitutionally allowed.<p>I feel like we need some bold lines drawn around this to make sure this power doesn’t get misused.
It’s all about mens rea. The law distinguishes between people who provide services to anyone, and people who intentionally market their service to criminals, even under coded language. In this case the provider didn’t just allegedly market themselves to them; they also actually excluded others.
Fair, I guess, although again I’m uncomfortable with how the PKK link appears to be used as an excuse for political suppression. I think in cases like this, it would be best to order the provider to discontinue services to the specific entity in question before resorting to sanctions, since they provided services to other political groups that were not listed as “terrorists”. I’m not sure if we have any information about whether this happened or not.
I agree that ultimately they'll try to target Signal. Meredith (Whittaker) has a tough job on her hands. Much admiration.
> targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented<p>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.
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> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US have all deemed a terrorist organization for over 20 years, then of course the US should sanction them and they have no moral ground to stand on.<p>No <i>moral</i> ground to stand on? Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?<p>This collective of course has much more of a moral ground to stand on than indeed Amazon.
> Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?<p>Strictly speaking, unintended collateral damage of civilians in a war does not fulfill the definition of terrorism. The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel. Terrorism is deliberate attack on civilians to achieve a political goal.
>The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.<p>Bloomberg piece on this topic:<p>>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe<p>>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.<p>>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.<p>>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.<p><a href="https://archive.is/LNMMf" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/LNMMf</a>
Strictly speaking, no. If you're going to play semantics, you first need to define how "unintended" is "unintended". If I drive down the highway at 200mph and get someone killed, is this unintentional? Now what if I do so in a crowded street? If I'm sending a missile at a country, how much effort do I need to put into research to be able to say it was "collateral" damage? If I aim them completely randomly, then what's the verdict?<p>If you're going to go down the semantics route, <i>every</i> word needs proper inspection. You're focusing on only one of them, "terrorism".<p>Luckily though, we don't need to; the US does more than enough intentional extrajudicial executions of civilians on its own. Even just considering one particular area where it does them, and then only the ones we know about, we're at about 227 civilian executions in just the last few years [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/29/us/us-caribbean-pacific-boat-strikes.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/29/us/us-caribbe...</a>
Oh okay, how about the deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure?<p>I love how governments (in the west) are absolutely incapable of campaigns of terror.
What about intended collateral damage?
> The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.<p>A mistake in a completely unjust war.<p>And what about the fishing boats we are bombing in the Caribbean and the Pacific? Not even the pretense of a legitimate war in that situation.
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><i>And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.</i><p>careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will <i>also</i> need to go. i guarantee more terrorism-related content is discussed via those providers than a/i.<p>we should probably also go after internet service providers, too. maybe the companies that make the fiber optics?<p>(has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
All the providers you mention here work with the US government in situations where their platforms are being used by terrorist organizations. It sounds like the a/i folks are specifically offering free services to a militant group, so that's why they're being sanctioned. I don't think your argument flies.
To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.<p>>careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go.<p>No, because they actively respond to removal request. Open by default, supporting request for removal.<p>The difference comes in when you are open by default and tell the US to fuck off when they ask you to stop supporting terror groups.
><i>To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.</i><p>i am replying specifically to your comments about neutral providers (that's why i quoted the part of your comment that i did)<p>><i>No, because they actively respond to removal request.</i><p>there is still orders of magnitude more conversations going through the providers i mentioned, related to terrorism/csam/etc., which is simply not reported or not known. right now, meta is facilitating <i>significantly</i> more terrorism than a/i.<p>in any case, this isn't really about terrorism. they've just overused the child-safety angle lately, and needed to drum up some anti-privacy/anti-encryption using the terrorism card.
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><i>So no one knows about these conversations but you know there are orders of magnitude more? Walk me through that.</i><p>sure. whatsapp is used by literal billions of people. add in a few more billion people through facebook, instagram, gmail, outlook, amazon.<p>would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations? or can you extrapolate from the <i>billions</i> of users? now make a guess how many people a/i has facilitated. a few thousand? a hundred thousand?<p>><i>Even if that were true how would that change anything? They still comply with the US government and their mission statement isn't to empower, protect, support political extremists.</i><p>because it demonstrates that the goal is not to curtail terrorism.
i would agree there as long as the providers are actually neutral they should be free from culpability. we shouldn't encourage providers to restrict who they serve because of potential liability, that's giving them way to much power.
