In this mid-week special, you may have noticed a change in our introduction, that we’re listing TFSR.Media as our website (a work in progress, currently pointed at our blog, soon to be pointed at our new web host). This is because we’re moving our website from NoBlogs.org following the August 26, 2026 announcements by the US State Department and Department of Treasury that designated the hosts of NoBlogs, the Italian autonomous tech collective Autistici / Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and placed it on the Specially Designated Nationals list under Executive Order 13224. In this conversation you’ll hear a member of the crimethinc ex-workers collective and Sprout from Sabot Media talk about the designation, the intended impacts on anarchist, antifascist and other movements by the US government, and what can come next if we’re up for the fight.

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Update: Via their updates page, KeepItAlive.AI, September 6th Autistici/Inventati announced that it would be shutting down. This development saddens us but we can’t fault them after a quarter of a century of amazing work. and it works to underline the critical need for infrastructure for movements for liberation that is somehow defensible from capitalist and authoritarian states, where we can communicate among our movements, across their borders. As they say, Stay Human.

I invite listeners to check out the statement from CrimethInc as well as the public letter still awaiting more signatures and articles available on the subject from sabot.media. There’s also a recent chat by Outlaw podcast with Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights on the legal elements of this chat, alongside a list of rad servers from Riseup that could be helpful for people looking for new web hosting homes for their projects.

Sabot Media about NoBlogs:

• The Server Called Paranoia
• A Network Called Resistance
• Molotov Now! Podcast interview with A/I
• A/I’s Bank Account Temporarily Suspended

Also, check out Autistici/Inventatiti ‘s book about their first ten years: +Kaos: Ten Years of Hacking and Media Activism

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Featured Tracks:

• TFSR by The Willows Whisper
• Beatbuster by The Willows Whisper

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Transcription

Sprout: Thanks for having me on today. My name is Sprout from the podcast Molotov Now!. My pronouns are they/them. I’m here today with the Sabot Media Collective, we’re an independent anarchist media project based in so-called Grays Harbor, Washington. Sabot Media has been focused on movement reporting, rural organizing, and trying to build rural-urban solidarity, autonomous infrastructure, and building publishing tools.

Currently, we’ve been documenting the designation of Autistici/Inventati (A/I) as a terrorist organization and reconstructing the collective’s history. We did an interview with them in writing and we’re trying to get an audio version uploaded soon, and we’ve been emailing institutions trying to figure out who made this decision and what the fallout is going to be, and trying to just follow up on everything that’s going on. I want to be clear from the beginning that we’re not affiliated with the A/I collective. We don’t represent them, and we don’t speak for them. We are an anarchist journalism project covering an attack on anarchist infrastructure, because what happens to that infrastructure concerns all of us. Whether it’s just them attacking anarchists right now, that sets a precedent that could be dangerous for everyone who uses the internet.

CrimethInc: I’m here in my capacity as a participant in Crimethinc, a three-decade running anarchist publishing collective. For the purposes of this interview, any pronouns are fine by me. And I’m excited to talk with y’all.

TFSR: So, on August 26th 2026, the U.S. Department of State applied the specially designated global terrorist label to three additional groups, on top of the ones that they’ve already been listing out recently. These include an autonomous left web host in Italy, which is Autistici/Inventati (and just so listeners know, if people refer to A/I during this conversation, we’re not talking about so-called artificial intelligence, it’s just shorthand for Autistici/Inventati) as well as two groups that focus on solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, life, and dignity. Would someone want to talk about these groups a little bit, and just kind of say what they do and what connections they have, or what the claim behind the designation was.

CrimethInc: The other two groups that have been designated as terroristsare a British direct action group, Palestine Action, and the transnational Palestinian movement Masar Badil, and they’re designated basically as part of the branding of all things Palestinian being impermissible and described as terrorism. I think it’s significant that the other two groups are Palestinian groups specifically because that’s that’s part of the branding of this entire move. Now, as various news sources have noted, those are both activist groups that organize specific events and so on, whereas the Italian group A/I is just a web provider that offers a spectrum of services.

