Autistici/Inventati and the Reach of U.S. Sanctions
On the 26th of August, the US designated Autistici/Inventati as a global terrorist under EO 13224: a way of saying that the group supports terrorist acts and should be shut down.
It happened, as A/I wrote: “We decided to wind down operations.” We should be mad about this.
Who was Autistici/Inventati?
Autistici/Inventati is a collective founded in 2001 around anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist and anti-militarist values.
It offers private infrastructure that anybody can use to avoid being tracked. The collective is important enough that, just a few weeks ago, my fiancée was taught how to use Autistici/Inventati in journalism class. She does not particularly care for Linux or follow these topics; the lesson was about the importance of tools for staying private on the internet.
Those tools include email, lists, hosting, blogs, chat, video conferencing, streaming, anonymity tools and documentation.
The latest number I have - although it is outdated - is about 10,000 people; it is probably higher now, but this remains a relatively small, if important, collective. Its yearly expenses were about 20,000 euros, funded mostly by donations and Italy's five per mille system.
The police did try to do that
You could argue that privacy-first services make it easier to commit crimes using their infrastructure. If you want to commit crimes, you want privacy-first tools.
On the 15th of June 2004, the Postal Police entered Aruba's data center, a common Italian hosting provider. They accessed a disk belonging to Autistici/Inventati, read its data and inserted a monitoring device, none of which the collective discovered until one year later.
This exposed about 5,000 mailboxes and tens of thousands of mailing-list participants—a particularly serious intrusion, as the government read the data of a privacy-first collective without its knowledge.
As a result, they decided to use interchangeable and geographically distributed servers to make sure that this wouldn't happen again.
There is evidence
To be clear, there is evidence connecting Autistici/Inventati's platform to some of this: rail sabotage in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands in 2026; action against the Transalpine Pipeline; and a German network associated with a Berlin power attack that affected 45,000 households and caused a fatality.
Some claims or manuals connected to these actions were hosted on the infrastructure. Washington decided to shut the whole thing down: if people use privacy-first infrastructure for these activities, the response is to shut down the infrastructure entirely.
The reason it worked is the bank
It worked because of the bank, Banca Etica, whose name literally means “ethical bank”: it seeks to act more ethically, especially in its investments, tells clients how their money is used, and funds socially beneficial causes instead of the military. It was a good fit for the project.
Banca Etica initially suspended Autistici/Inventati's account, even while condemning the political use of these counter-terrorism rules. Visa, Mastercard and extra-euro payments involve US-linked intermediaries. Routing our financial transactions through American companies gives them considerable soft power, which is deeply concerning.
I don't think Banca Etica wanted to shut down the account, but had it not done so, it could probably have faced serious consequences affecting all of its roughly 130,000 clients.
On the 4th of September, the bank terminated the contract, leaving several tens of thousands of donated euros unavailable and Autistici/Inventati unable to access its money.
This happened without any action from the Italian government
This happened without any request or action from the Italian government, and without any court ruling, purely because the US designated A/I as a terrorist organization. This is not the first time.
For instance, Francesca Albanese is a UN rapporteur working to show that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, which at this point is no longer a matter of debate; it's now the majority opinion.
Her work was very controversial because of US ties with Israel. The US sanctioned Albanese; as a result, her bank account was closed and she could not open a new one even through Banca Etica. She could not make any financial transaction—a serious restriction.
If the US can shut down people's accounts even at local banks that strongly support the same antifascist values, we are giving it considerable soft power, which is a serious problem.
The .org domain
Autistici/Inventati was also blocked from its .org domain, making the website inaccessible. It initially said it would try to continue despite the difficulty, but ultimately had to shut down.
This is a serious loss: the organization provided independent infrastructure important enough to be taught in journalism classes, and now it is gone.
This is not some small thing happening just in Italy
Alternatives exist and, although they are not as well known right now, they will probably grow. Still, this is an alarming precedent: something that should not have happened and is happening more frequently. We should restructure how we operate so that we are less dependent on day-to-day US decisions. It might seem like a minor matter confined to Italy, but if it happened here, it could happen elsewhere. If this does not provoke anger, I do not know what else to say.
Sources
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