Isn't forcing a provider to do business with everyone who asks just as bad? You're saying noblogs should be compelled to host nazi blogs. (Actual Nazis, not a euphemism. People who want Jews to be gassed.) You're also saying wedding cake bakers should be compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings.
A service can't be refused for reasons like religion or race, a power company cannot refuse to serve a customer because they're black or Muslim. If a company is acting as a platform or provider they should serve customers regardless of their views and this should give them protection for being liable for their customers actions.<p>Do you think providers should be allowed to refuse service because they don't like certain customers views?
> (has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)<p>Or for that matter, where they get their <i>air</i>?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…<p>I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.<p>Gotta reign this insanity in.
except they aren't neutral, which is the whole point
did you read the part where nonethewiser said <i>"And even if they were [neutral] that doesn't mean the US shouldn't
sanction them for supporting terrorism."</i>?<p>the double-negative might be confusing, so we can reword it to: "<i>And even if they were neutral, the US should sanction them for supporting terrorism</i>"<p>that's the part i quoted and my comment is about.
So since The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will US sanction him too?<p>Or since ONU has declared illegal the occupation of territory in West Bank, will US sanction Israel?<p>Or will the United States only sanction those who simply see things differently from them?
> If they choose to support the PKK<p>Did they? There's a lot of implication with that "if", and I saw someone else point out (albeit rudely) that anything that may have supported them was taken down.
we should be careful not to assume that the eu, uk and us set a good moral standard to follow.<p>you might ask who is right; the groups like google providing services to the us military, or the groups providing services to those opposing the us military.
It's bullshit made up by Shideler [0], and it's not even the PKK directly either that A/I supported, but some blog that reposts communiqués.<p>We'll see if the Bush- and Obama-style thoughtcrime back in action will lull USA citizens and make them forget the gas price.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/4a3850cc-9186-4271-fe98-9caebcd5b632/2025-10-28-PM_Testimony_Shideler.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/4a3850cc-9186...</a>
> Their own manifesto says they use their limited resources to support groups they align with.<p>Woah, with radical statements like that, we might have to go after mutual aid groups, PACs, and churches.
I mean, I think it entirely depends on the nature of the groups they support?
You miss the point. It establishes they aren't neutral. Of course it's not necessarily bad to support things you agree with.
Morality != legality. these anarchists have a much better moral grounding than most US tech companies which gladly support US military destruction.
Cherry picking bad one organization doesn’t make me feel any better about this over-broad order.
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US<p>But they are not choosing to support the PKK.<p>They accuse it of being “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”<p>The far left is a terrorist group? Where are all these violent "antifa cells"?<p>They labeled this groups as a terrorist organization so they could claim that anyone protesting the fascist Trump regime will easily be labeled terrorists and thrown in jail without a trial.
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> <i>Only months after Paranoia</i> [their first server] <i>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.</i><p><a href="https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10083/2" rel="nofollow">https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10083/2</a><p>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.)<p>Turns out, other people had been recording events, so that a covering narrative may not prevail over the truth.
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.<p>What is this?
The "About" page seems fairly clear:<p>> 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"<p>It also says their manifesto was written in 2002.<p>You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
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.
i thought the page says it pretty clearly.<p>they are a group of people providing services to activists. services include email, web hosting, chat, and other anonymity services. (see <a href="https://www.inventati.org/services/" rel="nofollow">https://www.inventati.org/services/</a>)
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
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They're just anti-capitalist nerds, example, they host Linux user groups in a couple cities, collect computers for schools etc.
It is intentionally vague. From the State Dept:<p>> 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.
Did you click on <a href="https://www.inventati.org/about" rel="nofollow">https://www.inventati.org/about</a> ? (I also tried reading the manifesto first.)<p>From it:<p>> 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<p>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"<p>How much more specific can you get?
Solutions to help individuals <i>live</i> through the digital age. Very different - for-profit vs for-survival (etc.).
> <i>some "not mainstream" political views</i><p>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.
