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unfocso 8 hours ago [-]
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.
stymaar 7 hours ago [-]
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Waterluvian 7 hours ago [-]
Weddings if you’re lucky. They’ll also murder 150+ girls at school.
vrganj 6 hours ago [-]
Whats the dictionary definition of terror again?
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
mitxela 17 minutes ago [-]
I believe the pragmatic definition is "disagreement with the government".
stanleykm 6 hours ago [-]
It sounds like that until you realize that the baseline behavior is for countries that are not in NATO to be subservient to NATO. So, as you can see, it is the governments and populations that are coercing and intimidating themselves and NATO is helpfully returning them to normalcy.
Ruphin 5 hours ago [-]
The situation in Iran has nothing to do with NATO really. It is a US initiative, and NATO was not involved in any way in decision making or policy.
jpoesen 3 hours ago [-]
Oh sweet summer child, you would be absolutely correct were it not for your unfortunate confounding of NATO with the USA.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
I am biased here, as somebody who grew up next to an American military base in Iceland and had a pro-communist upbringing and learned to hate NATO (as well as the American imperialist agenda as a whole) from an early age.
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
There clearly is. Because NATO isn’t getting involved in America’s idiotic war of aggression and Trump is very upset about this. They’ve spent years being very upset about every other NATO nation’s spending, too.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
selfhoster1312 12 minutes ago [-]
They have been involved in pretty much all previous USA "idiotic wars of aggression", so while it may become useful in the future to make a distinction, it's also fair to appreciate that this distinction doesn't make a lot sense to a whole bunch of people.
runarberg 22 minutes ago [-]
* The UK allowing the USA to use it’s military bases for the war on Iran.
* Germany transporting weapons to Israel during the Gaza genocide.
* The UK doing reconnaissance missions during the Gaza genocide.
* NATO involvement in Libya
* Denmark participating in the invasion against Iraq.
* NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
In two of the bullet points above NATO as a block had a direct involvement in USA’s foreign affairs. And in the other cases individual NATO members are clearly doing the bidding of USA’s interests. Sure there maybe a distinction, but effectively there is no meaningful difference. NATO is clearly an alliance who‘s recent history is exclusively about protecting USA’s imperial ambitions. I can only assume that USA’s frustration is there only because it feels like other NATO countries should be spending more to further America’s dreams of empire. And predictably, most NATO countries obediently did exactly what USA ordered.
Just a couple of weeks ago NATO as a block had a military practice in Iceland, presumably use by the USA as a show of aggression for a potential invasion in Greenland.
1 hours ago [-]
dvt 3 hours ago [-]
> So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
Barrin92 3 hours ago [-]
Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone. It was an actual LARP and as Bruno Macaes wrote resembled a bunch of people making it to the end of a videogame, then running around confused in costumes and going for a drink.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
mitxela 16 minutes ago [-]
Jan 6 didn't work, but it could have worked. Many similar events have worked before. Jan 6 was the only time people tried, that was the point.
jfengel 2 hours ago [-]
What worked was getting people stirred up to the point that some would turn to violence. Even now a majority of their party believe they were justified.
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
xienze 53 minutes ago [-]
> Jan 6, didn't work, not entirely sure why you bring this up as a blueprint for anyone.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
"I broke everything like a child and now everything is worse" is not a revolution. It's being a useful idiot
kryogen1c 2 hours ago [-]
> you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol.
This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.
2 hours ago [-]
jasonlotito 28 minutes ago [-]
They were terrorists. Every single participant in J6 was a terrorist and deserves the full fury of the United States of America to treat them as such. They were also attempting to assassinate the VP. 1500+ terrorist and failed assassination attempts.
It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.
Geronimo.
chanakya 3 hours ago [-]
If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.
georgemcbay 4 minutes ago [-]
> which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (sometimes).
1matin 2 hours ago [-]
As a person living in the place you're mentioning, I have to confidently state that you've been brainwashed
wseqyrku 16 minutes ago [-]
I see you get your news from the internet.
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
> you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is
also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the
case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing
that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their
billionaires stole from us.
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ghandiluvsu 2 hours ago [-]
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JuniperMesos 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what A/I is experiencing is nothing different than what they themselves would seek to do to anyone they consider to be a Nazi.
2 hours ago [-]
mitxela 15 minutes ago [-]
And when you are the victim of a serial killer, it's no different than what you would seek to do to serial killers. Is that a good or bad thing?
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arcticfox 7 hours ago [-]
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
coldpie 7 hours ago [-]
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
2 hours ago [-]
mc32 7 hours ago [-]
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ipython 6 hours ago [-]
Let me fix that for you.
Lots of maga are idealists (even if their ideas are not based in the real world), a number of them are LARPers and a small number are hard core intent on eliminating “the enemy”. To think that no maga member is violent and entertains violent options, is denying reality. Also it’s disingenuous to think they are all out of their minds looking to overthrow the government. Many just have ideals that don’t align with the mainstream.
That doesn’t work. maga aren’t idealists, they are deeply cynical, atavistic reactionaries.
stale2002 2 hours ago [-]
Its not controversial to say that right wing extremists exist, some of which even commit violence, so your analogy isn't the brilliant whataboutism gotcha that you intended it to be.
So yes, just like some very far right people exist, that can justifiably be called terrorists, so to do some very far left individuals.
jasonlotito 23 minutes ago [-]
> just like some very far right people exist
The difference being they have support from the president. Whereas on the left, it's just some random "person" on Twitter.
Republicans and MAGA literally supports terrorists. This isn't a debate. It's fact.
mc32 6 hours ago [-]
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phoghed 6 hours ago [-]
> That violent criminals were pardoned doesn’t change the fact
It pretty explicitly changes that fact. Inb4 ehrm actually, we all know bro.
sdenton4 6 hours ago [-]
... But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members. It's an accusation levied against people the right wing wants to call terrorists.
stale2002 2 hours ago [-]
> But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
mitxela 13 minutes ago [-]
Am I a member of a terrorist organisation? How do I check?
mc32 6 hours ago [-]
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customguy 6 hours ago [-]
> Why do so called anti fascists act fascistically
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
mschuster91 6 hours ago [-]
> If so, why carry those flags and bandanas on their faces?
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
vrganj 6 hours ago [-]
Because opposing fascism gets fascists to target you and people are concerned for their safety.
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throwaway-11-1 6 hours ago [-]
People sharing similar values does not make them an organization. “Why do they wear masks?” because they don’t want nazis to interfere with their jobs, friends and families? You’re asking questions there are very obvious answers to. Seems like a disingenuous comment or you’re unable to do the most basic research
iwontberude 6 hours ago [-]
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strictnein 6 hours ago [-]
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paimapi 5 hours ago [-]
that's what a call a straw-man. NSPM-7 exists and is providing funding and direction for LEOs to target ideologically leftist organizations as tame as BLM or 50501 [0]
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
It’s mesmerizing to see how easy it has been to transform the USA into what was decried China to become about 5 years ago.
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
mitxela 11 minutes ago [-]
They say "every accusation is a confession" yet I'm still continually surprised by accusations that I never thought would turn out to be confessions, turning out to be confessions. Like the Chinese surveillance state.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
You're just not confronting reality, man. The President of the United States personally called for Gavin Newsom to be arrested in June 2025. In September of that year, in response to Newsom's post calling Gestapo chief Stephen Miller a fascist, Miller went on TV to complain that nobody is allowed to call him a fascist and Newsom was encouraging violence by doing so.
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays!
jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
sltkr 6 hours ago [-]
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aetch 6 hours ago [-]
Not wanting to provide free services to someone isn’t the same as not supporting free speech
sltkr 5 hours ago [-]
It's also not the same as supporting free speech.
That's why I asked: what did the authors ever do to _support_ free_speech, i.e., speech that they _don't_ agree with?
You don't get credit for supporting dissemination of your own views only. That's just “free speech for me, but not for thee”.
mitxela 10 minutes ago [-]
Right. If I support free libraries, but I deny a library card to an ax-wielding serial killer, I don't really support free libraries.
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
petre 3 hours ago [-]
Basically fascists against commies all over again. Important? Yes. Because they've proven again that they're actual fascists.
mitxela 10 minutes ago [-]
What is your definition of fascist,m
unfocso 7 hours ago [-]
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
msm_ 7 hours ago [-]
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
TowerTall 7 hours ago [-]
njal.la (no affiliate) exists for that purpose. It is a privacy focused domain service that is run by the people behind the pirate bay.
