Italian tech collective shuts down after U.S. terror listing

Autistici/Inventati, an Italian technology collective that spent 25 years providing free email, blogs, and websites to activists, announced on Sunday that it would shut down its services. The closure came 11 days after the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control added the group to the Specially Designated Global Terrorists list on August 26.state+2

"A/I is shutting down. The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide," the group wrote in a statement published on a backup domain after its original autistici.org address became unreachable.pasqualepillitteri

A Chain of Private Actors

The designation, made under Executive Order 13224, alleged the collective "materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support" for terrorism by operating digital infrastructure used by "violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants". The collective rejected the characterization, stating in an earlier press release that "antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism".amlintelligence+2

What followed was a rapid cascade of private-sector enforcement. PayPal ↗ 0.82% froze the group's donations account on August 27. The next day, Public Interest Registry, the U.S.-based manager of the .org domain extension, placed autistici.org in "serverHold" status, making it unresolvable regardless of where the servers sat. The collective's servers remained in Europe, but the domain's American jurisdiction rendered them unreachable.inventati+1

Italy's Banca Etica then suspended and ultimately terminated the collective's account on September 4, freezing tens of thousands of euros. In a statement, the bank said it "firmly condemns the use of OFAC lists for political ends" but explained it had no choice: secondary sanctions threatened to cut it off from U.S. payment networks, jeopardizing services for all 130,000 of its customers.pasqualepillitteri+1

A Precedent for European Infrastructure

The shutdown affects an estimated 16,000 mailboxes, 10,000 blogs, 5,500 mailing lists, and 1,500 websites. The collective said the decision to close was driven not by a lack of servers or funds but by the risk of exposing users and associates to criminal or financial consequences.pasqualepillitteri

On September 3, the European Digital Rights network published a solidarity statement signed by 33 organizations from 13 countries, arguing that "treating the provision of general purpose communication tools as material support for terrorism sets a precedent that applies to any European digital infrastructure provider". EDRi called on European institutions to invoke the EU's Blocking Statute, a 1996 regulation designed to shield European entities from extraterritorial U.S. sanctions. As of Sunday, no official European response had materialized.edri+1

The collective closed its farewell with a line that read: "Now turn off your PCs, get out of your homes, struggle, hug each other and keep on smiling".pasqualepillitteri