> "not mainstream" political views<p>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
Maybe a honeypot?
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.<p>It provides email accounts, mailing lists, blogs, websites, chat and VPN access.
There is also an article on we will free us [1] if you want to dive deeper into that rabbit hole.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defend-autistici-inventati-before-september-25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...</a>
The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:<p>a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:<p>> 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.<p>b) And the issue U.S. has with them:<p>> 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 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.<p>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]<p>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]<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-protester-phone" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-pro...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/statment-on-strategy-and-tactics-for-june-4th-rally/" rel="nofollow">https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/statment-on-strategy-and...</a>
Seems like this should be a/the top level link
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?<p>Google Search yields a very small amount of third party support for the PKK, all unreachable now.<p>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.
For those like me who don't have context, here is the New York Times article on this recent news / event<p><a href="https://archive.fo/e8Gss" rel="nofollow">https://archive.fo/e8Gss</a><p>> The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>a/I collective in the OP is the third on this list.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
PA hit a police officer in the back with a sledgehammer.<p>During a 2024 raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, Samuel Corner—a Palestine Action activist—struck police sergeant Kate Evans in the back with a sledgehammer while she was on her knees arresting another activist.
She suffered a fractured lumbar spine, was off work for three months, and later had to give up her rank. Corner was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm and sentenced to seven years and eight months.<p>Also groups protesting Islamic violence rarely drive their cars through St John’s Wood screaming “kill the Jews rape their daughters” but that’s just my own personal experience.
> I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups<p>The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.
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Right. But when when a group blows up hospitals, schools and other infrastructure and murders 70,000 civilians (Israel)... Why is that not disignated terrorism?
You're not suggesting that most, if not all of these, are things the US hasn't done, are you? Surely not. The one you might try and dispute is the "50,000 protestors" one, as you know the other ones are clear as day.
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I notice people always respond with "but the US does this too!" and never actual incidents. No, I'm not going to just high five your vague head nod at wrong doing you can't even describe.<p>Seriously, sit down, make a list of incidents, including weighing the outcome of those incidents. If it's a case where an officer or a soldier did something wrong, list what happened after (court, punishment, cleared of wrongdoing, etc)<p>Then do the same for your favorite alternate country that you think is superior. If you want to pick team Iran or Russia, then lay it out for them. Make the same list.
<i>The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces, as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft. Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom sustained permanent paralysis.</i><p><i>Eight of the shooters were charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, but were acquitted in a bench trial.</i><p>I'm not going to make an exhaustive list of all the terrible shit perpetrated by the US government and its agents. It would be too detrimental to my health. But you choosing to bury your head doesn't prove anything either, so I guess I have one up on you.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre</a><p>you would do well to note that this page links directly to an entire wikipedia entry for 'US War Crimes': <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes</a>
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.<p>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.
The genocide of the Palestinians (as argued by the UN) triggers the genocide convention obligating states and individuals to act.<p>It even comes in the effect at the very probability of genocide occuring. Preventing new armaments being sold to Israel is thus the rational and responsible thing to do, for example what Spain has been doing by refusing the transportation of arms through their country. This off course earns you some powerful, heavily moneyed enemies.<p>Edit: This was an attempt to explain why civilians are spray painting Elbit's military planes.
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<p>This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging <i>military equipment</i> 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.<p>> This is simply armed conflict.<p>Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
> <i>Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades.</i><p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah</a>
Well the definition is flawed, or as the British say, the law is an ass.<p>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.<p>Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
> Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.<p>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.
Just because it's part of the government's definition doesn't mean that it's true. It's in the government's interest to define as much as possible as terrorism.
Terrorising means causing terror. I have no real reason to be afraid of Palestine Action, because I am not a military jet.
> Damaging property for political ends<p>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."<p>Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.<p>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.
You cannot hide behind convenience.
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?<p>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.<p>Corrections welcome if I am wrong.
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> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.<p>I hope no one takes this seriously.<p>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 <i>used to be</i> defined as attacking <i>civilian</i> targets to aid in political messaging.<p>Attacking <i>military</i> targets is somewhere between an insurgency, partisanism, or an armed conflict.<p>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.