You’re still subject to ICANN, an American org. There is no escaping the US government if you’re using the public web for your infra
unfocso 7 hours ago [-]
Njalla is not ICANN accredited, so they cannot register domains. They buy them and then lease them out to you.
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
mitxela 9 minutes ago [-]
You don't have to discover the perfect solution in advance. You can just try something and see how long it works for, then try a different thing.
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision ;)
eikenberry 3 hours ago [-]
This is such a small blip in all the crap this administration is perpetrating that most are probably not aware of it or are drowned out in the rage over inflation, tariffs, wars, immigrants, etc.
mitxela 9 minutes ago [-]
They shut down basically the entire global left wing blogging space since this group was hosting it.
xoa 3 hours ago [-]
I'm a free speech absolutist (albeit one of apparently few people who actually knows what "free speech" is [0]) and I'm absolutely outraged and infuriated by this action and a long history of anti-speech actions by the USG, though this particular Administration is unprecedented in terms of censorship, general evil and authoritarianism in modern history. I also think it's unfortunate how many people in favor of all sorts of censorship now attack stawmen and treat something so vitally important as a joke like you have. The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society, and directly inspires nihilism/fatalism/tribalism etc, feelings which in turn directly support authoritarianism.
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0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
pet_the_bird 3 hours ago [-]
I am not sure I see a fundamental distinction between HN censoring your speech on their platform or the government preventing you from speaking in public. Both are censoring you right? Is the difference the fact that HN is free to regulate its own platform as it wants to?
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
mcv 4 minutes ago [-]
I don't think absolute free speech exists; there are always some limits to speech. Ideally not too many, but there are kinds of speech that I don't think you have any choice but to restrict if you want to have any kind of decent, safe and free society: threats, libel/slander, blackmail, and hate speech. Those are the kind of things that will silence, mislead or manipulate others, and are therefore by themselves a threat to free speech.
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
JoshTriplett 1 hours ago [-]
HN can't put you in jail.
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
mitxela 8 minutes ago [-]
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kurthr 3 hours ago [-]
If I have a public platform and refuse to sponsor/publish/platform your speech, that is my free speech right! You don't have the right to force me to speak your words. Only the government is prohibited (by 1st amendment) from censoring/limiting speech (that does not cause or promote violence or injury to others). There are also some restrictions and protections also offered to the press (eg libel and defamation) and common carriers, along with the abomination of the DMCA.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
andai 3 hours ago [-]
> The unseriousness you treat something incredibly serious with has become an endemic problem in our society
Testosterone down 50% since 1970.
Childishness up slightly more than that.
mjfs 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sure those two stats are definitely related. What a childish thing to say.
The word "testosterone" is not mentioned on this page at all. Nor any other hormones.
andai 42 minutes ago [-]
Well I was just noting a suspicious correlation. (Also childishness is up a lot more than 50%, in case my tone was unclear :)
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
mitxela 5 minutes ago [-]
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vmg12 3 hours ago [-]
I hate to see this strawman every single time there is an attack on free speech. You are actually mocking the fight for free speech. You aren't attacking the hypocrites that only use it when convenient.
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
RIMR 6 hours ago [-]
Did you really though? I never understood the "free speech absolutists" to care about speech they disagreed with. They made it clear that they only accept "patriotic" speech a long time ago.
politician 6 hours ago [-]
Did you catch the part where A/I Collective is operated by foreign parties outside the US?
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
Funny, the same US "free speech absolutists" get upset about "censorship" outside the US (mostly in EU countries) all the time, so it would be completely on point.
mitxela 4 minutes ago [-]
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Petersipoi 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be saying the "free speech absolutists" getting upset about censorship in the EU is a bad thing. While, at the same time, saying them not getting upset about this is a bad thing.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
rexpop 5 hours ago [-]
This is not how accusations of hypocrisy work. I don't have to agree with any particular stance of yours in order to accuse you of hypocrisy.
Arainach 6 hours ago [-]
If you believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, your belief shouldn't stop at borders.
xienze 41 minutes ago [-]
Good point, we should also allow foreign organizations to contribute to US election campaigns and make Facebook ads because they might also believe in civil liberties as rights and ideals, uh... right?
mitxela 3 minutes ago [-]
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politician 2 hours ago [-]
Don't put words in my mouth. I never claimed to believe what you're asserting.
As an American citizen, my right to free speech originates in the Bill of Rights as defended by my nation's armed forces. As a foreign company, A/I has no ability to claim the same rights.
Your talk about "rights and ideals" is just your own fantasy, ungrounded in reality.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
The Declaration of Independence, constitution and bill of rights aim to recognize and protect rights everyone is born with.
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Do you think your country is the only one that thought of free speech? Your particular implementation is irrelevant, I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by giving us a lecture on how some foreign country justifies their self-perception.
That being said, it is somewhat humorous how you're confirming the stereotypes that apparently even that needs guns and violence over there somehow?
politician 2 hours ago [-]
This story is about a US government designation. The clowns on HN are claiming that this is censorship and "what about my free speech". Yes, it's censorship. No, A/I Collective has no right to "free speech" from the US government. Italian free speech laws are irrelevant.
Please, pass this to an AI for a further explanation because I don't understand why you're so strongly resistant to understanding this very simple observation.
Arainach 1 hours ago [-]
> Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision
The crowd that claims to be in favor of free speech should be in favor of free speech for everyone, not just US citizens. This thread isn't about the government - it's about how HN's very vocal "free speech" crowd are actually libertarians who want to say awful things and not get called out rather than people who stand up for the concept of free speech in general.
kennywinker 6 hours ago [-]
So free speech absolutists don't care about free speech, just free speech for americans on american soil? Not very absolutist then...
estearum 4 hours ago [-]
"Free speech absolutists" demonstrably don't even care about free speech for Americans on American soil. "Free speech absolutism" is, in 99.9999% of cases, a euphemism for 1) holding abhorrent views and 2) being a gigantic fucking crybaby when someone criticizes you for them.
overfeed 4 hours ago [-]
The US free speech advocates had plenty to day about Julian Assange, an Australian stuck in the Ecuadorean embassy all the way across the Atlantic.
InsideOutSanta 8 hours ago [-]
I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.
mcv 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do? That's ultimately how they're able to do this.
Frieren 5 hours ago [-]
> Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do?
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
At the moment Europe is getting more reliant on the US. There are new non-Us payment systems but the end user devices are Apple or Google controlled. Governments and banks are very eager to get rid of cash, to introduce digital ID etc. That all relies on American platforms.
Frieren 4 hours ago [-]
> That all relies on American platforms.
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
mcv 40 minutes ago [-]
We used to. Contactless payments from my phone didn't require Google Wallet a few years ago, but now they do. My bank passes suddenly say VISA and have credit card numbers on them which they didn't have a few years ago. European banks are going in the completely wrong direction and need to reverse.
graemep 21 minutes ago [-]
They will only do so if forced to by regulators, and so far regulators have shown no interest in doing it.
einpoklum 2 hours ago [-]
> This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
pessimizer 18 minutes ago [-]
I love how Europeans get pumped up on anti-American rhetoric when they are far more submissive to the US than even a Ukraine or a South Korea is. I'm starting to think the rhetoric (always about what they're about to do, something about Trump, something about Musk) is being pumped to them by US admin think tanks.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
mitxela 60 seconds ago [-]
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JeffRosenberg 5 hours ago [-]
What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.
toomuchtodo 7 hours ago [-]
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
RonanSoleste 7 hours ago [-]
Europe is decoupling itself all ready also. Using SEPA-Inst and wero.
swiftcoder 7 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
mahkeiro 6 hours ago [-]
No but then you can have local bank that will not have US interactions but can still serve you. Since the French judge of the IPC was sanctioned, it’s clear that the EU must completely decouple from the US.
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago [-]
For now, but not forever. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Decoupling continues, with the target being independence. Quote this comment five years from now.
riffraff 41 minutes ago [-]
Not forever but long enough: there's no foreseeable future where the USA becomes an economy small enough to not be worth trading in.
For most banks the ability to sell financial instruments which end up interacting with the US financial institutions is fundamental.
So the rest of the world has the option of relying on China instead? How is that better?
FabCH 3 hours ago [-]
TBH China is not currently bombing a foreign country for no reason and it is not threatening to invade its allies.
