A/I shuts down

InsideOutSanta

I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.

righthand

> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human. How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?

rdtsc

Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”

monkaiju

Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.

AndrewKemendo

Love these people and what a powerful message If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it

vallerie

Yet another example of the troubling amount of power the United States holds over the internet and global finance. I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.

unfocso

Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.

nikunj1809

What does it means?

matt123456789

What did they do??

jtrn

I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people. From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is). Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report" Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.” Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit. I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...

elmer2

I've been following the collextive for 10 years. They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity. Parler was ripped off the Internet for 1% of this. You reap what you sow. If you don't support the freedom of people you disagree with politically, I don't support your freedom either. Covid has forced me to take a hard stance on this.

andlarry

Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...

hermannj314

I am first hearing about this group today, but here is some context: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism. I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen). EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.

Normal_gaussian

I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details. Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.

sdcfgy

This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.

NetOpWibby

A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this

Cider9986

>Sorry, but we don’t accept Bitcoin. https://www.inventati.org/donate Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is a group like this using banks for or at least diversifying?? It's like choosing not to use E2EE. It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone often. Even GrapheneOS, but intelligently, they use crypto heavily: >Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked. https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/status/1684663777273233408 https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Pay+monero...

hirako2000

So the oppression does work. It won't stop.

flohofwoe

Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision ;)

Dansvidania

I have no way to verify whether the collective really helped the violent acts that are cited in the designation[1] but, as an Italian, given the dialectic and rhetoric in their statements and in their websites, it would not surprise me if this once they - the US government - were not wrong. "A broken clock marks the right time twice a day" and all that. I have experienced this kind of language personally back when the collective started (they have root in the no-global movement, a protest group that contributed to the violence at the Genova G8). At the time I was a young activist on their side, but the 'we are not violent' wink-wink nudge-nudge attitude was not main stream but very much all over the place and became hard to ignore. [1] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... edit: forgot the link to the designation