The 25-year anniversary of 9/11 came and went last week with all the usual talk of freedom, our way of life, and the never-ending threat of terrorism. Fittingly, in the run up to the date, which hangs like a dark cloud over the republic and therefore the world, the US was debanking and forcing the closure of an Italian digital collective that offers free pro-privacy services to clients around the world. It was a repressive move that sets another dangerous precedent, one that the EU acquiesced to with its silence, and it was all done in the name of fighting terrorism, of course.
Let’s run through the details before turning to the larger significance for the digital commons, free speech, and Europe.
On August 26, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against Autistici/Inventati (A/I) as part of a crackdown on so-called “transnational far-left terrorist networks.”
A/Iis a group that formed in 2001 and which offers newsletter, blog, and email services for free to those who adhere to their manifesto’s opposition to fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. It is staunchly pro-privacy and operated outside the reach of Big Tech and the surveillance state.
The statement from the U.S. Department of State effectively tries, convicts, and condemns the A/I collective to a civil death via its severing from financial networks. No evidence that it is a “far-left terrorist network” is presented. A/I said in a statement:
“Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism,” the group said. “Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.”
Nonetheless, Italy-based Banca Etica—yes, etica translates to ethical— quickly closed the collective’s accounts in order to appease the US and avoid sanctions. And the Public Interest Registry organisation based in Virginia, shut down A/I’s domain. The collective was also hit by a cyberattack with likely connections to the US Blob.
With so much heat on, A/I announced on September 6—five days before the marking of 25 years of the Global War on Terror to “preserve our way of life”—that it was shutting down its digital services in order to protect its engineers and users from being targeted by US intelligence and law enforcement.
“We cannot engage in a fight or expose ourselves to manipulations that threaten the lives of these people and their loved ones, leaving them at the mercy of autocrats, fascists, and agencies that take extra-legal courses of action,” the group wrote in a statement. “The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide.”
A/I is also suing Banca Etica for the closing of its accounts.
Again, it’s important to stress that no evidence has been presented in no court of law that A/I committed any crime. Most of its users appear to be individuals and groups opposed to the fascist and surveillance tendencies of Big Tech and many of whom are also in opposition to the authoritarian, Zionist police state wave sweeping the Western world, but since when is that a crime? And when did it become illegal to offer them digital services?
Apparently, the answer to that question is when Trump issued his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) in September of last year. That executive order labeled common beliefs like “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” as terrorism.
As the US shut down Italy-based A/I, it’s been crickets from EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, the “nationalist” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and from all the supposed responsible, centrist, anti-Trump Europeans. That silence is deafening despite the State Department’s actions declaring that platform providers are responsible for the content of their clients, which has never applied to Big Tech and directly contradicts EU law. Brussels’ silence is another giant step in its vassalage as by keeping quiet it becomes party to the US equating anti-fascists, communists, and others with terrorism. That is a threat not only to those groups and individuals in Europe but also European companies and European sovereignty. As French computer engineer and security expert Benjamin Sonntag told Stefania Maurizi:
…using Google ads, buying service from Microsoft or Adobe, put you at great risk of losing all your data and services if one morning Trump gets up on the wrong side of the bed and then heard about your organisation…That’s a risk that any company or organisation should think about, and fast. I’m quite worried that the EU is not taking a stance on forcing EU companies to not comply with US sanctions if there is no EU equivalent sanction decided. The EU should understand that the instability of US policy is a big issue.
Why did the US go after A/I? Well, from the perspective of the Silicon Valley supperrich, Heritage Foundation advocates for serfdom, surveillance Blob, and the Zionists that wield power in Washington, it kills many birds with one stone.
Let’s look at some.
Crushing Competitors to All-Powerful Silicon Valley Surveillance
A/I’s motto was “Socialise knowledge without establishing power.” That’s a problem for the US military-industrial-digital complex, which aims to cement complete control over internet infrastructure. That of course means that control of the media and means of communication are left to oligarchs with anti-democratic goals.
Crushing Alternative Political Visions
On July 16 in DC, Secretary of State Rubio convened the ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.’
There he and White House Deputy of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller delivered a sermon on the danger of the left, claiming that anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, communists, anarchists and/or Marxists’ aim to destroy “our civilisation” and “everything that is beautiful and right.”
They pledged the US will destroy this “international network of terror.”
