https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defend-autistici-inventati-before-september-25/
For twenty-five years, an Italian hacker collective has built
communications infrastructure designed to survive censorship,
surveillance and police raids. On August 26, the United States
designated it a terrorist organization. On September 25, the wind-down
period ends.
It should have been a dark and stormy night in an Italian hacklab.
It was, annoyingly, a beautiful sunny Sunday.
On March 3, 2001, roughly ten people gathered at the LOA hacklab in
Milan around a computer assembled from discarded machinery. A bank had
sold them an old server for the symbolic price of 15,000 lire, about
eight dollars. They expanded it with scavenged components, including a
hard drive pulled from someone’s home computer. Nobody arrived with a
formal blueprint. Software packages were considered one at a time.
Every decision was discussed until everyone agreed. Deliberately, the
least technically experienced person was placed at the keyboard. The
process took far longer than necessary because efficiency was not the
only objective. Everyone was supposed to understand what they were
building. That day, one participant later recalled, was when they
declared: “A/I now exists.”
They named the machine Paranoia. The following month it went online,
carrying two domains and two intertwined histories: Autistici.org and
Inventati.org. Twenty-five years later, on August 26, 2026, the United
States designated Autistici/Inventati a Specially Designated Global
Terrorist and placed it on the Specially Designated Nationals and
Blocked Persons list.
The distance between those two events—from a recycled machine in a
Milan hacklab to the machinery of the American national-security
state—is the history of a collective that has spent a quarter century
insisting upon one dangerous proposition:
People should be able to communicate without first surrendering
themselves to corporations or governments.
The immediate threat now has a date. On September 25, the temporary
U.S. authorization for institutions to wind down their relationships
with A/I expires. Banks, technology companies, hosting providers and
other institutions are being instructed to sever what remains. A/I
built its infrastructure to survive the disappearance of a server. The
United States is now attempting to make the collective economically and
technologically untouchable. Join us as we explore what A/I is, its
history, and what this newest attack might mean for the autonomous tech
collective and the wider radical community.
# Before A/I: Italy’s underground internet
Autistici/Inventati did not appear from nowhere. Its roots run through
more than a decade of Italian autonomous organizing, pirate radio,
bulletin-board systems, squatted social centers, anti-capitalist
movements and experimentation with computers as political tools. During
the 1990s, networks such as the European Counter Network and Isole
nella Rete provided online space for social movements when the internet
remained unfamiliar to much of the public. Italy’s Hackmeetings brought
programmers, activists, artists and the technologically curious
together inside self-managed spaces. Hacklabs appeared in occupied
social centers, where people could learn Linux, build networks and
approach technical knowledge as something to be shared rather than
sold. The future members of A/I came from several parts of this world.
In Milan, people associated with the LOA hacklab used the name
Autistici to describe their intense fascination with technology and
their desire to expose the politics concealed inside it. In Florence,
the Inventati project was more oriented toward communication,
publishing and movement organizing. Its projects included Stampa
Clandestina, a newspaper intended to be pasted directly onto city
walls, and Spia la Spia, an effort to map surveillance cameras in
public places.
People from Bologna and elsewhere were also involved. Many participated
in the early development of Indymedia Italy, part of the international
open-publishing network that allowed protesters and ordinary
participants to report events without waiting for professional
journalists to mediate them. The different groups shared a problem.
Movements increasingly needed websites, mailing lists and private
email, but independent infrastructure remained scarce. The existing
European Counter Network was carrying too much of that burden.
Commercial providers offered greater capacity, but at the price of
money, dependence, surveillance and eventual censorship. In November
2000, Inventati sent the Milanese hackers an encrypted email asking to
meet. The message was treated like something out of an amateur spy
film: PGP keys, carefully arranged recognition instructions, a secret
time and place. Then the Florentines arrived two hours late in a
legendary rust bucket called the General Lee, honking outside the squat
while police monitoring the building watched in bewilderment.