Sprout: Palestine Action is a direct action network that targets companies and infrastructure connected to the arms industry of Israel, and Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path movement, is a Palestinian political organization. They’ve designated both of those groups through its own terrorism and material support claims. On the other hand, A/I is a volunteer-run Italian technology collective, all they do is provide free web services such as email, website hosting, mail lists, chat, video conferencing, and most famously, the NoBlogs publishing platform. They don’t really organize events or actions or demonstrations or protests, or anything. They simply let people post about what they want to post about on their website. I think the government’s theory is that A/I has supplied technological architecture and services or tools used by organizations idenfied by the government as violent or designated. Obviously, A/I has rejected the description, and argues that they’re collapsing the distinction between providing communications infrastructure and actually directing what people do with it.

TFSR: The Department of State has basically pointed out that these movements are becoming the focus of this attention because of the anti-fascist movement and anarchist movement in the United States, and probably the transnational or international anarchist movement as well, so this would fall under the general auspices in some ways of anti-antifa repression. That said, I would be really interested in hearing what your understanding of the expected impact for at least Autistici/Inventati will be related to the designation and the Department of the Treasury’s OFAC financial sanctions on it, or other elements.

Sprout: The legal core of the designation and its fallout is economic isolation. Property involving A/I that comes within U.S. jurisdiction is blocked. U.S. persons are generally prohibited from providing funds, goods, or services in support of A/I or receiving them from the collective unless OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) authorizes the transaction.

So that gets a little interesting because there are no financial transactions between users of A/I’s services because they’re all free, but OFAC issued what’s called a General License 36, which permits transactions ordinarily necessary to wind down existing relationships until September 25th, 2026. It’s not a general permission to begin new relationships or treat the designation as suspended. It’s more of a limited wind down period for institutions and organizations that do have a current relationship with A/I to decide to basically sever those relationships.

The OFAC entry also carries a secondary sanctions warning, that gives foreign banks and companies a powerful reason to cut ties, even when they’re outside of the United States, even when their own government has not designated A/I as a terrorist group, it’s called de-risking. Just because A/I was put on this list, they are now a higher risk category for banks and major payment processors and companies. So whether or not any of this has been proven in a court of law, or any of this has any evidence behind it whatsoever, simply because the statement was made by the executive branch and put into that listing, these companies are going to look at A/I as a higher risk and move to drop them just because of that.

We’re already seeing the consequences. PayPal terminated their account. The autistici.org domain disappeared from ordinary DNS resolutions. The people who handle that, the Public Interest Registry, did confirm to us that it suspended the domain because the domain itself appeared on the list. Although they said as a U.S. based registry, it considers the suspension legally mandatory. Which we’re not sure about, we’re trying to verify that with legal people, but they claimed that they had to sever the ties.

It is our understanding that it’s not a formal or legal mandate that this be done, it’s much more of a pressure campaign, or what’s called over compliance. Also, the bank that A/I uses has confirmed that they have temporarily suspended operations on their account, although they did come out with a firm statement basically in support of A/I and the work that they do, and the idea of a free internet, so they are working with European institutions to try and figure out a way to not have to cut ties with A/I, which is pretty encouraging to see. So there’s a mixed bag. We have the U.S. registry saying it’s legally mandated that we cut ties, and we have this bank in Italy saying we don’t want to cut ties, and we’re going to figure out a way to not have to do that.

CrimethInc: I’d like to speak more broadly to the impact of the designation. According to the U.S. State Department itself, this collective hosts something like 16,000 mailboxes, 1500 websites, 5500 mailing lists, and 10,000 blogs on its platform, and those are blogs for things like a free school, or anarchist bookfairs all all across the country, or even for radio programs, like the Final Straw. This is a wide-reaching crackdown that, in a single blow, is intended to take a large number of cultural and political projects offline.That’s the way to understand the immediate impact of this. It’s not just an action targeting a web provider, but is a way of silencing at least 1000s, maybe 10s of 1000s of of people, and making it more difficult for them to communicate with each other and with the public in general.

The way that that we describe this when we’re trying to explain it to the public, it’s like if a military is going to carry out an attack on a village, the first thing they try to do is cut off the lines of communication from the village so that nobody sees what happens there, and this is part of the process of the U.S. government targeting elements of U.S. society, as well as an Italian tech collective. This is meant to cut off the communications and access to the general public of a sector of U.S. society, a cultural and political sector of society, in order to be able to intensify crackdowns on the basis of targeting opposition to fascism.

Sprout: I can say that in our reporting, we have seen a lot of the fallout that Crimethinc is talking about, not just fallout to A/I themselves, but fallout to their users of not being able to publish report backs or not being able to host or talk about their book fair. The vast, vast majority of NoBlogs sites are just updating a community on events, something simple like that. So it’s not just a real blow to radical infrastructure, but the actual movement itself. It’s a real blow to our ability to freely communicate with each other and to actually literally organize in our communities.