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
graemep 25 minutes ago [-]
China has invaded and conquered other countries before, has occupied territories and clearly plans to invade at least one neighbour id it gets the chance. Its hugely oppressive internally and is wiping out minority cultures by any means required.
mandolingual 4 hours ago [-]
A small third party at the junction of two giants is infinitely more powerful than a small third party obliged to be the client of one.
graemep 4 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, yes. In the case of bankings systems combined with payment systems you could end up reliant on both. If the US sanctions you only people using a Chinese OS to make payments through a Chinese payment system will be unaffected and vice-versa. Either will be able to take your economy down.
nazgul17 26 minutes ago [-]
Competition is better for everyone
einpoklum 2 hours ago [-]
It can be better, if the alternative mechanism is designed with safeguards against hijacking by a single state. Naturally, the threat of sanctions can always bully banks or states into acting one way or another, but at least it would not be through the cutting off of money transfers between willing parties.
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
4 hours ago [-]
crawfordcomeaux 4 hours ago [-]
Just because millions of us haven't marched on the banks globally in a coordinated effort to control the banking system doesn't mean we can't.
Just have not yet done it.
NBJack 7 hours ago [-]
They already know what they are. There are good reasons the term "terrorist" has yet to be formally agreed upon among members of the United Nations.
what_hn 7 hours ago [-]
But meaning what
mitxela 1 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
mag7269 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
How many of these millions only had to migrate to the US because the US destroyed their countries with war, economic sanctions, covert CIA operations, or other attacks?
mag7269 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t know, how many? You are the one throwing blanket statements.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
hugodan 7 hours ago [-]
A/I shuts down
hiddencost 7 hours ago [-]
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
customguy 6 hours ago [-]
If you don't see an issue with the White House constantly posting straight up Nazi memes then that's on you. There's also plenty immigrants in Europe who vote for fascists, so? Turns out you can't just leave your "former" country behind like an old coat, it's still your upbringing and horizon. You are grateful "to the country", but what does that mean while also shrugging off what the people in "the country" are saying? What is left of "the country"? A bunch of papers, rights and money, opportunities for you; let the goons roam and fill their warehouses, keep children, even infants in despicable conditions, because you (think you) have nothing to fear?
mag7269 4 hours ago [-]
Yet billions of people would still want to come here.
How do you like them apples?
customguy 3 hours ago [-]
So you neither acknowledge nor disagree with any of that. As if it's nothing. I would if you don't care when it falls to fascism, it's not your home. You gave up your "former" country and you're not being a fellow country person in your new one, either, kinda like you don't really show up to this conversation, but worse. Since what you say has no substance it's as if you didn't say it in the first place. It just took up space and time, for nothing. Does that answer your question?
drivingmenuts 7 hours ago [-]
Some of y'all are from countries that are in great turmoil.
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
what_hn 7 hours ago [-]
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
> It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
throwitaway222 5 hours ago [-]
The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders. If anything it's the fault of leftist US government stance on drugs that weaken border security and allow drugs to get in (and therefore fund more drugs to be produced). And besides all that, the drug trade has been going on for far longer than you know. And including the murders.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
beedeebeedee 5 hours ago [-]
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago [-]
> The war on drugs definitely didn't cause the drug trade or the murders
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
nullsanity 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
aliasxneo 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sph 7 hours ago [-]
> HN is extremely left-leaning
What kind of mickey mouse political left are you using for reference here? The Dems?
HN is extremely american-leaning, whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
dgellow 7 hours ago [-]
> whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
Not really, no. Most of the world is under authoritarian regimes that would be seen as more right leaning. Most democracies are also right leaning. What characterizes the US is being extremely capitalistic and pro-corporations
aliasxneo 7 hours ago [-]
> HN is extremely american-leaning
I would agree that's true for Y Combinator, but my experience in the HN _community_ for almost a decade now has suggested that the heavy anti-American sentiment started right around the start of the current administration.
InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago [-]
> anti-American sentiment
It's always a bit upsetting to me when people conflate criticism of aspects of a country (like its government) with being against that country. I would rather say that it shows that people are pro that country and want it to do better.
aliasxneo 4 hours ago [-]
Fair enough. I do have a specific sentiment in mind, though, and it's not the constructive kind, which I very rarely see anymore. I would classify "anti-American sentiment" as sentiment which is against the Western culture that has predominated since the founding of the country.
But it's a slippery slope. If someone love America and wants a revolution to turn it into something historically unrecognizable, does that still make them pro-America? I would say no.
6 hours ago [-]
Petersipoi 5 hours ago [-]
America has the most progressive tax system in the world. There is no other country where the ultra rich pay such percentage of the tax burden. Fuck off with this "Left in the US is center in Europe" bullshit. The EU wishes they were as left as us in a lot of areas.
edit: Because this is HN and a lot of you are learning this for the first time:
US: $60k salary leads to $50k take home pay, then a less than 10% sales tax
Denmark: $60k salary leads to $38k take home pay, then a 25% sales tax
All that money you're losing in Denmark is paying for you shittier healthcare.
Welcome to a small taste of being outside your echo chamber.
commoner 3 hours ago [-]
> America has the most progressive tax system in the world. There is no other country where the ultra rich pay such percentage of the tax burden.
Nope, not even close. Sort this list by "Highest" and keep in mind that NYC is only one city in the US:
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
joquarky 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder why gun manufacturers aren't responsible for the behavior of their users, but this org is.
arcfour 3 hours ago [-]
Because you don't apply to a gun company to buy a gun. (You actually apply to the government...chew on that one for a while.)
ThunderSizzle 1 hours ago [-]
Well, in my state, you don't "apply" for a gun like you apply for a license. It is just document that you purchased it after the seller runs a background check.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
bakies 3 hours ago [-]
Didn't need to chew, I already know the government doesn't do enough to curb gun violence.
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.
parineum 5 hours ago [-]
That seems like two words for the same thing to me but making the distinction seems like a signalling mechanism to me.
jgtrosh 4 hours ago [-]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making alternative political movements care a lot about how decisions are taken. For instance, authors like David Graeber consider that majority voting only makes sense in the context if backed by violence.
2 hours ago [-]
typhonic 58 minutes ago [-]
> History shows that people always choose convenience over autonomy.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
raydev 31 minutes ago [-]
It only proves just how hard people’s lives were in order for them to prefer actual revolution over the status quo.
riffraff 45 minutes ago [-]
Well, you can interpret revolution as happening only when convenience breaks down too much.
postit 4 hours ago [-]
I'm wondering how long until they target CCC :/
sdcfgy 7 hours ago [-]
This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.
CircuitSeuss 5 hours ago [-]
Not all problems are best served with technical solutions. This is a political problem.
sdcfgy 4 hours ago [-]
I’m not suggesting technical solutions to be clear.
Ciph 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe LoRa? Doesn't get more sovereign than that. As long you have people to connect with, that is.
20after4 3 hours ago [-]
LoRa is very short range and extremely bandwidth limited.
Never heard of A/I and I have no idea what they are about, but rather than a government communication this statement reads like an angry rant with lots of unhelpful name-calling.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
dash2 41 minutes ago [-]
Really?
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Seems quite specific to me.
riffraff 29 minutes ago [-]
Well, the far left extremists also used ISPs, mobile phones, energy infrastructure to do this.
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
dpkirchner 4 hours ago [-]
This is the new Republican mainstream, the same mainstream that brings us AI generated videos of the Obamas as apes. They have no shame and are likely irredeemable (certainly their behavior is inexcusable).
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
tim333 5 hours ago [-]
Remember this is the Trump administration. I think your expectations might be a bit high.
threethirtytwo 3 hours ago [-]
Wait this is not true. I’m truly neutral here.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
Has any terrorist group ever used Gmail to communicate?
alexwebb2 6 hours ago [-]
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
notesinthefield 6 hours ago [-]
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
lokar 1 hours ago [-]
Stop trusting the US government.
dragonwriter 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
a2ff6eeb0 5 hours ago [-]
Hacker news engages in ideological vetting against users. For example, try posting content encouraging violence.
sublinear 4 hours ago [-]
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago [-]
What exactly do you think vetting means? Why do you think it's only allowed to happen up front?
1 hours ago [-]
WindyTree 5 hours ago [-]
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
4 hours ago [-]
kennywinker 6 hours ago [-]
Ideologically vetting can mean a lot of things. Like, a sign on the door that says "NO TERFS" is a form of ideological vetting.