The agreed-upon historical fact is that everyone eventually ate at a
pizzeria called La Balena. Over dinner, the Florentines revealed their
allegedly seditious plan:
Build another autonomous server.
The intention was not to replace existing movement infrastructure with
a new central provider. It was to multiply it. If there were thousands
of autonomous servers, they reasoned, no single raid or seizure could
shut down everyone’s communications. Autistici supplied much of the
technical knowledge. Inventati brought its experience with publishing,
cultural work and movement communication. Together they became
Autistici/Inventati, usually shortened to A/I. The collective’s legal
association was called Investici, but A/I never became a conventional
organization. It had no coordinator, official leader or permanent
spokesperson. Decisions were made collectively rather than by majority
vote. Nobody was paid. Its resources came from voluntary donations,
benefit events and the labor of the people maintaining it. The dual
name was deliberate. A/I was a Janus-faced creature: one face
technical, the other communicative; one facing the machine, the other
facing the movements that needed it.
# The server that locked itself out
The birth was not entirely glorious. On the second day of Paranoia’s
existence, someone entered an inverted firewall command and
accidentally instructed the machine to reject every connection not
originating from itself.
The server could communicate only with the server.
The collective found this so perfectly on-brand that it printed the
mistake on a T-shirt. That combination of technical seriousness and
refusal of self-importance became part of A/I’s character. Later
servers received names including Chernobyl, Astio—“Grudge”—Rivolta,
Contumacia and Latitanza: Revolt, Contumacy and Life on the Run. Behind
the jokes was a developed political position. Communication should be
free and accessible. Knowledge grows through being shared. Software is
not neutral simply because it operates in a supposedly virtual world.
The systems through which people speak determine who can speak, who can
listen, who owns the record and who can be silenced. A/I began
providing websites, private email, mailing lists, newsletters and chat.
Its services eventually expanded to include Noblogs, file sharing,
audio and video conferencing, streaming, anonymous remailing and other
communications tools—all without advertising or commercial data
extraction.
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. A/I was never a politically neutral commercial host.
But providing infrastructure is not the same act as authoring
everything transmitted through it. Political affinity is not
operational control. Giving someone an email account does not mean
writing every message they later send. That distinction is central to
the attack now being made against it.
# Genoa: infrastructure under fire
Only months after Paranoia 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.
For A/I, it was also what the collective later called a “traumatic
communion.” Its members experienced the same violence together while
maintaining systems through which evidence of that violence could
escape. After Genoa, A/I was no longer merely an interesting technical
experiment. It had become trusted movement infrastructure. Demand grew
rapidly. By 2003, A/I hosted more than 2,000 users, 205 websites and
269 discussion lists. Hosting those services for free was becoming
unsustainable, while commercial hosting would cost thousands of euros
annually. The collective answered with the KAOS tours: traveling
gatherings combining benefit events, parties, public discussions and
practical workshops. A/I members taught people how to configure
servers, encrypt communications, edit and distribute video, create
digital archives and stream audio.
The tours raised money, but their deeper purpose was political
education. The collective did not want to become a group of invisible
experts performing magic for passive users. It wanted the community to
understand the machinery upon which it increasingly depended.
Every subsequent attack on A/I would produce a variation on this
response:
Disclose what happened. Repair the damage. Share the lesson. Build
something harder to destroy.
# Trenitalia discovers the Streisand effect
A/I’s first major legal confrontation came in 2004. A design collective
called Zenmai had created a website parodying the Italian railway
company Trenitalia. It copied the appearance of the company’s website
while denouncing Trenitalia’s involvement in transporting tanks and
other military supplies during the invasion of Iraq. Trenitalia
demanded the page’s removal, damages and publication of notices in two
major newspapers at a projected cost of approximately €20,000. A court
initially ordered A/I to take the parody down. The internet responded
by reproducing it everywhere.