CrimethInc: The thing that I’d really like to emphasize about this designation is that according to the Italian collective themselves, they don’t monitor everything that they publish. You know, everything that they provide a platform for. In an interview, they recently said that if you have an email address registered with them, you automatically have the opportunity to set up a blog, and the U.S. State Department is alleging that some things appeared on these blogs that the U.S. government doesn’t approve of, but that’s probably true of Reddit, of a number of different platforms on the internet where school shooters or other people post statements or manifestos, and those get circulated.

So, in terms of what’s going on here legally, this is an unprecedented effort to hold a provider responsible for what appears on a platform, and that distinguishes it from other recent designations. The goal is to cut off communications, but the practice and the legal theory that’s taking place here is intended to set a new precedent, specifically rendering anti-fascist speech a target for legal repression.

Sprout: Like Crimethinc just said, A/I hands out emails to people that they feel align with them politically. But once you have that email, anyone can make a blog. So they do not monitor that. And I think we’ll get a bit more into the Section 230 aspect of things later, but another interesting thing that I wanted to bring up is, since the beginning of this, thinking about this all as a “legal maneuver” has struck me as very interesting since there has been no due process. There has been no evidence presented in a court. There has been no court proceedings whatsoever. It was just a statement that was published by the State Department, and it is sort of just been taken as true. And companies are running with the fact that this is a true thing, that A/I is a dangerous terrorist group, and they need to sever ties with them based off of what I would not consider a legal process.

CrimethInc: The U.S. government, now under Trump, functions mostly by executive declaration and by fiat, so it’s representative of the way that the Trump administration likes to make decisions and to make moves. But, the fact that the State Department can do this using the existing state infrastructure or state power, shows the extent to which so many of the things that the U.S. government does don’t depend on a legal process or anything that can be subject to the checks represented by a court of law, such as they might be.

TFSR: Both of your platforms have published responses in the wake of the designation of Autistici/Inventati, would you talk a bit about what they offer in context of the anti-globalization era? Or talk a little bit about how their work fits into a wider autonomous, anti-authoritarian, or anti-capitalist social ecology.

Sprout: I can talk more directly about A/I and what they do, and maybe Crimethinc can jump in on the ecology side of things. A/I came out of a period when movements understood clearly, because of repression that they had just received, that communication infrastructure was political infrastructure.Again, they were founded in 2001 in Italy by people coming from hack labs, occupied social centers, autonomous movement spaces, Indymedia, the European counter-network, or the hack meeting scene in Italy. These were spaces where people were learning Linux, assembling machines from discarded parts, building pirate networks, and trying their best to share the technical knowledge that they were learning, as opposed to hoard it or sell it.

Kind of a funny founding story is that they had the least technically experienced person deliberately put at the keyboard when they were first installing the server, and they did that so that they could get the server online in a way that everyone could understand. Since the beginning, the point of A/I has not just been to be an infrastructure provider, but to inform, educate, teach, and show people, that not only is this movement infrastructure necessary, but you can do it yourself too, with just a little bit of learning. In our most recent interview with them, their solution to this problem was: let’s have a 1000 networks, let’s have 1000 NoBlogs. Let’s have this sort of model of an autonomous infrastructure web service provider that provides free services to people that they are politically aligned with. Let’s replicate that globally and see what happens.

It’s not just commercial infrastructure with nicer politics, it’s an entirely different relationship. As Crimethinc mentioned, they do all they can to minimize identifying information and the logs that they keep. They use free software. They finance themselves through volunteer donations and stuff like that. They don’t do any advertising or sale of user data. They operate through political affinity and collective responsibility, rather than pretending that infrastructure exists outside of politics.

In terms of what they offer, their main thing is email, but they offer video conferencing, they offer mailing lists, they offer the NoBlogs platform once you get an email, and their services are also always expanding.They have some privacy tools that they offer. They do streaming, I mean, they do whatever they can, and they always offer it for free. So that relationship that you develop with the service provider is really important because right now with Big Tech and the moves that they’re making are again not politically neutral, and so to have an autonomous movement infrastructure is incredibly valuable. And we as Sabot Media would love to see other people take impetus from this situation to perhaps learn how to start their own server and learn how to start doing this stuff on their own, because we can’t just centralize it down to A/I and NoBlogs.