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
What if "ideological vetting of users" means "discarding those who you believe would use the services for purposes you loathe".
megous 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
20after4 4 hours ago [-]
The current administration defines disliking fascism as a very bad thing.
stevenwoo 39 minutes ago [-]
The latest US Space Force dress uniforms look like Temu Schutzstaffel costumes.
mapontosevenths 5 hours ago [-]
Define genocide so we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing.
13415 4 hours ago [-]
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
3 hours ago [-]
catlover76 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
madsmith 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately I can no longer take any official communication from my government at face value. They have lost my trust that they are operating as directed by the letter of the law without fear nor favor.
fastball 5 hours ago [-]
> A/I’s cadre of radical hackers and tech developers provide a full spectrum of services
Pun intended?
sph 7 hours ago [-]
Like trying to scrutinize the motives of a complete lunatic.
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
Here’s the thing though: if even some of the examples given in the state department page are true (some of them are rather silly), that A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of, I’m not sure how they expected to hide behind their mission.
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
pepperoni_pizza 6 hours ago [-]
> “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
What Signal does is different than what A/I was in a number of ways.
sph 6 hours ago [-]
Which terrorists and criminals are texting right now on Signal? You (and hopefully Signal) have no idea whatsover, that's the point of privacy.
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
boesboes 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree in more ways, so that invalidates your comment xoxox
pepperoni_pizza 6 hours ago [-]
You won't elaborate though, just make vague accusations.
ricardobeat 6 hours ago [-]
I think the difference they alluded to is that they manually vetoed new users, presumably based on their self-declared goals and ideology, whereas Signal etc are neutral platforms.
pepperoni_pizza 5 hours ago [-]
The A/I vetting was in the form of a form asking why do you want A/I email or blog. You could write anything in it.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago [-]
How do you know what the A/I vetting consisted of or what standards they held? They don't seem to have published any detailed description of the process, and by their own account they destroyed all records of the vetting after approval.
Grombobulous 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah I didn’t elaborate since this was explained elsewhere in the thread.
Jeff_Brown 6 hours ago [-]
Please elaborate!
fl0id 6 hours ago [-]
in interviews, they said if you give them examples of "xyz" is prohibited by applicable law, they would remove it. They would not help you spy on them probably, by backdooring their infra or sth.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> A/I knowingly provided services to groups that verifiably did some rather violent things they are accused of
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
beej71 6 hours ago [-]
Or J6.
6 hours ago [-]
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
> There are very logical reasons why the state wielding force and violence is preferable to the alternatives…
Seems like there are some pretty clear historical exceptions to this rule.
Grombobulous 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
> we’ve already established an okay-ish democratic system
We have pardoned Jan 6ers convicted of "wielding force and violence" for political goals in goverment positions now.
And everyone involved in hiring and pardoning them should go to prison. I can't speak for everyone, but many of us really do have a principled opposition to political violence.
stanleykm 6 hours ago [-]
well depends on if you are in the group the state is wielding that power for or not..
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
hirako2000 6 hours ago [-]
> ERR_UNEXPECTED_PROXY_AUTH
bambax 6 hours ago [-]
"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
the_wolo 5 hours ago [-]
> one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US?
I too find it really weird. My grandpa was a member of a violent antifascist organization (US Army, 1940s). The US government even awarded him multiple medals for his antifa activities.
20after4 3 hours ago [-]
The Fa has taken over the US government.
computomatic 6 hours ago [-]
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
Grombobulous 6 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the problem they ran into.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
fl0id 6 hours ago [-]
for them it basically just means to not platform nazis etc. but then once you have an account, there is no control or anything.
fastball 5 hours ago [-]
That's exactly the point though: if you are choosing to platform some and not others, and some (many? most?) of the groups you are choosing to platform are violent groups, you very quickly run out of plausible deniability.
vrganj 6 hours ago [-]
Basically, far right extremists targeting antifascists through mechanisms of political repression while having the gall to call themselves pro free speech.
politician 3 hours ago [-]
Good to know that comments pointing out that the Bill of Rights does not extend "free speech" protections to parties operating in foreign countries will be flagged by the HN Illuminati.
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Again, whatever laws you have in the US is irrelevant in Italy, where they have their own free speech and the US is the foreign country.
Free speech has been around as a concept for two millenia, starting with Athenian democracy. Your relatively recent constitution didn't invent it and harping on your particular implementation is off-topic.
politician 2 hours ago [-]
Did you miss where this story is about the US government making a determination about a foreign party? It's very much not off-topic.
The US has different rules for (a) its citizens and (b) foreigners. If the US decides an Italian company is carrying water for terrorists and takes steps to stop it, that has nothing to do with my right to free speech. Isn't this obvious?
I'm glad they forced it off the internet and I support the action.
I think the real question is why Italy cannot protect its companies.
mrtesthah 6 hours ago [-]
Why is this downvoted? The regime has openly declared that anti-fascist beliefs are now cause for surveillance, censorship, and persecution.
Who cares about some American Bill in Italy? Y'all really think your country is the only one with freedom of speech?
queenkjuul 5 hours ago [-]
Most Americans truly do believe that
6 hours ago [-]
Dansvidania 6 hours ago [-]
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.
It's interesting how a terrorist organization is now labeling others terrorists. This is how far we've come.
einpoklum 2 hours ago [-]
This is unfortunately nothing new. The hegemonic power defines resistance to it as criminal, terrorist, immoral, heathen, satanic, reactionary etc.
2 hours ago [-]
m4rtink 1 hours ago [-]
So I guess they just relaunch under a different name ?
Kuyawa 4 hours ago [-]
I hereby designate the US dollar the currency of an international terrorist organization
matt123456789 7 hours ago [-]
What did they do??
dd8601fn 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds like providing encrypted communications?
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
SkyeCA 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
msm_ 7 hours ago [-]
IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah and maybe others are far right organizations, so I don't think this is purely left/right.
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
graemep 4 hours ago [-]
Their supporters in the west form alliances with the left.
I do not think you can meaningfully fit them in a left vs right classification. There are many groups in the world that take bits from left and right. There are ethno-nationalist communists, for examlle.
bakies 3 hours ago [-]
Can you describe those alliances?
politician 6 hours ago [-]
No one believes pro-Hamas activists in the US are voting for Trump.
kennywinker 6 hours ago [-]
"pro-hamas activists" is approximately nobody.
fastball 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tancop 4 hours ago [-]
People who are anti-semitic and violent call themselves Proud Boys and Restore Britain.
It's true that a lot of radical leftists do "critical support" for Hamas, just like they used to with the IRA or ETA. But that's the same thing as the US government supporting Islamists against the Soviet Union and Reagan funding right wing militias in Nicaragua.
It's defending a resistance movement on some parts of their agenda even if you disagree with the rest, because you think they're fighting for a good cause against a common enemy.
Some Hamas leaders, individuals within the party, want to massacre Jewish villages to drive all Jews out of Palestine. Almost no one in the student protests was defending that. But when it's the other way around all the Western leaders rush to defend the Israeli government saying it's just two insane ministers in a big cabinet and the rest will talk them into submission. That's clearly not true when you see a lot of their ideas getting implemented.
If the conflict was just Israel against Hamas it would be one of the situations where everybody involved sucks and there's no clear answer to anything so you should stay neutral. But the Israeli government is treating it as a war against Palestine where they allow their soldiers to rape and kill civilians, you can hear generals publicly setting kill targets and "security" policies that were already close to Apartheid level are getting stricter every week. They see every Arab as a legitimate target.
That tips the balance to the point where you can argue that supporting any resistance, even violent nationalist Hamas, is the only right move.
fastball 4 hours ago [-]
I appreciate your wanting to introduce nuance into the discussion, but nuance isn't really needed here. Two commenters replied to GP saying "Pro-hamas activists don't exist", which is untrue. That was my claim, and that was basically all GP said as well (with the additional assertion that such people are not voting for Trump). Why they are supporting Hamas is beside the point.
This conversation is basically the "it's not happening" > "it might be happening" > "it's happening and it's good actually" meme, though admittedly not by one person.
politician 2 hours ago [-]
My point was simply that foreign "far right" organizations are not the same as the "right" organizations belonging to the left vs right paradigm in the United States. Hamas is not equivalent to the Republican Party.
Fastball here is the only one that wasn't triggered by this observation.
pepperoni_pizza 6 hours ago [-]
> No one believes pro-Hamas activists in the US are voting for Trump.