Trenitalia then demanded that A/I remove links to the mirrors as
well—an argument raising the absurd possibility that linking to
disputed material could make any search engine responsible for it. A/I
appealed. On September 14, 2004, the court ruled that the website was
protected satire grounded in factual controversy. The page returned,
and Trenitalia was ordered to pay A/I’s legal expenses. It was an
extraordinary victory for a small volunteer collective. But while A/I
fought visible censorship in court, a more dangerous operation was
taking place without its knowledge.
# The Aruba crackdown
By then, A/I’s server was housed at the commercial provider Aruba in
Arezzo. On June 15, 2004, Italian police arrived at Aruba under orders
from a Bologna prosecutor. The company’s technicians shut down A/I’s
machine and allowed police to copy material from its disks.
Investigators obtained its cryptographic certificates and may have
installed equipment capable of intercepting traffic. A/I was told that
the interruption resulted from an electrical problem. The collective
discovered the truth almost a year later, and only by accident.
In May 2005, A/I was ordered to close the mailbox used by the Italian
Anarchist Black Cross, Crocenera Anarchica, amid a sprawling
investigation involving allegations of anarchist conspiracy and
subversion. A/I complied with the court order and requested the
underlying case documents. Those documents contained messages that
investigators should not have been able to possess. Buried in a
footnote was the explanation: police had gone to Aruba the previous
year and acquired access to A/I’s server. An operation purportedly
concerned with one mailbox had potentially compromised thousands of
accounts and tens of thousands of mailing-list subscribers. Among those
affected were lawyers and technical experts working with the Genoa
Legal Forum. Police may therefore have gained access to confidential
defense communications concerning prosecutions arising from police
conduct at the G8. The violation exposed a brutal truth. A/I could
operate its own server, configure it carefully and refuse to retain
identifying logs—but the physical machine remained in someone else’s
building. A commercial provider could open the door, surrender its
contents and conceal what had happened.
A/I removed the machine from Aruba, cleaned it and restored essential
services. Parliamentary questions were raised in Italy and at the
European level. The collective traveled through Italy and Europe
explaining the breach. Most importantly, it rebuilt the network.
# Plan R*: repression becomes architecture
The result was Plan R*, launched in October 2005: a network of
“resistant communication.” Instead of concentrating A/I’s services on
one machine, the collective distributed encrypted data and functions
across servers in several countries. Public-facing machines could be
replaced. Services could move when hardware was seized or a provider
became hostile. The loss of one node would no longer expose or silence
the entire community. R* meant replication, redundancy, resistance and
other words beginning with R. Its architecture was conceived not merely
to survive mechanical failure but to withstand political attack. A/I
did not claim it could guarantee perfect security. On the contrary, it
repeatedly warned users never to entrust their safety blindly to any
provider, including A/I. It minimized logs and identifying information
because information that does not exist cannot easily be seized. It
encouraged users to encrypt their own communications because even the
strongest server architecture could not compensate for unsafe
individual practices.
The collective transformed a covert surveillance operation into an
infrastructure lesson.
Repression became architecture.
# The Vatican, a satirical video game and Norway
The pressure continued. In 2007, an Italian politician demanded action
against Operation: Pedopriest, a satirical browser game criticizing the
Catholic Church’s efforts to conceal sexual abuse by clergy. Its
creator temporarily removed the game to protect the hosting provider.
A/I then hosted a copy. Following a complaint from an unidentified
child-protection organization, an American provider disconnected the
entire Noblogs server. After consulting attorneys, the provider
concluded that the satire was lawful in the United States and restored
the machine. Plan R* kept the disputed material accessible elsewhere
and limited the wider interruption. By then, A/I had become an
important refuge from the emerging commercial social web. Noblogs
offered independent publishing without advertising, data mining or
demands that people attach their legal identities to everything they
said.
Its users included movement organizations, personal writers,
dissidents, artists and NGO workers operating in dangerous
environments. In 2008, A/I received Italy’s Winston Smith “Privacy
Hero” award for creating free communications infrastructure resistant
to censorship despite scarce resources, technical attacks and repeated
judicial interventions. Then, on November 6, 2010, Norwegian police
copied an A/I server’s hard drives at Italy’s request. The
investigation originated with threats and antifascist graffiti directed
at members of the neo-fascist CasaPound organization. Authorities were
seeking information concerning one mailbox. A/I had already explained
that it possessed neither subscriber identities nor activity logs, but
investigators apparently wanted to determine whether that was true.
