A single signature by Trump can remove you from the internet

A new David-versus-Goliath battle is being waged on the internet, after the U.S. government’s war against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. This time, the epicenter is Italy, and David is an Italian volunteer organization – a tiny collective of low-profile individuals who create and distribute encrypted email accounts, blogs, and mailing lists for free.

It is pro-privacy, anti-fascist, and anti-capitalist. It emerged twenty-five years ago from the utopian vision of the internet as a tool for liberation and the sharing of knowledge. In this era of Big Tech, of social media and its algorithms designed to keep users glued to their screens while siphoning off their personal data to resell for profit, this collective seems almost out of step with the times. They call themselves Autistici/Inventati and they have just come under fire from the U.S. government. The Trump administration has likened them to the digital arm of al-Qaeda and, in an unprecedented move, just added them to the list of global terrorist organizations, accusing them of providing digital services used by, among others, violent far-left American activists, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Il Fatto Quotidiano has sought to dig deeper into the allegations by questioning the U.S. State Department and speaking directly with the Autistici/Inventati collective as well as with experts in cryptography and digital rights. The picture that emerges is of a case that risks setting a grave precedent against freedom of expression, internet freedom and, ultimately, against political dissent. That is the view of Chip Gibbons, director of the American organization “Defending Rights and Dissent” and a longtime observer of the U.S. government’s war on press and internet freedom.

“The decision to sanction the Autistici/Inventati collective as terrorists, using the same scheme as applied to Al-Qaeda is deeply troubling”, Gibbons tells Il Fatto Quotidiano, “First and foremost, the Trump administration has made clear that is looking to tar the left as ‘terrorists’ and it seems clear this group was singled out for their leftwing political views. Moreover, there is nothing unlawful about providing tech tools to political groups. Sanctioning them as though they were al-Qaeda for doing so will obviously have a wider chilling effect on those who create tech tools or provide them to political groups”.

“Autistici/Inventati” has no factual information to determine where the attack originated. What prompted the Trump administration to add a tiny group from a nation on the periphery of the American empire to the list of terrorist entities? Did the Italian right—which has always been obsessed with the “threat” posed by anarchists and activists—play any role in this designation?

Speaking to our newspaper, Autistici/Inventati expresses skepticism and does not seem to believe that the Meloni administration played a role in this. “There are Americans who have used our services, and those are probably the bread crumbs that U.S. authorities followed to conclude that we are at the center of a global conspiracy,” a member of the collective tells Il Fatto, referring to the many American anti-fascist movements and the many activists opposing the brutality of ICE agents, who may have used Autistici/Inventati’s digital services.

Our newspaper tried to ask Matteo Piantedosi’s Ministry of the Interior whether the Italian government—and the Ministry of the Interior in particular—had been informed beforehand. The ministry declined to respond. The State Department did not respond to our requests for clarification either.

And yet the designation as a terrorist entity immediately led to the shutdown of the autistici.org website: who ordered it? The collective confirmed that it has not received any injunction from U.S. or Italian authorities: their website was simply taken down less than 48 hours after the designation. The organization’s PayPal account was immediately blocked as well.

Autistici/Inventati relies on donations and has a bank account with the Italian Banca Etica. As of this writing, Banca Etica appears intent on closing the account. Nor can Autistici/Inventati rely on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to circumvent a banking blockade: “We never wanted anything to do with cryptocurrencies because we believed they were a form of financial speculation,” they explain to Il Fatto, reiterating their anti-capitalist views. “We have never accepted donations in Bitcoin, otherwise we could have probably become rich, but again: our goal isn’t to get rich,” they say, “We want free and open services—not commercialized ones—that offer people the opportunity to express themselves both privately and publicly on the web or via email. We can’t read any of the email content; it’s all encrypted, because that’s how it should be”.

Shutting down Autistici/Inventati risks eliminating the secure, free, and open services that supported an incredibly rich diversity of initiatives: emails, blogs by hundreds of activists, independent radio stations, and social-benefit organizations, explains Francesca Bria—a professor at University College London and an expert on digital sovereignty—to Il Fatto.

Bria sees the offensive against the collective as a move that goes far beyond a tiny Italian volunteer organization. “Designating a collective that has been active for over twenty years in the European civil and digital rights movement—and has always operated openly—as a terrorist organization is part of the technological war that the United States is waging against anyone who asserts autonomy over digital networks and infrastructure”, Francesca Bria tells Il Fatto. “This attack must be repelled: Autistici/Inventati, a small organization made up of just a few people, deserves all the support it can get. This case must be brought before the European Parliament; it concerns not only them, but also the freedom of those in Europe who are working toward an independent, secure, and resilient digital infrastructure—the heart of the European digital sovereignty project. Digital infrastructure is the nervous system of our society and our economy; shutting it down by decree is the logic of an authoritarian state, not of a state governed by the rule of law”.

But in launching its attack against a tiny Italian collective, the Trump administration likely made a strategic calculation: striking at a weak link so as to set a precedent that could also be applied against stronger organizations. “It seems too niche of an issue for most of the tech press”, Harlo Holmes tells Il Fatto Quotidiano. Director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation, Holmes adds: “That means there won’t be any pushback, and that means we could already be on a slippery slope”.