There are tons of other providers out there, but really this one is the biggest, and so this one is the one that’s at the top of the pack, getting picked on. It’s just another signal to me that decentralization and federation is the way to go, and not centralization.

CrimethInc: I just want to emphasize that this is happening in the context of a steady clampdown on internet freedoms over the past quarter of a century. The “Internet 1.0” that Edward Snowden spoke so eloquently about appreciating, gave way to an internet where corporate providers control and shape the platforms on which we encounter each other, and the algorithms that determine what we can see or what we can think as a consequence. And the Italian tech collective here has been holding out another model for what human relations could be; not profit-driven, not controlled by a tech elite, but controlled by the participants in a bottom-up way, based in self-determination.

This shift that has happened over the last 25 years is part of power becoming concentrated in a few people’s hands at everybody else’s expense. Now that people who use the internet depend largely on corporate platforms, it’s much easier for a state government to carry out censorship of dissenting views just by pressuring a couple companies to take users off their platforms. Which is something that we saw starting in the late 2010s, with a bunch of people being deplatformed from Facebook. Then when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the whole thing sort of went into overdrive. Another way to understand what’s happening here is that now that many of the platforms through which people communicate are corporate-owned, and as a consequence, impose the ideology of a financial elite on the rest of society, the state is trying to get rid of any other models for how we might relate.

TFSR: I think that also that plays out in an ideological way, where that operates according to how the modern capitalist state envisions people’s relationship of communication to each other, is that these should be monetized interactions, and also because the people that are licensed to do the privatized, profit-driven interactions are subservient in a lot of ways. They have to be responsive to the demands of the state for collecting information about users, for handing that over either for free so that they continue getting licensed from the state to operate in the ways that they have, or maybe considering the state to be a client as well, to whom they can sell user information or access to their platforms that undermines social movement that would provide alternatives or show opposition to government policies. Is that an okay way of also adding on there?

Sprout: One thing that A/I said in our discussions was that they just can’t imagine that someone would basically open their door to the whole world and say, “Hey, come and build whatever tools you want to build, and just let people have at it for free.” They can’t conceive of that, so they’re trying to attack them through means that they didn’t really have a plan for because they haven’t faced this exact type of repression before. But it’s also interesting to see the right-wing conception of what is going on between A/I and its users versus the reality at hand.

TFSR: In one of the pieces that Sabot Media put out, “The Server Called Paranoia,” the author does a really great job of using what’s available publicly and probably from conversation with Autistici/Inventati, as well as their book +KAOS, to talk about the way that innovation within the collective was often driven in response to repression that they faced. Synthesizing knowledge that they were able to attain from how the state was able to take their infrastructure and threaten it, and then develop an alternative moving forward with those lessons learned with, I think it was like Plan R*.

Sprout: Yeah, Plan R*, and then they throw their little asterisks on there because that’s their little logo basically. But yeah, that came out of not the first slew of repression that they faced, but kind of the second. In 2004, Italian police accessed their servers at the commercial hosting company that they were using called Aruba. They copied their disks and obtained cryptographic materials. The hosting company concealed what had happened, and A/I only discovered the intervention much later through court documents, so the answer to that was the Plan R*. They chose to distribute their services across multiple servers all over the world, in different jurisdictions and with different providers, so that taking one machine could not take down the whole project.

The plan was to minimize logs, encrypt sensitive data, replicate what needs to remain available, and make nodes replaceable. This architecture helped them recover quickly when Norwegian police copied another server in 2010. But as much as they have been excellent at responding to the repression they’ve received, but like I said, they have not received this type of repression before. When you go after the financials, and when you go after I guess the reputation that the collective has, and place them on this list, calling them terrorists, that’s really hard to technically defend against.

There’s nothing that they can do about the domain, the DNS level, the domain registry. They can’t be their own domain register. You know what I mean? There’s only so far you can go doing it all yourself, and they have done as much of that as they can. But there’s only so much technical defense that they can provide against this sort of move.

TFSR: Going back to the to the targeting, Trump’s second administration has escalated its threats and attacks against anarchist, anti-fascist, leftist, secularist, pro-bodily autonomy and abortion, pro-LGBTQIA groups, notably with telegraphing the National Security Presidential Memo Seven (NSPM-7), which was published in the wake of the gacking, shooting of Charlie Kirk. Could you speak to some of the focuses of NSPM-7, and how it’s how it’s been applied and to whom? Like, just to caveat with the de-risking that was mentioned, this reminds me of a conversation that I had with a member of Dresden Anarchist Black Cross, talking about how Rote Hilfe and Dresden ABC and other groups that do prisoner support in Germany have been having to deal with debanking because of pressure and designation of prisoners they’re doing anti repression work for.