> Terrorism used to be defined as attacking civilian targets to aid in political messaging.<p>Not consistently, and its not a clear definition.<p>The same groups that attacked civilians in places I have lived in also attacked military targets as part of the same strategy. Terrorism is used to threaten, divert resources from front lines, cause economic damage, etc. Civilian targets are attacked in most wars. Is a car bomb outside a military barracks that different from one in a civilian area? What about a suicide bomb aimed at a sentry on a civilian road? I was about to drive past that one. Are the civilians who were killed collateral damage from an attack on a military target or victims of terrorism?<p>> people who burn police cars<p>So people who attack a civilian target. By your own definition they are terrorists if they are doing it for political motives.
Yeah but it's not terrorism. Words have meanings you know.
> 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).<p>That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage <i>against occupying or invading militaries and their allies</i> are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".<p>This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames <i>disarming</i> as an unacceptably violent act.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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 <i>trade on the emotional impact of those definitions</i> while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
Thank you! Kind of nuts they posted this with that title but no explanation.
seems like PIR (the .org registry) now also suspended their main domain:
<a href="https://www.whois.com/whois/autistici.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.whois.com/whois/autistici.org</a> (it is on serverHold)
For reference: <a href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-06-16-en#serverHold" rel="nofollow">https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...</a>
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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://tucowsdomains.com/provider-result/" rel="nofollow">https://tucowsdomains.com/provider-result/</a>
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Well, the State Dept is anything but vague about its argument:<p><a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...</a><p>"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...."<p>"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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Everyone's a terrorist nowadays.
Did they find evidence of weapons of mass destruction? No? It should be soon then.
Do I see "Free palestine" in the corner there?
As from Wikipedia reference to Webster Dictionary in "Definitions of Fascism":<p>"a: any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, <i>rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition</i>. b: <i>any tendency towards or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control (as over others within an organization)</i>"<p><i>"rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition"</i> is what this is. As specifically and <i>publicly declared actions against a group defining itself as "anti-fascism</i>, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism".<p>if this isn't matching <i>fascism oppression against anti-fa</i> then what is it?<p>additionally as context the short history link with more facts is even clearer:<p><a href="https://www.inventati.org/who/collective" rel="nofollow">https://www.inventati.org/who/collective</a><p>"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them.
Actual link: <a href="https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076" rel="nofollow">https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076</a><p>Title: A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
Bella ciao.
It's hard to imagine how anything like this can legally exist anywhere within legal reach of Western system. Indeed liberty has gone too far.
the group: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260101085655/https://www.autistici.org/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260101085655/https://www.autis...</a><p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>From their about page:<p>> 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.
> We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible<p>This is like straight out of every evil villains mouth.
Sad, but this deplatforming nonsense was always going to cut both ways.<p>The slippery slope continues.
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].<p>Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...</a>
The biggest free speech violation I can imagine.
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.<p>(If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?<p>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
So, its not a group, its just multiple groups with the same label. My point stands. You cant just believe what someone labels themselves as, nor what others label them as. I never called them a centralized group.
The word is being used descriptively. Opposing the National Socialist German Worker's Party doesn't mean you oppose socialists, because those aren't socialists. You could have said that a/i isn't antifascist, but you didn't say that.
I didnt say they weren't antifacist because its both irrelevant to my point and i dont know nearly enough about them to claim so.
In the case of antifa, the content and the label are congruent. They are, literally and practically, anti fascist. That's not the case for the NSDAP.
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...<p>Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...<p>Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.
> when no such central organization insists<p>No any such organization exists. It is a movement, and a description one can describe one's self or actions: "anti-fascist".<p>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.
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Opposing someone who happens to be anti-fascist doesn't make you anti-anti-fascist or fascist any more than opposing someone who is blue makes you anti-blue or yellow.<p>However if I say all blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot blue on sight. Then I'm anti-blue. If I say all anti-blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot anti-blue on sight, then I'm very pro-blue. It doesn't matter if there's a bunch of green over there calling itself blue. If I meant the green calling itself blue was terrorists, then I would have said that.
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<p>Oddly the US is very cozy with some modern Communists!
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Related discussions:<p><i>US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343</a><p><i>US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391</a>
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.