Because "pro-Hamas activists" don't exist.
healsdata 6 hours ago [-]
Substack knowingly and openly platforms neo-nazis, allowing them to profit from their rhetoric while taking a piece of the action. Even if the authors avoid specific calls to violence to skirt the ToS, it still gives them fertile ground for recruitment and funding of their activities.
By your definition, then, Substack should be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown, yes?
dpkirchner 3 hours ago [-]
Worse, Substack promotes nazi content via push notifications to people that haven't subscribed to those nazi accounts.
3 hours ago [-]
foxglacier 3 hours ago [-]
Writing about your Neo-Nazi beliefs, or even being a Neo-Nazi doesn't make you a terrorist, and I'm sure none of those you're talking about are. So no, by his definition, Substack shouldn't be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown.
5 hours ago [-]
dd8601fn 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree. I just don’t know if they actually were courting bad guys or bad guys used an encrypted services provider. Both? Neither?
And I don’t see anyone hand wringing about that list of bad guys. Calling some of them “left” is pretty ridiculous in the first place.
That part sounds a little like telling on oneself.
7 hours ago [-]
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
Their public position, before the sanctions at least (https://archive.is/5TWWu), was that their services were manually vetted and provided "exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with".
soulofmischief 5 hours ago [-]
By that logic, you should stop paying taxes if you don't want to support terrorism.
bakies 3 hours ago [-]
I would be in favor of my state government withholding federal taxes, yeah
micromacrofoot 4 hours ago [-]
so let's shut down the US government?
aetch 6 hours ago [-]
The traitors in power in the U.S. use signal and no one cheers for signal to be shut down
NostraDavid 6 hours ago [-]
> Hizballah
Is that Hezbollah's little brother?
strictnein 6 hours ago [-]
Hizballah and Hezbollah are different spellings of the same thing, with Hizballah probably being more accurate and the one regularly used by the US government.
13415 4 hours ago [-]
Oh...the US government. That clarifies a lot...
rdtsc 8 hours ago [-]
Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”
mcv 7 hours ago [-]
Possibly. The content can be saved and posted on a variety of other platforms.
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
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.
I think everybody should read the two Economic Hitmen books by John Perkins.
NetOpWibby 7 hours ago [-]
A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this
13415 6 hours ago [-]
I still think a decentralized DNS alternative could scale, if done the right way. I also think that the majority of sites would be more secure if they used a system like ssh to deal with certificates, and government-controlled trust chains should be left for banking and other "official" stuff.
NetOpWibby 4 hours ago [-]
I'm working on something like this with Dap[1] (full disclosure, I used to be heavy into the Handshake[2] ecosystem). Where previous alt-roots failed is having nothing to build on it. Lots of marketing about how "things will be different" this time while providing nothing in the way of getting developers building experiences atop this new naming system.
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
[1]: https://dap.sh
[2]: https://handshake.org
nikunj1809 8 hours ago [-]
What does it means?
reilly3000 7 hours ago [-]
The US government designated a long-running web/email hosting services collective that served political dissidents as a terrorist organization.
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...
reilly3000 7 hours ago [-]
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
jtrn 7 hours ago [-]
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago [-]
The problem is that, as A/I themselves explained (https://www.inventati.org/who/collective), they worked hard to ensure that they do not possess any evidence of or data about who is using their infrastructure.
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
aetch 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they vet the users request before giving them access. After that the usage is anonymous. It’s not that deep
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
upofadown 5 hours ago [-]
I note that that extensive list only contains a single death, due to a power failure. Extreme civil disobedience, but not really terrorism.
philstephenson 7 hours ago [-]
> “That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large;”
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
queenkjuul 5 hours ago [-]
Why aren't they banning Signal?
nullsanity 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
JuniperMesos 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Do you oppose using standardized tests to determine which applicants should get admitted to selective public universities? This is a specific thing that was halted in California because activists argued it was illegally racist (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...). You'll probably find that lots of ways you relate to people around you as gendered beings, men and women, count as either sexism, transphobia, or both, at least according to some activists' definitions. I do not assume that when a political activist group claims to oppose racism, sexism, or other ostensible hostility to a demographic group, that they aren't trying to define this in a way that would result in an immense restriction on your rights, freedoms, or quality of life if enacted.
ranyume 7 hours ago [-]
> And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
jtrn 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but there are degrees. I’d rather have a conversation about trans rights here in Oslo than in Afghanistan.
ranyume 7 hours ago [-]
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
dvdkon 6 hours ago [-]
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars here in the Czech Republic, so "blood free" actually seems like a good characterisation. Sometimes the system just works.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
ranyume 3 hours ago [-]
I don't remember any LGBTQI+ wars inside my house either, but they're respected here. That's strange isn't it?
dvdkon 2 hours ago [-]
It is strange. I certainly wouldn't think your house, having been isolated from western society over decades by a communist regime and heavily-patrolled borders, would respond to social activism in foreign countries. But maybe there's just some secret house mycelium for sharing progressive ideas that I don't know about.
ranyume 2 hours ago [-]
It's very clear you do not have a grasp of Marxism or Communism. You'd know that the worker class is only one.
dvdkon 33 minutes ago [-]
Theoretical aphorisms can't override the facts of recorded history. If the harsh border control and cultural isolation of the East Bloc ran counter to Marxist principles, then you can complain to the dead leaders of the USSR, but that's about it.
goosejuice 6 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Must also acknowledge that such tactics generate the seeds of opposition. i.e. hate begets hate and violence begets violence.
jtrn 3 hours ago [-]
People who want bloodshed tend to say this… It’s melodramatic.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
ranyume 3 hours ago [-]
I have not glorified violence nor called to do violence to anyone. You seems to have misunderstood: I wish for violence to stop. It was always the oppressed's blood that was spilled by the establishment through police force every time they protested in the streets, and every time they were uncomfortable. Take the workers day as an example. It's egregious to me to call a protest violence.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
akhasg 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jtrn 7 hours ago [-]
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123hz 7 hours ago [-]
You go from "I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information..." to "That’s at best a simplistic framing."?
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
righthand 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
K0balt 7 hours ago [-]
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
oblongsquare69 8 hours ago [-]
I take it as, talk to people in real life and don’t rely on systems that can be shut down.
Normal_gaussian 7 hours ago [-]
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
unfocso 7 hours ago [-]
>Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
mdp2021 4 hours ago [-]
> wiretapped them for one year
Can you share the source? I don't have it.
Note: one big issue in the whole event is that this prosecution is happening without a transparent judgement.
ithkuil 1 hours ago [-]
You can read about the Italian police obtained the encryption keys through the Aruba colocation provider in the Wikipedia page:
The "terrorist" definition is just anybody that doesn’t agree with this administration at this point.
They will fabricate anything to justify their thinly veiled intentions.
driverdan 2 hours ago [-]
This isn't new, it changed after 9/11. The US government expanded the definition of terrorism to pretty much mean anything they want.
NicoJuicy 2 hours ago [-]
Another reason why EU should be independant of US. Cloudflare never had this kinda of bs...
2 different rules it seems.
AndrewKemendo 8 hours ago [-]
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
monkaiju 8 hours ago [-]
Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.
apricot 4 hours ago [-]
> In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate.
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
queenkjuul 5 hours ago [-]
I fucking hate the US so much
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
> Every day we stayed online after August 26, 2026, has been a victory, but now we are forced to stop.
Sad to see big bro tech and AI skynet is winning the war.
vallerie 8 hours ago [-]
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.
13415 7 hours ago [-]
It's in my opinion insane that the US can get away with this without serious backlash from other countries, and it confirms the disappointing reality that the US has become the biggest force for fascism and the biggest motor for the suppression of freedom of speech in the world.
swiftcoder 7 hours ago [-]
I mean, this sort of pales in comparison to sanctioning the International Criminal Court, no? They got away with that...
13415 6 hours ago [-]
Good point, it's not a particularly new behavior. It's just depressing what kind of utterly horrible shitshow the US has become. I was pretty open to and almost planning to move to the US 25 years ago and now I'm so happy I didn't.
mannanj 6 hours ago [-]
So, in 2021-2022 I publically called the See I Ayyy terrorists and advocated against accounts that algorithmically looked to astroturf or divide people on Instagram.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.
sfx77 5 hours ago [-]
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behole 8 hours ago [-]
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iammyselfhere 7 hours ago [-]
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sph 7 hours ago [-]
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darig 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
phoronixrly 7 hours ago [-]
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monkaiju 6 hours ago [-]
Bold of you to assume we have any say...
beej71 6 hours ago [-]
Yet we did, indirectly.
monkaiju 6 hours ago [-]
Indirectly is doing a lot of work there. The US is an extremely disenfranchised place, and the choices are both pro-capital and will never actually represent the people in any meaningful sense. This liberal individualism framing only serves to bolster nationalism and divide groups when what we really need to be doing is recognizing our shared goals, with "we" being the international "we", and figure out who our enemies really are.
hermannj314 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
behole 7 hours ago [-]
More boogie man bullshit from our fascist admin.