Sprout: I can imagine that we’re going to see a lot more of it because of the power of the U.S. globally. If the US starts taking those actions, other countries will follow suit. But in terms of the NSPM-7, that’s a separate mechanism from the foreign sanctions imposed on A/I. The political logic overlaps. The memorandum directs the Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate what it describes as organized political violence as a network phenomenon.

It tells investigators to look beyond an alleged act to organizations, employees, funders, nonprofits, financial relationships, and foreign ties. The Treasury Department has been instructed to trace financial networks. The IRS has been directed to scrutinize tax-exempt organizations. Investigators themselves are told to question people about organizers and financial sponsorship. The memo explicitly places anti-capitalism, self-described anti-fascism, positions on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards what it calls “traditional views” inside its account of the supposed threat.

Now, I think it’s important to be precise. This memorandum doesn’t literally make anti-capitalism or anti-fascism a crime. The United States also does not have a normal statutory domestic terrorist organization designation system equivalent to Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. I think more of the danger in this situation is that political ideology becomes an investigative indicator. Instead of beginning with evidence of a specific offense and working outwards as the legal system usually operates, the state can begin with a political ecosystem and search through its funders, organizations, relationships, publications, and communications for a prosecutable theory. So it’s fishing.

Critics of the memorandum argue that this framework risks treating affinity as conspiracy, solidarity as financing, publishing as radicalization, and infrastructure as operational support. Whether particular investigations actually do that has to be established case by case. But it is certainly another incredible precedent that’s been set.

CrimethInc: The fact that the United States has a FTO, a foreign terrorism designation, but doesn’t designate domestic terrorist organizations, is central to what’s happening here. The Trump administration has been doing the best they can with the laws and policies that they inherited from previous presidential administrations, they haven’t been in a situation to pass a lot of new legislation.

So, mostly they’ve been working with executive policy. And since they don’t have the means to designate domestic terror organizations, or designate an entire category of human behavior and activity, like resisting fascism as terrorism, they’ve had to do their best with what exists.If there were a domestic terrorism designation, they would probably be starting elsewhere, but in the absence of that, they’ve been making do as best they can by targeting a tech collective from outside the United States that publishing projects, cultural projects, book fair organizers, free schools, and others depend on around the United States. That’s the way to understand what’s happening here.

They’re starting in Europe specifically, and it’s no coincidence that the anti-fascist groups overseas that are being designated as terrorist organizations have targeted specifically anti-fascist groups in Italy and Germany, the historic centers of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s not lost on the administration, and it should not be lost on us. The fact is that they’re trying to do what they can with the tools that are at their disposal, with the intention of hopefully getting control of the legislative process eventually, in order to pass new legislation via which they can target everyone. That’s the way to understand how this is simply a step in a much larger plan aimed at suppressing all kinds of dissent.

It’s been noteworthy that corporate media platforms, liberals, and leftists have largely not even noticed or not acknowledged or not understood the targeting of NoBlogs and the other infrastructure. When this is a step towards setting precedents that will be used across the political spectrum to target entities that the administration regards as opposition.

TFSR: Could you talk about Section 230, how it has traditionally been understood and applied within the framework of service provider versus user of a service? For instance, you know whether it be a web host or an updated version of a web host being a social media provider for microblogging or related services like Facebook or X or Truth Social. The rules are being applied as the technologies are, although updated, they’re really similar. And the standards up until this point have not been to punish a service provider for the content that’s published on their platforms without some sort of recourse or pressure, at least depending on the nature of that.

Usually the state has gone after the individual posters and oftentimes gotten support from the host of that information in the capitalist framework, that’s pretty normal. People operate under license from the state. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that provision of the Section 230, how it’s been understood in terms of web traffic, in terms of freedom of speech by the U.S. government, and how this precedent that’s being set in this instance isn’t just going to be against the anti-fa sites that are posting doxx information about the Nazis that live next door to you, but also proponents of the Trumpist agenda.