Thousands of accounts were copied in the process.
Plan R* restored the affected services elsewhere within approximately
two hours. Within twenty-four hours, the network was operating
normally. The seized disks were encrypted and yielded no useful
identifying information. The operation became a public scandal in
Norway. Lawyers, journalists and technology organizations questioned
why Norwegian police had copied thousands of people’s private
communications in response to an inadequately explained foreign
request. The underlying Italian investigation was eventually dropped.
Where another organization might have interpreted repeated raids as
proof that its project was impossible, A/I interpreted them as
confirmation that the project was necessary. Its history is documented
in the collective’s book, +KAOS: Ten Years of Hacking and Media
Activism, and its own history of the collective. [1]
# August 26, 2026
The newest attack is of a different order. On August 26, the U.S. State
Department designated Autistici/Inventati a Specially Designated Global
Terrorist. At the same time, the Treasury Department’s Office of
Foreign Assets Control placed A/I on the Specially Designated Nationals
and Blocked Persons list under Executive Order 13224. This is not
simply a condemnatory government statement. It activates one of the
world’s most powerful systems of economic exclusion. 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.
Treasury’s public announcement focuses upon the services A/I provides:
foreign-hosted websites, encrypted email, chat, video conferencing and
the digital architecture supporting Noblogs. It describes A/I’s
antifascist and antimilitarist politics, its practice of selecting
projects compatible with those politics and its provision of
infrastructure used by the PKK. Treasury then treats the provision of
that infrastructure as material or technological support for terrorism.
(U.S. Treasury announcement) The State Department’s accompanying case
goes further, presenting attacks, communiqués and publications that it
says passed through A/I infrastructure. Its 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. (State Department
designation) The government’s public statements do not show that A/I
planned those actions, selected targets, transferred weapons, directed
the cited groups or authored the material hosted on its systems. They
do not establish when A/I learned of any particular act or whether it
knew about it before it occurred.
Instead, the designation advances a broader and more consequential
proposition:
Building communications infrastructure for radical movements can itself
be treated as terrorism.
That theory collapses the distinction between a provider and a user;
between political affinity and operational control; between protecting
privacy and concealing a crime; between maintaining a publishing
platform and authoring everything published through it. A/I has never
claimed to be politically neutral. It built infrastructure precisely
because radical movements needed somewhere to speak, publish and
organize beyond corporate and state control. The United States is now
using that purpose as evidence against it.
# What happens on September 25
Because A/I is now on the SDN list, all of its property or interests in
property within the United States—or possessed or controlled by a U.S.
person—must be blocked and reported to OFAC. Unless an exemption or
license applies, U.S. people and institutions are generally prohibited
from providing or receiving funds, goods or services involving A/I. The
restrictions can reach transactions passing through the United States
even when the parties are located elsewhere. OFAC has issued a
temporary license allowing transactions ordinarily necessary to wind
down existing relationships with A/I until 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on
September 25, 2026. Payments owed to the collective cannot simply be
released to it; they must be placed in blocked accounts. After the
deadline, covered transactions require another applicable
authorization. September 25 is therefore the date by which American
companies and individuals are expected to separate themselves from A/I.
The consequences may include the loss of:
- 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.
Foreign companies are not automatically governed by every prohibition
imposed upon Americans. But OFAC warns that foreign financial
institutions can face secondary-sanctions exposure for knowingly
facilitating significant transactions on behalf of a designated entity.
That warning may do as much damage as direct enforcement. A European
bank, registrar or hosting company may not know precisely what American
law demands of it. Its compliance department may simply decide that
maintaining a relationship with a small Italian anarchist collective is
not worth the perceived risk. Institutions frequently over-comply.