Keep in mind we're talking about <i>communications services</i> here, and one focusing on <i>political speech</i> at that.<p>"<i>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.</i>"<p>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.<p>Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1" rel="nofollow">https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1</a><p>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, <i>including the PKK</i> (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.<p>The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including <i>services and communication equipment</i> and the law still stands today.<p>Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
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.<p>This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.
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.<p>Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
Basing an argument around the unavoidable physical embodiment of speech is sophistry. There is no "above". The "material support" you speak of is all just republishing speech.<p>By the argument laid out by the government here, merely <i>reading</i> writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.
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?”
Links to the actual announcements of sanctions:<p>* <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/" rel="nofollow">https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/</a><p>* <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...</a><p>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.<p>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.
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The point is not what kind of policies the "radical left" tech guys had. The point is they had quarter century run in which law enforcement in Italy could not find anything illegal in their actions.<p>And The current US administration was like "we don't care that running a webserver for activists is legal in Italy, we will just declare them terrorists".<p>Which is precisely why it's important that criminals and even terrorists have rights and due process. Else they can just declare YOU a terrorist and suddenly you have no rights.
> Very far to the left,<p>Well, a proto-fascist government would consider hosting anti-fascist websites as being "far left".
Don't worry guys, fascist are always looking out for free speech.<p>What was that...<p>muummuummmmemmmeuuuu...<p>BANG
<a href="https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076" rel="nofollow">https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076</a> - Direct link to the sanctions declaration.<p>The actual Treasury Announce here - <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/" rel="nofollow">https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/</a><p>"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.<p>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."
What does it entail, in practice?<p>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.
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.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479122">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479122</a>
The consequences may include the loss of:<p><pre><code> • 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.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defend-autistici-inventati-before-september-25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...</a>
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*˙ᴉuᴉlossnW oʇᴉuǝq - uoᴉʇɔɐǝɹ sᴉ ɯsᴉɔsɐℲ
Anti-fascism is reaction to fascism, it's in the name, even.
Antifa is a leftist movement, nowhere on this planet is not anti-capitalist.
The two flags in the logo, black and red, represent the anarchist and the communist movement.<p>Marxism came first. Mussolini was a Marxist, then developed Fascism as a reaction to it.<p>When Marxist talk about "reactionary forces", what do you think it means?
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Clueless.
In my experience, groups like this have a fairly hostile relationship to State Communism as well. The Kronstadt rebellion for example is frequently cited [1]. But then you have groupings like Anarchist communists [2], which you would then risk lumping together with the anti-Communism part (not to mention that anti-Communism as a term is usually associated with forces <i>staunchly</i> opposed to people like this). Plus, if you are "only" anti-authoritarian, how do you suggest avoiding getting lumped together with Anarcho-capitalism?<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism</a><p>Furthermore, these organisations operate in what they perceive to be Fascist and/or Capitalist societies, so why state opposition to something that is not "there" and has been pretty much gone from the global scene for nearly forty years?<p>In conclusion, yes, you have a point. But given the reasons above I find it <i>really</i> hard to get worked up over it and Anarchists do not generally get along with Leninists, Stalinists, or Maoists <i>anyway</i>.
Of fascism, capitalism, and communism, only two are going concerns in these people's lives. If they're going to declare themselves "anti-communist" they might as well also take a strong vocal stance against ghosts and flying cars.
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Yep I just donated $1000
Can I ask what you're hoping the organization does with that money? I'm genuinely interested in understanding what the expected outcome is.
Servers, connection and maintenance costs... That is what they do. Read the manifesto.<p>> <i>We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals</i><p>Yes, they select the users. But clearly to exclude services to those they would judge as bad actors!
So you're in it purely for freedom of expression? I can get behind that, but after reading further it doesn't seem like they are about that at all, but rather are extremely selective and it has nothing to do with "bad acting."
Ouch.<p>A good friend of mine was charged with providing material support to terrorists for providing similar donations. And all his donations were <i>prior</i> to the US designating the recipients as terrorists. The government's arguments were "Yes yes, but you knew what you were supporting even though we hadn't designated them as such..."<p>Hope you're not in the US.
Hope I loudly go to jail so everyone can see how corrupt things are. Hope there are street riots about it.