Sprout: Yeah, eventually anyone. Section 230 says that any interactive computer service, generally cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information supplied by somebody else. The basic principle is that the person who creates third-party content is ordinarily responsible for it, not the infrastructure that carries it.

And now you’ve heard a lot about 230, probably in regards to Big Tech companies, because they have definitely used it to shield themselves from liability from some of the stuff that they have allowed on their platforms. But Section 230 technically applies to every service provider, big or small. So it would apply to A/I, but it’s not necessarily a shield against OFAC sanctions. It expressly does not prevent enforcement of federal criminal law, so they’re technically not ignoring or violating Section 230 in order to sanction A/I, they’re using a different legal system there.

But the spirit of the law, clearly we can all recognize that just because I go on Facebook and post some racist screed before going off and committing a mass shooting does not mean that Facebook should be held responsible for mine and every other individual’s post who might get Facebook in trouble. We’ve accepted that to the point of passing it in law. Yet now the exact opposite standard is being applied in that A/I is being seen as the same as publishing the stuff themselves. In ordinary publisher liability cases, American law recognizes the platforms and users are not the same actor. Large commercial platforms benefit enormously from this, but when the provider is autonomous or politically committed, or privacy preserving, or serving radical movements, they change legal lanes and they can invoke national security and sanctions power and just go around Section 230.

Section 230 is, in spirit, supposed to protect all platforms including A/I, but it’s a lot harder to get that protection when you’re a small provider. And as A/I themselves has said in our reporting, “They’re coming for us first, but we hope that all the Big Tech companies are paying attention to this because they are setting a precedent to come for Facebook and Mastodon and Blue Sky and whatever else you can think of that they don’t like the stuff that’s being posted there.” So it’s not just a matter of the administration had some bug out for this small Italian tech collective. It’s a strategy towards a larger plan to be able to put this sort of pressure on any company of any size.

TFSR: What do you all see as the likely intended outcomes for the end user in movementthat relies on services offered from NoBlogs, the encrypted email, or other things provided by Autistici/Inventati?

It feels hard to know, but a lawyer guest on the recent episode of Outlaw podcast was talking about how the Clinton administration had intentionally constructed vagueness around the SDGT (Specially Designated Global Terrorist) category, like this category that’s being applied when it was first applied against supporters of the Palestinian movement. But they did use the provocative description to designate projects as being almost like legally radioactive. So looking at Autistici/Inventati in this case as being considered to be radioactive, Sprout had mentioned a September 25th end date, which the legal consequences of interacting with them change. If you could say a few words of how you see this playing out, or what experience you’ve heard from activist groups that are using this infrastructure having to consider new implications.

Sprout: The radioactive thing is not a legal category. It was a lawyer’s metaphor for what the designation does socially and institutionally. Everyone is encouraged to back away before anyone understands exactly what the law requires. So, in terms of the laws themselves, we’re dealing with a Clinton-era law. The SDGT category itself comes from Executive Order 13224, which was issued by Bush in September 2001, Section 2339A was enacted in 1994, and the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded the material support framework and created its prohibition on knowingly providing support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

A/I is being designated as an SDGT, not an FTO, under Section 2339B. Those categories should not be treated as interchangeable, as close as they may be. So for ordinary users, the first effects are obviously practical. So far, people using the email that they have provided have had to change server addresses or create aliases. Mailing lists have been moved to other domains. One domain controlled at the registry level can disappear even while the underlying servers still function. Payment systems and bank accounts can become unstable. We’re seeing all of this right now. NoBlogs was not taken down by the OFAC action itself. A/I has reported a separate compromise affecting that platform. I think what’s uncertain is what’s going to happen kind of after September 25, as you said, because that’s when the wind down period ends, and the idea is that everyone is supposed to have cut contact with A/I by then.

Like you said, the legal implications of interacting with them, even for us, is going to change come September 25th, 2026. And the really hard part is that no one really knows how. It’s kind of legally up in the air as to what’s going to happen. I think it also has a chilling effect on people too. A U.S. user is going to wonder whether continuing to use an email account is even allowed legally. A journalist might hesitate to request an interview with A/I. A host may terminate services rather than pay a lawyer to determine what’s actually prohibited. The bank, even despite their statement in support of A/I, might need to protect their other users by discontinuing their account.