Providers may close accounts or withdraw infrastructure even when the
law does not clearly require them to do so. Organizations may remove
links, avoid correspondence or terminate unrelated relationships merely
because A/I’s name now appears on a terrorism blacklist.
That is how American sanctions acquire worldwide force: not only
through legal jurisdiction, but through institutional fear.
# The wider target is the community around the server
The designation may be directed at A/I, but its effects will not stop
at the collective. A/I’s infrastructure is used by writers, organizers,
researchers, artists, movement publications and people who chose it
precisely because commercial platforms were unsafe, politically hostile
or designed to extract their data. Those users are not automatically
sanctioned because they have an A/I address or published on Noblogs.
But once the provider itself is placed on a terrorism blacklist,
ordinary association can be converted into a risk signal. A bank may
scrutinize a payment. An email provider may downgrade or block
delivery. An employer, border agent or investigator may treat an
address as suspicious. A journalist may hesitate to contact a source. A
researcher may avoid an archive. A new user may decide that opening an
account is too dangerous. None of this requires the government to
prosecute every person involved. The designation can produce its own
perimeter of fear.
That is one reason this otherwise inexplicable move may be useful to
the state even if A/I remains online. Earlier attacks tried to reach
the collective through particular machines, mailboxes and providers.
A/I answered by distributing its systems, encrypting its disks and
retaining less information. Those practices made conventional seizure
and surveillance less productive. Sanctions attack a different layer:
the relationships that allow infrastructure to exist. Rather than
breaking the encryption, the government can pressure banks, registrars,
data centers, software companies and users to isolate the people
operating it. Rather than prove in court that each user committed an
offense, it can make continued contact costly and legally uncertain.
This is surveillance-state power operating through private
intermediaries. The government does not need to place an officer inside
every server room when compliance departments, payment processors and
platforms can be induced to police the network themselves. Each
institution will draw its own defensive boundary, often wider than the
law requires. Some may demand more identity documents, retain more
logs, monitor political content or refuse privacy-preserving projects
altogether. Others may quietly close accounts and provide no meaningful
avenue of appeal. Enforcement becomes dispersed across companies whose
decisions are difficult to see, challenge or even document.
The resulting harm is not limited to censorship. It can change the
architecture of movement communication. Small autonomous providers may
conclude that serving controversial communities invites existential
risk. Larger platforms may point to the designation as another reason
to expand identity verification, automated moderation and data
retention. Users may migrate from trusted movement infrastructure to
commercial systems that are easier to monitor, subpoena and map. The
state gains leverage even when it gains no plaintext from A/I’s
encrypted disks: people separate themselves, providers collect more
information and the social relationships surrounding dissent become
easier to observe.
The precedent also reaches beyond explicitly anarchist or antifascist
projects. If political alignment with users, privacy protections and
the hosting of controversial publications can be assembled into a case
that infrastructure itself constitutes support, then encrypted mail
providers, radical publishers, community archives, VPNs, federated
social networks, legal-support projects and other independent hosts all
have reason to pay attention. The immediate facts and laws would differ
in every case. The danger lies in normalizing the category: a
communications provider no longer treated as a conduit or publisher
with its own rights and responsibilities, but as a participant in every
act the government attributes to anyone using its systems.
That does not mean the designation is secretly about every A/I user, or
that every possible consequence will occur. The government has not
publicly explained its internal strategy beyond the allegations in its
announcements. But the structure of the action is visible. It replaces
a narrow accusation against identifiable conduct with a broad penalty
against infrastructure; shifts enforcement from a courtroom to a global
web of cautious institutions; and makes uncertainty itself an
instrument of control. The immediate objective may be to disable A/I.
The wider effect is to warn anyone building communications beyond
corporate and state supervision that the shelter they provide can be
recast as evidence against them.
# Can A/I survive this?
A/I has seen state repression coming for miles.
Its entire infrastructure assumes that:
- Servers will be seized.
- Providers will cooperate with police.