Your friend has integrity and should hold their head up high they are fighting against oppressive bullshit
Naive world view. They also filed other less serious charges against him (of which he may have been guilty). He intended to plead "Not guilty", but after 2.5 years of him being held before trial[1], they offered him a deal. Plead guilty and get 5 years, including time served.<p>He likely would have beaten the terrorism charges, but for the lesser charges it wasn't clear that he'd get a better prison sentence than the one he was being offered.<p>He took the deal and pleaded guilty.<p>Also, lawyers cost money - perhaps he couldn't afford to keep fighting through a trial. I also have <i>another</i> friend who had the same charges leveled against him (not for donations, but volunteering services). He <i>did</i> fight the charges and got acquitted. I don't know if it's true, but I heard it cost him well over $1M for his legal defense.<p>[1] Trials like these take a long time to prepare for, by both parties.
Do you really not care to know what the terrorist organization was before you assume that "they are fighting against oppressive bullshit"? Is A/I and ISIS the same to you?
Nice! That’s genuinely worth praise
You are a good person.
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This is getting too big to ignore and is leaking into mainstream popular culture.<p>In the most popular streaming show atm (new season of Reacher), a main plot point is CIA and State Department and Green Berets involvement in a village massacre in Indonesia in the 90s (in the land of the tv show), this is of course a reference to the CIA and State Department indirectly murdering 1 million Indonesians 1965-1966.
> US has done worse<p>They have not.
Which of Trump or Putin is worse is irrelevant. Trump's US is maybe on par with Putin's Russia, maybe better or maybe worse (which depends on which aspect is looked at). That cannot deter us from fighting against what is bad in both of them.<p>This is NOT a competition nor a championship about which dictatorship can inflict the most pain and destruction to the world.<p>Nobody is rooting for such a "winner".<p>Criticize all the despicable actions of such stinky regimes, regardless of if they are in Putin's Russia, in Trump's US, or wherever else.<p>We are NOT in a race to the bottom.<p>We shall never forget our values, as Humans and as Earth-dwellers.
the asymmetric deployment of "whataboutism!" is hypocrisy about hypocrisy
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Do you see how a removal from a private app store, while bad, is different from an arrest or a sanction?
Parler experienced a government coordinated shutdown across app stores and infrastructure providers like AWS.<p>I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make, when their infrastructure (AWS) was shut off due to the government labeling them terrorists due to some users (who Parler had banned) using the service.
Did the government force AWS to shut them off or just ask nicely? Hard to say. Any message from the government comes with <i>implied threats</i>. We'd only find it which was the case, if AWS had refused and the government had either punished AWS or not.<p>Can you see how it's different from an explicit sanction or an arrest?
I think these are very different things, private company's actions vs government actions.<p>"HN cheering", true or not, doesn't really matter in the end, either.
<a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot/2026/05/05/the-goomba-fallacy/" rel="nofollow">https://freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot/2026/05/05/the-goo...</a>
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the first few sentences of this link, and their about page, and their services page all make it clear what they do. i am unsure of where you confusion comes from.
They host blogs and digital infrastructure for autonomous anarchist/leftist collectives and are deeply connected to global free speech movements since their founding in 2001. If you expect to see a two sentence
mission statement or a product summary, you’re going to be disappointed.
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From HN guidelines:<p>> Off topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.<p>So you’re incorrect. HN isn’t off bounds for all political posts, but yes, they do have to have an “interesting new phenomenon”.<p>The U.S. sanctioning a decades old technology collective is clearly new. Whether it’s “interesting” I can’t speak to because that’s subjective to every individual, but that’s where the useful voting system comes in.
<i>> For the majority of organizations one can tell what they do in a few seconds</i><p>Have you ever opened the website of any B2B software/services provider? By your logic, they're all the most suspicious people on earth, because none of them seem to be able to explain what they actually do.
There's an "About" link on the top of the page and if you click it it fully explains what they do and for who in the first sentence of the first paragraph.<p>You're getting a negative response because ignoring that and implying that they're secretly doing sketchy things makes it look like you're doing bad faith criticism
Reason.com is political. EFF.org is political. Anti-ChatControl sites are political. Do you flag those, too? If not, why not?
They aren't?<p>They are very clearly providing IT support for free to anti fascist organizations.