These quieter effects just ripple out in ways that are hard to really understand or predict, but I think that independent reporting, criticism, discussion, promotion of demonstrations, report backs on actions, book fairs, cultural events, and all the like, are going to take a real hit. We’re gonna have to either replace A/I as an infrastructure service, or go back to doing things in a different way that doesn’t involve the internet or online communications. Because if we can’t establish free or low cost, open source, autonomous movement infrastructure, then the online space becomes incredibly dangerous for us.

CrimethInc: I just want to add that how this plays out will be determined in part by how people respond to it. Whether other collectives take up the project of providing free infrastructure for online communication, or by whether we mobilize around this and bring the issue to other people, put it in front of other people, so that there can be a collective response. It’s not just a misfortune that is occurring to us, but it’s also an opportunity for us to act, as these always are.

One of the interesting things in communication patterns is that already over the last 10 years, as there has been a top-down clampdown on public social media platforms, we’ve seen people shift, shifting already towards a more person-to-person media use, whether that means using signal loops or other forms of technology that connect people more directly and in a way that offers more privacy to the participants. I think that we’ll continue to see that really quite apart from this particular designation. That’s the general trajectory that human relationships are on.

A lot of people for a lot of different reasons, have become disillusioned in the sort of interactions, relationships, or narcissism that are fostered by the social media formats that are provided by corporate control, and people are looking for other ways to relate to each other and their collective potential. We can foreground those kind of connections and those ways of forming relationships and shared projects as we go forward in response to this.

TFSR: I think that leads well into the last question that I was going to ask you all, which was about a positive note, with possible steps forward. If there are any other thoughts that you have concerning alternatives that we could be working towards as technologists or as members of movement and community who need alternatives to the models of tech tools available under authoritarian capitalism.

If you have any ideas on how we can help comrades shift their messages off of this platform, and if there are any thoughts that you have on where they might go. Just to sort of harken back to the Plan R* reference, and similar to what Crimethinc said, we are innovative if nothing else, in our ideals and in the visions of the world that we not only want to see but are willing to build. I’d love to hear any inspirations towards taking this as a challenge to build something better, stronger, and that serves our needs better than what’s available now? If you have any thoughts.

Sprout: Absolutely. Basically, a new Plan R*, which would have to defend more than servers this time, because this attack moved up the stack. The original Plan R* was built to survive the loss of a machine or a hostile hosting company. This designation reached across to the domain registry level, payment processor, banking relationship, and institutional connections around the machines. Some options under discussion include portable accounts and data, and interoperable services, multiple domains and jurisdictions, reproducible deployments, wider administrative knowledge, diversified funding arrangements, and legal and journalistic response capacity.

Every option that I’ve seen anyone talk about has technical, legal, labor, and sanctions implications that would need to be evaluated. Like I said, there are immediate alternatives that people can find to A/I and NoBlogs as services. I don’t know that I want to necessarily shout those out by name at this particular time, because a lot of these projects run on very limited money and volunteer labor, and a wave of NoBlogs users could honestly overwhelm them. I could reach out to some folks, and maybe in the show notes we could publish some of those names if they’re okay with that, but I think the idea is absolutely to learn from this and not only beef up what A/I has been doing, but replicate, replicate, replicate it everywhere, and don’t just be like, “Let’s get A/I back up and running, and call it a day.”

We need to take the cue from A/I themselves that the solution here is to have a 1000, a million servers, as many servers and providers doing different things and hosting in different ways for different people and different groups. You know, with the Fediverse, it’s all interoperable, and so we can still talk to each other and cross-pollinate. But we’ve learned that the server can be in Europe, and the off-switch can still be in Washington or Virginia. The bank can be in Italy, and its cards can still depend on American companies, so jurisdiction is a big issue in any thoughts moving forward I think.

Sprout: It can’t just be reduced to where server racks sit. We have to ask where the organization is incorporated, where the administrators live, who owns the hardware, who provides the bandwidth, which register sells the domain, which registry controls the top-level domain, which DNS operators make it resolvable, who processes payments for donations, everything. Because of the networked way in which they’re approaching this from the right, we need to be looking at the same sort of networks that we have and making them resilient to these attacks.

I think I can also speak a little bit to if users are out there on the hunt looking for an alternative, I could think of some relevant questions you might want to ask. Can you export stuff? Can you export content, your website, the mail, subscribers, domains? What logs do they take? How long are those logs retained? Try learning if the provider owns its own hardware or rents cloud capacity or how they handle that. Look into what happens if a domain register, bank, payment processor, or whatever disappears, and also how the project itself is governed. I think you need to take that into account, and capacity. A technically secure service may still be fragile if it lacks sufficient labor, or documentation, or funding, or admins.