It’s really difficult to pick out any few quotes from their remarks; the entire transcript really needs to be read to be believed to see how they’re fleshing out Trump’s NSPM-7 and how dangerous this is for anyone who values freedom of speech, the press, and other liberties. It’s also important to remember, lest we pin this all on Trump and believe it will go away when he leaves office, that these “terrorism” powers rarely go away once unleashed and that many of these “anti-capitalist” forces are considered just as much an enemy by the Democrat Party as the GOP.
In Rubio and Miller’s telling, they’re the victims of a vast network of violent demonstrators and “not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way.” (Their words!) This is coming from figures in the administration in one of the most powerful states in the world, one that is currently unleashing death and destruction across the planet.
According to Rubio and Miller, the only way to deal with this threat is to situate people outside of rights—and those rights can range from financial and speech to a jury and life.
Let’s not forget that Trump, in the forward to the recently-released counter-terrorism strategy document, says “We will find you and we will kill you,” referring to these “anti-American,” “anti-capitalists,” and anyone else the state deems a threat.
And that can mean anyone—even “normal” people— as Samer Araabi, the associate director of political education and research at the Center for Constitutional Rights, notes:
I don’t think it’s even limited to the left. It’s a broad attack against anyone who questions the authority of this very small group of people. The thing that undergirds that is this idea that the existing system is threatened by an amorphous and terrifying “other,” this “other” that can’t really be defined, that can’t be whittled down to a particular group of people espousing one particular ideology, or any particular strategy or plan, but rather it’s everywhere. It’s omnipresent. It’s everyone and it’s no one. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere.
As a result of that, the government can do anything. It doesn’t need due process. It doesn’t need warrants. It doesn’t need permission to spy on people, to surveil them, to follow their every movement, to detain them, to question them, to access their personal documents, to deport them. And we’ve been seeing that happening, and we’ve been seeing, both for US citizens and non-US citizens, the ways in which this continues to expand outwards to encompass an ever-growing set of violent activities from the United States government against these people–the overwhelming, overwhelming, we’re talking 99.999% of whom have done absolutely nothing, literally nothing at all.
For now, the downing of A/I and its popular noblogs.org platform will cause problems for several alternative sites, including many in the US from anarchist and abortion rights groups to a Seattle book fair.
Even if A/I had managed to remain online, due to the US sanctions Americans would have faced up to 20 years in prison for donating to the group or using its platforms.
Pentagon Role
Unsurprisingly, yet notable for signalling an intensification of the state crackdown on alternative media, is the Pentagon’s connection to the takedown of A/I.
It wasn’t just the sanctions, the bank account closures, and the cancellation of its domain; A/I was also the target of a significant hacking attack.
Almost immediately after that post, “DataRepublican,” aka Jennica Pounds, championed the hack as well.
Who is Jennica? Up until June she was a member of the Pentagon Press corps, a group of imperial-friendly hacks welcomed by the Hegseth War Department in a new program created last year.
In August, the Washington Post reported that as early as July Jennica had transitioned from a member of the media to being directly employed by the Pentagon as part of the secret program to install influencers in civilian roles.
DataRepublican and AstraRCE have a long history of back and forth amplifying one another’s posts and championing hacks against the left. In this case, not long after AstraRCE brought attention to A/I hack, Jennica’s DataRepublican website was publishing a visualization tool showing thousands of alleged NoBlogs sites.
AstraRCE then issued a notice:
It would appear that Jennica, who is now officially employed by the Pentagon, was awfully tuned into the hacking operation of A/I, raising questions about the Pentagon’s involvement. Not surprising, yet notable.
If the data maps published by DataRepublican are to be believed, Italy—and Europe in general— is a central node in this global network of “anti-capitalist, anti-fascist terrorists”/ people who dare to imagine a world better than commercialized genocide, which is an obvious threat to people like Rubio, Trump, Thiel, Musk, Netanyahu, and friends.
The fact that DataRepublican’s data shows the overwhelming number of “enemy” accounts located in Europe makes it even more scandalous that EU leaders have remained completely silent.
Others aren’t so shy. Several groups offered congratulations to DataRepublican’s announcement of the hack on Musk’s X. A spokesperson for Turning Point USA, for example, which is now funded by Zionists following the assasination of Charlie Kirk said, “Well done, patriots.”