- Governments will demand information about users.
- Corporations will disconnect controversial material.
- Individual machines and locations will become unavailable.
- Data and services must therefore be encrypted, distributed and
replaceable.
That preparation matters. A/I is based in Italy, not the United States.
Its infrastructure is internationally distributed. Its services are
maintained by technically sophisticated volunteers. It avoids
dependence on any single provider, minimizes identifying information
and has decades of experience restoring services during emergencies. It
has no shareholders, corporate headquarters or conventional payroll.
Its relatively modest operating costs and volunteer structure give the
state fewer familiar pressure points. There is little reason to assume
that the website, mail system or Noblogs will simply disappear on
September 25. A/I may be better equipped to survive a seized or
disconnected machine than nearly any communications project of
comparable size.
But this is not another server raid.
Plan R* was built to survive machines disappearing. It cannot, by
itself, prevent banks from blocking money, registrars from suspending
domains or companies around the world from withdrawing services because
they fear American penalties.
The designation targets the connective tissue around the servers:
- Banking.
- Donations.
- Domains.
- Data-center contracts.
- Bandwidth.
- Certificates.
- Software dependencies.
- International institutional relationships.
A/I has survived technical isolation before. The United States is now
attempting financial and institutional excommunication. Its core
services may be resilient. Its ability to fund them, replace
infrastructure and participate in the broader technological system is
at considerably greater risk. What happens after September 25 will
therefore depend not only upon the architecture surrounding A/I’s data,
but upon the solidarity surrounding A/I itself.
# September 25 is not a deadline for silence
The designation is designed to isolate. The answer must be informed,
independent and disciplined solidarity. People in the United States
should not improvise donations, disguise payments or route resources
through another person, organization, currency or country. That could
create sanctions exposure for the supporter, the intermediary and A/I
itself. The prohibitions can also extend beyond money. Coordinated
technical assistance, translation, advocacy, event organization or
other services provided to a designated entity may create legal risk.
But September 25 is not a deadline for silence. Independent reporting,
criticism, protest, education and political advocacy remain possible.
People can tell A/I’s history, examine and challenge the government’s
claims, contact journalists and civil-liberties organizations, preserve
public materials and independently organize against the criminalization
of resistant communications infrastructure. The practical distinction
is between speaking and acting independently about A/I and providing
funds or coordinated services to A/I. The exact boundaries can be
complicated. Anyone contemplating fundraising, replacement
infrastructure, public mirroring or direct technical assistance should
obtain qualified sanctions counsel. A February 2025 civil-liberties
primer on material support and OFAC restrictions [2] also warns that
lawful or protected activity can still attract surveillance,
investigation, immigration consequences or civil litigation. Supporters
approached by law enforcement should decline to answer questions and
speak with an attorney.
This article is reporting and political analysis, not legal advice.
# What supporters can do before September 25
Tell the history.
Share A/I’s story: the hacklabs, Paranoia, Genoa, the KAOS tours, the
Trenitalia victory, the Aruba breach, Plan R*, Noblogs and the
Norwegian seizure. Do not allow the government’s description to become
the only publicly available account of what A/I is. Build a public
defense coalition. Ask independent server collectives, digital-rights
organizations, hacklabs, free-software projects, radical libraries,
independent publishers, journalists, attorneys, researchers and former
users to respond publicly. Preserve the archive. Servers can be seized.
Domains can be suspended. Hosts can panic. Back up publicly accessible
and historically valuable Noblogs writing, along with A/I’s manifestos,
technical documents, legal records and movement history. Record source
URLs, authorship, publication dates and retrieval dates. Respect
privacy, copyright and removal requests. Do not access private accounts
or circumvent security. Personal preservation, research archiving and
ordinary journalism are not the same as publicly operating replacement
infrastructure; anyone considering a public mirror should first seek
qualified advice.
Document over-compliance.