So, you know, I think we had it real sweet with A/I. They had a lot figured out over the last 25 years. But the beautiful thing is that even if A/I were to disappear, their knowledge does not, and those collective members are going to be out there every day, spreading that knowledge and making it accessible to other people who want to replicate what they’ve done.

CrimethInc: I want to emphasize that this is not the end of an era. It’s not the end of the era when there are horizontal, not-for-profit, volunteer-run providers for internet access. It’s not the end of the era when people used the internet to communicate freely or to oppose autocracy. It’s rather an indication of how important it is to do those things, and we’re in a situation in which more and more people will need to be able to have unfettered access to communication, and people will be looking for ways to do that.

This should inspire more people to get active to to look for new ways to establish infrastructure, to facilitate contact and collaboration between people, and we’re in a historical era that is propelling more and more people into asking those questions. We can learn from the admirable legacy of programmers who, for the last quarter of a century or more, have put effort into establishing egalitarian and accessible options. But we should be thinking about how to meet the demands of the moment.

To put the designation of this Italian tech collective in a contemporary historical context, the far right currently holds power over the government of the United States, but it hasn’t been able to consolidate power on the level of the society. So the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular. They’re scrambling to shore up their control as more and more people become fed up with them and with the consequences of their attempt to establish a tyrannical autocracy.

The crackdown on people who use NoBlogs is just one small aspect of that. The Trump administration is going to continue to do things like this, and it’s not because of anything that demonstrators or protesters or dissidents did. It’s not because Charlie Kirk was killed. It’s not because of any of these things. It’s because the road map that the Trump administration has is to establish an autocracy by pursuing this sort of oligarchical authoritarian model, like we’ve seen in Hungary, in Russia, in other places where they consolidate power in their hands and suppress all criticism. They’re doing something that has happened in other parts of the world, and they have a road map. They’re proceeding along the road map as quickly as they can, and they will do that because we give them the opportunity to do so by not resisting. Or if it looks like they’re going to lose control, they’ll go through their checklists as fast as they possibly can, the way the Trump administration did in 2020 when it was becoming clear that he was going to be forced out of power.

We’re going to see more elements of this crackdown in the future, but those are not an indication that we’re doomed or that we can’t win this fight. They’re just the inevitable period of suffering that we have to go through right now as a consequence of some people toying with the idea that maybe living under an autocratic government would be a good thing. I think even many of those people are learning that that’s not the case.

In the long run, how to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again? That will really depend on whatever power structure comes after the Trump administration. Joe Biden succeeded Trump the first time around and kept many of the repressive instruments that Trump had introduced in place. We can imagine that happening again. If that does happen, we will continue to experience this thing where the political context just ratchets further and further to the right, as right-wing proponents of autocracy introduce additional repressive mechanisms, and then centrists legitimize those repressive mechanisms, and then pass the government back to the far right.

The alternative is for us to build up enough grassroots momentum to have leverage on whatever political formation succeeds the Trump administration, and to be able to exert that leverage to compel them to push back the repressive mechanisms and maneuvers that the Trump administration introduced. That’s what we need to aim for as a political minimum program: to make sure that if anything is radioactive, it is to continue the repressive policies of the Trump administration so that whoever succeeds the Trump administration, whatever political formation succeeds the Trump administration cannot by any means continue to crack down on free speech on volunteer-based grassroots organizing, or cannot continue to crack down on dissidence itself.

That’s our long-term horizon that can get us out of this situation. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to speak with you all today on this radio program. To everybody out there who is is listening, I want to emphasize the importance of the things that you can do to make a world in which people can communicate and cooperate freely. Thank you very much.

TFSR: Thank you both so much for this conversation. I really appreciate the time, the effort, and the thoughtfulness that you’ve put into it. And I’ll be sure to put links in the show notes to the numerous articles in the public letter that are published on Sabot Media, as well as the Crimethinc response, and I’m sure there will be more to what’s been going on with Autistici/Inventati. So thanks again for both of you participating in this chat.

Sprout: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. I think if anyone really wants to show support to A/I, the safest way to do that right now is to just stay up to date on what’s going on and not let this become something that gets swept under the rug. We just posted a campaign hub that kind of centralizes all sorts of reporting on this issue, including ours. So go to our website to check that out, and just don’t let A/I get forgotten.