LeoPanthera 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
r3trohack3r 7 hours ago [-]
From the state department link above:
> Oregon-based Rose City Antifa has relied on A/I Collective tools and services to organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment. Rose City Antifa also used A/I Collective tools and services to disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with calls for targeted attacks on ICE agents in the streets and “in their homes.”
Planktonne 6 hours ago [-]
That's a bunch of unproven allegations from an administration with a history of lies; have you got anything more concrete?
GaryBluto 6 hours ago [-]
So violent cells that refer to themselves as "anti-fascist" don't exist?
7 hours ago [-]
phyzome 7 hours ago [-]
I think people are downvoting you for several reasons:
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
hermannj314 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks for explaining, I will work on my approach, I didn't think I said anything that presented I agree with or believed the PR, only that it was context for why the A/I situation.
I’d like to see you resist a government ordered shutdown of your accounts for more than a few hours
layer8 7 hours ago [-]
I’d like to have more information about what “offered” means here. I’m sure that regular email and hosting providers have been used by terrorists without being designated a terrorist organization themselves.
I'm sure they're aware who they are hosting, at least blog wise. We're not talking about a massive company with no ideological affiliation, they vet who they provide access to before they do so, so in many ways it is more of a partnership than simply providing services. Not that necessarily I think it was worth labelling the organization themselves terrorists, but it still isn't something that should be whitewashed.
swiftcoder 7 hours ago [-]
> Eleven days?
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
xgulfie 7 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine continuing to run something designated by the US as a terrorist organization for for even ONE day
mindslight 7 hours ago [-]
Actual terrorists have a right to speak too, you know. Intrinsic to the whole idea of rights is that even people we don't like (or are even mortally opposed to!) still have them. The problem with "firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers" is obviously the firebombs.
elmer2 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
benregenspan 7 hours ago [-]
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and dropped by AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not subjected to sanctions by a foreign government.
lukan 7 hours ago [-]
"They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity."
What kind exactly?
hirako2000 6 hours ago [-]
They are neutral. So violent terrorist activity is cracked down via their provider. So called secondary sanctions.
NostraDavid 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
well_ackshually 6 hours ago [-]
Because as we all know, the US government (and especially this one) would never lie.
How are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doing?
7 hours ago [-]
beej71 6 hours ago [-]
Unless the US government ripped parler off the Internet, this is not a sensible comparison.
foul 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
par 7 hours ago [-]
"created: 62 days ago" -- beyond that, what else makes you think it's a bot?
foul 4 hours ago [-]
I'm a gentleman and beyond that it's merely more likely (we are on HN and it's a newish user) that it is a bot, compared to their being a "meta shill" or a "monomaniac". You can skim their comments history for more information.
Shuang1 6 hours ago [-]
Everyone who disagrees with me is a bot.
tolerance 1 hours ago [-]
If I was someone who funded/relied on A/I's services I would have been trying to figure out what would it had taken for the US State Department to produce evidence for their allegations and would have lobbied for some sort of determination of whether the scope of A/I's involvement with said parties and their actions violated their own policies/terms of service.
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
> violence or the threat of violence used as a weapon of intimidation or coercion
> especially: violent or destructive acts (such as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terror
Now, which actor in this story does this sound like? The webhoster exercising their speech rights or the apparatus bombing schools and weddings in order to get their way?
I don‘t see a difference. I was told this when I was a child, and as I’ve grown up and seen more of the world (including by immigrating to the USA) I am more convinced then ever. In my eyes, there is no meaningful difference between USA and NATO.
So even if you don’t believe it, the U.S. clearly cares about NATO member behaviour and therefore recognizes a distinction.
* Germany transporting weapons to Israel during the Gaza genocide.
* The UK doing reconnaissance missions during the Gaza genocide.
* NATO involvement in Libya
* Denmark participating in the invasion against Iraq.
* NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
In two of the bullet points above NATO as a block had a direct involvement in USA’s foreign affairs. And in the other cases individual NATO members are clearly doing the bidding of USA’s interests. Sure there maybe a distinction, but effectively there is no meaningful difference. NATO is clearly an alliance who‘s recent history is exclusively about protecting USA’s imperial ambitions. I can only assume that USA’s frustration is there only because it feels like other NATO countries should be spending more to further America’s dreams of empire. And predictably, most NATO countries obediently did exactly what USA ordered.
Just a couple of weeks ago NATO as a block had a military practice in Iceland, presumably use by the USA as a show of aggression for a potential invasion in Greenland.
Honestly, the internet has made folks so lazy. It's very ironic that the most "revolutionary" act taken recently (January 6) was actually done by the far-right. Yeah: if you believe in something, you need to actually get out of the basement, grab a gun, and storm the Capitol. And if you take it all the way, a lot of people are going to die. That's how revolution works. Unless we're all LARPing?
But Americans/Westerners (left, right, center) are way too comfortable for a revolution, so for people that are, or have been, actual dissidents (think Arab Spring, or IRA, or ETA, or whatever), this is all just a big meme.
What did work for them was pouring money into the election system and party apparatus, media, the courts and then taking control over politics
That helped them take control of politics. And so that tactic will surely turn people to violence again. The violence itself may not be effective but the level of outrage is.
Might want to let the Democrats know that. According to them the government was >this< close to being overthrown. Which is funny, because if anyone truly believes that, we don't stand a chance against pretty much any country on earth.
This is not what happened on J6, and is specifically why it was not an insurrection.
It's a shame we went so light on them. Care bear punishment. Sweetheart deals, and then pardoned by a man that literally, factually, supports terrorism against the USA and supporting the attempted assassination of his VP.
Geronimo.
And in case the wedding reference wasn't explicit enough, this isn't just Trump, it was also Obama.
It pains me to summon the specter of "both sides" because the Republicans are so much worse. But the majority of national level Democrats aren't inherently good. They are just less bad (sometimes).
Well, it is a mafia. See the international court investigating war crimes is also targeted by the orange clown-brigade mafia.
> the only option is to cave
Objectively speaking you are correct, but I don't think this has to be the case. For instance, why is that orange mafia so powerful? That is the thing that has to be fixed on every level, not just by taking back what their billionaires stole from us.
Lots of maga are idealists (even if their ideas are not based in the real world), a number of them are LARPers and a small number are hard core intent on eliminating “the enemy”. To think that no maga member is violent and entertains violent options, is denying reality. Also it’s disingenuous to think they are all out of their minds looking to overthrow the government. Many just have ideals that don’t align with the mainstream.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1153982516232...
https://www.gettyimages.com/videos/jan-6
So yes, just like some very far right people exist, that can justifiably be called terrorists, so to do some very far left individuals.
The difference being they have support from the president. Whereas on the left, it's just some random "person" on Twitter.
Republicans and MAGA literally supports terrorists. This isn't a debate. It's fact.
It pretty explicitly changes that fact. Inb4 ehrm actually, we all know bro.
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
You see some form of resistance (the guy that was caught with a truck full of cut Flock cameras) but it seems the population is resigned.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
That's why I asked: what did the authors ever do to _support_ free_speech, i.e., speech that they _don't_ agree with?
You don't get credit for supporting dissemination of your own views only. That's just “free speech for me, but not for thee”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
[1] https://njal.la/domains/
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
----
0: For example, if HN bans you, shadowbans you, makes your posts dead by default, flags, or downvotes, that's all free speech.
For a large part I see people using digital platforms as a primary method of expressing their thoughts and opinions. Governments in both the US and the EU have imposed restrictions on what platforms may host. I think we have not reconciled yet how to reinterpret free speech online.
Im no expert on free speech, of free speech absolutism, so please let inform me :)
But things like criticising governments, questioning political or economic paradigms, or just making fun of powerful people, should always be legal and protected.
Freedom of association and freedom of speech go hand in hand. You can say whatever you like. You should not be arrested for it. People may choose not to associate with you, or not to do business with you, or not to amplify your speech by hosting it for you.
Personally, I don't consider paid speech to be free speech, and I don't consider corporations to by humans, but the supreme court does.