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In the United States, your example is explicitly protected by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It is the legal defense of arms manufacturers who's product is sold legally and in good faith but is used by a third-party for illegal actions.<p>Rather than a vague insinuation that this group has taken some action deserving of economic blackballing, perhaps you could point to some specific action this group has done?
Sure you can. Gun makers do it all the time!
Which terrorist groups, specifically? And what support are they offering specifically?<p>You say provide tools for communication. Presumably that's every communication platform worldwide - almost undoubtably some sort of terrorist has used each of them.
>They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups.<p>As per a government who puts cycling and expressing distaste for inflation in the same camp.
> So I don't think this is as innocent as they seem.<p>Well, they are innocent until proven guilty.<p>> They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups.<p>By all means, present something that shows they are knowingly supporting terrorist groups so we might judge for ourselves.<p>I mean, we have organizations that supported the January 6th terrorists that haven't had anything done to them, so I'm looking for something more serious than murder, storming the capital, riots, attacking the police force, and attempted assassination of a Vice President.
Without judging this or trying to axiomatically derive the logic, I think the claim here is that a/I knowingly and deliberately provides services to the PKK, which the US and the EU designate as a terrorist organization.
It’s more than that, I think. I read through the various government statements as I was curious about rationale and precedent: the other two groups impacted by the order are rather unambiguous extremists, so understandable. In the extended justification for this a/I group, the US gov lists a large number of US and EU “Antifa” groups that variously leverage their services, including one that the individual recently arrested for wiping his phone is meant to be connected to. It suggests to me this was the result of some considerable network analysis and that the intent is to now have stronger legal tools to go after those groups.<p>I think that second (speculative, of course) step would be the more worrying precedent: if the use of technical infrastructure also used by designated groups was formally made to be incriminating/right-waiving. Why wouldn’t that apply to Signal, for example? The OP suggests the dividing line should be between true infrastructure open to all, including unsavory actors, versus tools that advertise services to a particular faction. It’s not an entirely disagreeable distinction, but I think in practice it’s rather fuzzy (Moxie of signal is/was rather far left himself, if I recall).<p>EDIT: Re-reading the document, the state department emphasizes that a/I “manually vets all potential users.” OP’s distinction stands for now.
I share most HN'ers priors about this administration and its motives and am commenting positively, not normatively, and only about the specific claim the Treasury Department made.<p>Signal doesn't knowingly and deliberately provide services to any organization, let alone one formally designated by the US and the EU. The whole point of Signal is to eliminate all pretenses of the service knowing who its users are or what they're doing. To the extent that's also true of Autistici Inventati, the OFAC designation is invalid.
Yes, I originally only meant to note that in the extended statement on a/I the PKK isn’t mentioned and the focus is rather on a network of “antifa” groups [0]. With respect to your legal point, I reread the document and we’re in agreement: the state department goes to lengths to demonstrate that a/I “manually vets all potential users.”<p>[0] <a href="https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...</a>
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My understanding is that this is only coming from the US government. Do we have any reliable information to back this up? Because if it's just the US government, I can safely assume it's all lies.
The question stays the same: “are you antifa or are you fa?”
> Our financial strategy relies exclusively on voluntary donations.<p>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.<p>Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]<p>[0] *Unless you now know why this collective needs crypto more than ever.
><i>That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term</i><p>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]<p>There are many of us who do not live in the US, so many still can. Just not through paypal.
The capitalist mind cannot comprehend this
Maybe they should try couping the Italian government, rename themselves to Ragazzi Orgogliosi. That should help.
noblogs encourages and hosts violence and other terrorist activities.<p>They doxx people they don't like and pass around kids schools/addressess/home addresses/names of spouses, for the sole purpose of violence.<p>They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there, which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.<p>I've been following this 'collective' since 2016.<p>It's about time the US did something about it.
>noblogs encourages and hosts violence and other terrorist activities.<p>how does it encourage it? can you show an example?<p>>They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there<p>what does this mean?<p>>which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.<p>Which group? reference? link? examples?<p>>I've been following this 'collective' since 2016. It's about time the US did something about it.<p>well this explains a lot about your point of view, but can you expand or prove your above statements?