Record companies, banks, registrars, platforms and institutions
terminating services or removing material. Preserve notices and
correspondence. The public record should show how far the designation
reaches beyond its formal language. Demand answers. Ask digital-rights
groups, European institutions and public officials whether they will
permit American sanctions to dismantle an Italian communications
collective. Ask what protection exists for European infrastructure,
users and archives. Organize independently. Hold public discussions
about autonomous infrastructure, sanctions, surveillance and
material-support law. Publish explainers. Teach encryption. Support
independent civil-liberties work opposing expansive terrorism
designations. Prepare lawful material support. A/I has historically
survived through voluntary donations, but U.S. supporters should not
send or reroute money while the designation applies without a clear
authorization. Digital-rights and legal organizations can independently
investigate lawful support mechanisms, licensing and potential
delisting proceedings.
Listen carefully to A/I’s public response while keeping advocacy
legally independent.
The collective’s statement should inform how its history and
circumstances are described. Any coordinated campaign, fundraising
channel or direct service requires separate legal consideration. The
immediate objective is to make A/I impossible to quietly disappear.
# The network called solidarity
A/I has survived corporations demanding censorship, covert police
access, confiscated disks, hostile providers, parliamentary attacks and
international investigations. The Trenitalia case produced mirrors and
a legal victory. The Aruba breach produced Plan R*. Provider censorship
produced redundancy.
The Norwegian seizure demonstrated that the network could recover in
hours. Each attempt to isolate the collective spread knowledge about
how censorship and surveillance operate. Each attack became an
opportunity to teach more people how to protect one another. The United
States has now transformed that history into a global test. At stake is
not only the survival of one Italian hacker collective. It is whether
maintaining infrastructure for radical movements can itself be treated
as terrorism; whether privacy can be redefined as concealment; whether
refusing to collect identifying information can be presented as
obstruction; and whether a provider can be held politically and legally
responsible for every text, tactic and claim transmitted through its
machines.
A/I has spent twenty-five years preparing for the day when a server
disappears. It knows how to replace a machine, move a service, restore
encrypted data and continue operating after police or providers pull a
plug. The United States is attempting something different. It is trying
to frighten banks, hosts, registrars, infrastructure providers and
supporters around the world into abandoning the collective. Whether
that succeeds will depend partly upon A/I’s architecture.
It will also depend upon us.
Between now and September 25, preserve the history. Share the story.
Build the coalition. Document the isolation. Teach the tools. Prepare a
lawful defense. Do not allow the state to quietly establish that
building privacy-preserving infrastructure for dissent is itself an act
of terrorism. Twenty-five years ago, ten people gathered around a
recycled machine and deliberately took too long configuring it because
everyone in the room was supposed to learn. That remains the lesson. Do
not leave the knowledge with experts.
Do not leave the infrastructure in one place. Do not leave the targeted
to stand alone.
The first server was called Paranoia.
The network it created was called solidarity.
____
Public statement from Autistici/Inventati: [3]
Today we were made aware that the US Government has targeted a small,
volunteer-run, technology collective from Italy with disproportionate
sanctions as anyone can read in the Treasury Department Statement, the
State Department Statement and the related Executive Order.
We deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly
affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital
self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists
and other individuals, groups and associations.
We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all
these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter
the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration
with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from
their own violence and warmongering.
Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not
terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for
humanity.
Autistic/Invented Collective — “Socializing knowledge without
establishing power”
Stay human.
Download the A/I book, +KAOS, on the history of the collective’s work,
available for free. [4]
Download our Media Kit for social media graphics, archival guides,
press briefs, templates, and flyers if you or your organization would
like to show solidarity with A/I or learn more.[5]
[1] https://www.autistici.org/who/collective
[2]
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/548748b1e4b083fc03ebf70e/t/67be35d745142c70ddc7430f/1740518871622/MST%2Bresource_edit-2.pdf
[3] https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076
[4] allegato in epub e disponibile in altri formati su
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/kaos-ten-years-of-hacking-and-media-activism/
[5] https://sabotmedia.noblogs.org/files/2026/08/Media-Kit.zip
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