Remember, facts aren't real, there is no truth, and crime is legal (in the current "Justice" Dept).
Testosterone down 50% since 1970.
Childishness up slightly more than that.
But you've given me quite an interesting endocrinology research project here. Last I heard, the root cause of the drop remains unknown. (And it's still dropping.)
The only purpose this rhetoric serves is to justify using the power of government to silence opponents the next time your side happens to be in power.
In criticizing their inconsistencies, you are highlighting and simultaneously missing your own inconsistencies.
As an American citizen, my right to free speech originates in the Bill of Rights as defended by my nation's armed forces. As a foreign company, A/I has no ability to claim the same rights.
Your talk about "rights and ideals" is just your own fantasy, ungrounded in reality.
That being said, it is somewhat humorous how you're confirming the stereotypes that apparently even that needs guns and violence over there somehow?
Please, pass this to an AI for a further explanation because I don't understand why you're so strongly resistant to understanding this very simple observation.
The crowd that claims to be in favor of free speech should be in favor of free speech for everyone, not just US citizens. This thread isn't about the government - it's about how HN's very vocal "free speech" crowd are actually libertarians who want to say awful things and not get called out rather than people who stand up for the concept of free speech in general.
This is why Europe needs to detach itself from the American banking system.
It used to be very practical to use it. Countries renounced to some sovereignty in exchange for ease of doing business. The USA had an advantage but it didn't abuse it too much.
The current situation is that the USA is asking to forfeit sovereignty and to control business in an ideological basis. There is a strong incentive to leave that system as the alternative is become a colony of the USA. And the push for colonization is not subtle as the president takes over other countries resources like Venezuela's oil or tries to take control of the straight of Hormuz (None part of the USA at this moment)
Totally true. The EU needs its own platforms, I hope that better regulated than their USA counterparts. Linux started in Europe, it should have been promoted more for internal usage. But privatization of state-owned companies made it ideologically impossible to push for it. Public good was seen as "bad" and "against business", I hope that the obvious failure of that policy makes it now a possibility to use Linux.
So far, what it's detached itself from its sources of fossil fuels. With a little help from its great American friends.
The US is going to be at peace with Russia, and still pumping anti-Russian rhetoric into Europe to keep them buying US LNG. The big difference will be that they'll start mixing more Trump-Russia rhetoric in - but the result is that they'll be more dependent on the US. The anti-China rhetoric is working great, too.
The best thing for a Europe that wants to separate from the US is to completely isolate themselves from any possible energy or trade replacement for the US./s
That being said, in Europe it's a small elite class (that is still fairly firmly in control of everything) that pushes this (on direct orders and direct payments from US masters.) The rising degree of control of speech and association they have to exert, and the direct election interference they've had to engage in is very disturbing to a plurality of the European population. And that normally politically disengaged plurality is becoming politically active as their living standards drop.
China, Egypt to do away with the use of the US dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555056 - September 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
For most banks the ability to sell financial instruments which end up interacting with the US financial institutions is fundamental.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112
It’s not a particularly high bar, but of the big powers, only China currently meets it.
And I know you will say „but payment networks are not a warfare question, they are an economic question“ but that kind of breaks down when they are used to sanction ICC judges presiding over war crime cases.
Of course, that's an _if_, not something to just take for granted.
Just have not yet done it.
I’m from Latin America and it’s 100% the fault of some of our own corrupt governments and us people living in those places.
Emphasis on “some,” because countries like Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay and lately Argentina and El Salvador are showing that less government intervention in economic matters and a zero-bullshit policy on crime is how you turn things around to something that reminisces a somewhat livable country.
How do you like them apples?
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
This is a direct result of the "war on drugs" perpetrated by the US.
The other two are genuinely not the fault of the US, but bringing up two examples where the US wasn't the source of the problem doesn't exactly contradict the original claim.
> Which is partly or mostly our fault.
It does contradict the original claim because it's 3 examples of things we didn't cause - and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause, then the world's craziness is not mostly the fault of America. Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
Have to stop you right there. The “war on drugs” absolutely has created the conditions for the drug trade and the murders. If you criminalize a large part of the economy, then only criminals will profit from it. If we had sane drug policy, there would not be the profit that attracts these criminals. Additionally, the US intelligence services (and other nations) have a long documented role in cultivating the drug trade for diverse reasons: for profit and paying for operations, for control of regions, and to provide a reservoir of violence to disguise or facilitate their work.
You should be a lot less confident in your opinions. The war on drugs required violent interventions against drug production in Mexico, which directly created militarized, violent drug cartels.
Example: pressured by the US, Felipe Calderón launched Operation Michoacán in 2006 with U.S. backing and funding. He deployed tens of thousands of federal forces. Mexico has recorded more than 463,000 homicides since that declaration of war on the cartels, a huge increase.
Just look at the data.
> and he said "mostly our fault". If it takes 3 seconds to think of things we didn't cause
He said "mostly" because he knows there are counterexamples, so providing counterexamples doesn't contradict his point.
> Mostly the US has a hand in stopping communist governments where the citizens are kept as slaves.
This is such a genuinely undiscriminating statement that I can't help but categorize it as dumb. I don't usually say this, but you need to stop listening to propaganda and pick up a few actual history books. Until you do, any discussion is pointless, because you're so stuck in your ideology that facts can't penetrate the bubble.
That's really all I have for you. It's up to you to fix yourself.
What kind of mickey mouse political left are you using for reference here? The Dems?
HN is extremely american-leaning, whose centre is firmly to the right compared to the rest of the world.
Not really, no. Most of the world is under authoritarian regimes that would be seen as more right leaning. Most democracies are also right leaning. What characterizes the US is being extremely capitalistic and pro-corporations
I would agree that's true for Y Combinator, but my experience in the HN _community_ for almost a decade now has suggested that the heavy anti-American sentiment started right around the start of the current administration.
It's always a bit upsetting to me when people conflate criticism of aspects of a country (like its government) with being against that country. I would rather say that it shows that people are pro that country and want it to do better.
But it's a slippery slope. If someone love America and wants a revolution to turn it into something historically unrecognizable, does that still make them pro-America? I would say no.
edit: Because this is HN and a lot of you are learning this for the first time:
US: $60k salary leads to $50k take home pay, then a less than 10% sales tax
Denmark: $60k salary leads to $38k take home pay, then a 25% sales tax
All that money you're losing in Denmark is paying for you shittier healthcare.
Welcome to a small taste of being outside your echo chamber.
Nope, not even close. Sort this list by "Highest" and keep in mind that NYC is only one city in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Hmm. So they are going by “A/I vets its users” and users sabotaged rail systems so therefore A/I is materially assisting terrorists? I wonder how this vetting works? Do users have to submit government issued documents, write essays? Do they make users sign non-violence agreement ToS. I mean heck, Facebook and Twitter has material supporting various things like that and US government is designated them as terrorists.
The government isn't attesting to your capabilities - that is still on you as a citizen.
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.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.
> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.
Seems quite specific to me.
Are those terrorist organizations too?
Moreover, ask yourself: why hasn't Germany accused A/I of being co-responsible of the attacks?
And ultimately these statements aren't for the normal citizens. They're for the truly strange, the racists, and the trolls.
The site lists actual terror attacks where the tools were used. That’s pretty damning if accurate. Anyone care to comment on that? I’m not well informed but the statement does not look like just straight up name calling.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
By this logic any right wing message board would be designated terrorists the moment one person who has posted there commits a violent act.
This is meant to chill domestic left-wing activism. Just like the person who got 30 years for delivering some zines (https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... https://portside.org/2026-06-25/injustice-how-leftist-zines-...)
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
It is the first line of https://www.inventati.org/who/policy
Pun intended?
My impression is that they didn’t say “hey we don’t have customer information but we don’t service violent groups and we will responsibly investigate and discontinue service to offenders.”
Their vibe was much more defiant, like, “we designed this to be anonymous and specifically intend/expect for it to be used in any way regardless of legality and are okay with it.”
Is it right for the US to be the global arbiter of this issue and domains in general? Of course not.
That is also what Signal does. Or absolutely any end-to-end encrypted communication service at all - these are explicitly designed not to retain details of communication.
Do you want to declare them terrorists too?
Now, if you are against private conversations, please state so clearly so we know which side of the fence you lean towards.
Meanwhile, Signal requires a phone number, so it knows much more about your identity than A/I did.
If that's disqualifying, a lot of US government contractors are in trouble.
Seems like there are some pretty clear historical exceptions to this rule.
We have pardoned Jan 6ers convicted of "wielding force and violence" for political goals in goverment positions now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch is uncomfortably close to the situation.
The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.
always has been
e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0Ql0VfcRg
> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?
Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.
A lot of the state department’s claims of “violent groups” are BS but it also seems like a non-zero number of them are pretty violent organizations.
There’s a big difference between “we have designed our devices to be zero-knowledge but we act swiftly against violent/illegal activity if it’s discovered” versus “we actively endorse the views of our user base.”
Free speech has been around as a concept for two millenia, starting with Athenian democracy. Your relatively recent constitution didn't invent it and harping on your particular implementation is off-topic.
The US has different rules for (a) its citizens and (b) foreigners. If the US decides an Italian company is carrying water for terrorists and takes steps to stop it, that has nothing to do with my right to free speech. Isn't this obvious?
I'm glad they forced it off the internet and I support the action.
I think the real question is why Italy cannot protect its companies.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-commo...
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
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
I do not think you can meaningfully fit them in a left vs right classification. There are many groups in the world that take bits from left and right. There are ethno-nationalist communists, for examlle.
It's true that a lot of radical leftists do "critical support" for Hamas, just like they used to with the IRA or ETA. But that's the same thing as the US government supporting Islamists against the Soviet Union and Reagan funding right wing militias in Nicaragua.
It's defending a resistance movement on some parts of their agenda even if you disagree with the rest, because you think they're fighting for a good cause against a common enemy.
Some Hamas leaders, individuals within the party, want to massacre Jewish villages to drive all Jews out of Palestine. Almost no one in the student protests was defending that. But when it's the other way around all the Western leaders rush to defend the Israeli government saying it's just two insane ministers in a big cabinet and the rest will talk them into submission. That's clearly not true when you see a lot of their ideas getting implemented.
If the conflict was just Israel against Hamas it would be one of the situations where everybody involved sucks and there's no clear answer to anything so you should stay neutral. But the Israeli government is treating it as a war against Palestine where they allow their soldiers to rape and kill civilians, you can hear generals publicly setting kill targets and "security" policies that were already close to Apartheid level are getting stricter every week. They see every Arab as a legitimate target.
That tips the balance to the point where you can argue that supporting any resistance, even violent nationalist Hamas, is the only right move.
This conversation is basically the "it's not happening" > "it might be happening" > "it's happening and it's good actually" meme, though admittedly not by one person.
Fastball here is the only one that wasn't triggered by this observation.
Because "pro-Hamas activists" don't exist.
By your definition, then, Substack should be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown, yes?
And I don’t see anyone hand wringing about that list of bad guys. Calling some of them “left” is pretty ridiculous in the first place.
That part sounds a little like telling on oneself.
Is that Hezbollah's little brother?
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
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...
Claiming your root is more secure isn't enough, what can people DO with it and WHY should they care? I've ranted enough about this to deaf ears over a half decade to no avail. Even if Dap doesn't end up being the first credible alt-root, I do hope something appears and is not immediately linked to (objectively) illegal/evil activity.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
It means the government won.
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...
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260826145332/https://www.autis...
"We provide our services strictly for non-commercial use, in order to provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with. In order to verify the existence of these pre-conditions, each and every service request is processed manually by one of our volunteers and is in a dialogical form. All requests are anonymized and will be destroyed."
Anonymized how? Before the first contact? After the conversation?
If anyone here wants to set up a similar service: This is patently stupid for an ISP to attempt.
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
Do you oppose using standardized tests to determine which applicants should get admitted to selective public universities? This is a specific thing that was halted in California because activists argued it was illegally racist (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...). You'll probably find that lots of ways you relate to people around you as gendered beings, men and women, count as either sexism, transphobia, or both, at least according to some activists' definitions. I do not assume that when a political activist group claims to oppose racism, sexism, or other ostensible hostility to a demographic group, that they aren't trying to define this in a way that would result in an immense restriction on your rights, freedoms, or quality of life if enacted.
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
See also the Velvet Revolution for a pretty large shift away from totalitarianism without any deaths.
You could say that about anything classified as human progress. How did we improve things so that people could have electricity and safety? At the cost of deaths and suffering by everyone who built the Hoover Dam and similar projects. The same goes for "stop killing patients by going dirty from corpses to the delivery room," even when we knew it was unsafe. There is always death and blood related to any topic. How do you think you got the device you are communicating with? Through the death and suffering of someone in Congo, mining cobalt, and someone working themselves to death in a factory.
I have lived through the normalization of gay rights in Norway, and saying that it was a process marked by blood and suffering is moronic. It was painful, unnecessary, overdue, and many other things. But saying that it was a bloody conflict is just not true, at least not any more than many other progressive movements. So progress doesn't have to be violent.
You could say that this is not the lived experience of many people, and that is true. But that doesn’t automatically mean it has to be so for everybody, and it does not have to be inevitable for any cause. It’s not statistically more violent than many other things.
I’m getting tired of the violent and angry rhetoric people spew without pushback. Stop idealizing and glorifying violence and conflict to solve any problem. It seems more and more to me that this is violent ideation first, with the cause being secondary.
The only thing the oppressed can do is to be uncomfortable, organize, and not let the system claim their souls and bodies. The only thing the system does is perpetuate itself, inflicting violence to the oppressed, in an endless spiral towards the bottom.
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
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?
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
Can you share the source? I don't have it.
Note: one big issue in the whole event is that this prosecution is happening without a transparent judgement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati
Italian Postal Police wiretapping (2004–2005)
It is also not like Palestinian activism is blocked on X, despite people here saying that only Nazis are on X and everything is censored:
https://x.com/intifada
They will fabricate anything to justify their thinly veiled intentions.
2 different rules it seems.
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
At the very beginning of his first mandate, when he lied about something as trivial as the size of the crowd during his inauguration, and kept to his lies despite absolute evidence to the contrary, never showing any hesitation, second thoughts, or remorse, Trump showed everyone the way ahead.
Do not look at facts. Decide what you want to be true, and act like it is true. Do this every day of every year. In the beginning, people will object; do not get into a debate with them, rather continue making up lies, bigger ones.
I remember seeing videos of a tsunami for the first time. I imagined a huge wave that destroyed everything. It was nothing like that. It started slowly. The water level rose, a few waves went over a wall and onto streets, But the water kept coming, and coming, destroying everything that stood in its path, and in a matter of minutes it was the ocean where before there was a city.
Sad to see big bro tech and AI skynet is winning the war.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.
They showed up as actors in my commune where I lived (it was open-to-join, that was the mistake I made among being naive publically thinking truth prevails). I found after that the many past abuses of our government have not stopped and simply adopted to the modern age. Organizations whose interest it is to protect their shadow interests care not about what’s actually good for Americans, their interests are for maintaining status quo.
Status quo supports what - questioning AI and attempting to reverse the power structures or following along obediantly without question? I always wondered if my commentary led me to be put into a database of some kind. After Formerly holding a clearance, and letting it lapse, I’m recently reapplying and let’s see if “calling a government organization a terrorist org” discounts me from that. After reading the article I wouldn’t be surprised if like school yard bullies a leader in the orgs with power respond to viral accusers by marking them in a database as terrorists. Edit; please don’t accuse me of having mental health issues, I’m fine and I am working with my senators office and a “investigatory” agency to look into the abuses. I don’t yet feel hopeful the 3 petter org will reveal anything tho about my case due to security reasons.
> Oregon-based Rose City Antifa has relied on A/I Collective tools and services to organize and incite violent and criminal acts domestically, including an attack on Customs and Border Patrol helicopters that led to a federal indictment. Rose City Antifa also used A/I Collective tools and services to disseminate doxing lists and release illegally obtained personal information of Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with calls for targeted attacks on ICE agents in the streets and “in their homes.”
- Taking administration propaganda pieces at face value (such as the batshit insane page you linked to)
- Referring to "violent antifa cells". That's the spin Trump has been trying to put on the groups of people who have been resisting fascism. (Do you know what "antifa" stands for?)
Yes I am well aware of what antifa means.
I'm sure they're aware who they are hosting, at least blog wise. We're not talking about a massive company with no ideological affiliation, they vet who they provide access to before they do so, so in many ways it is more of a partnership than simply providing services. Not that necessarily I think it was worth labelling the organization themselves terrorists, but it still isn't something that should be whitewashed.
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
What kind exactly?
How are the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doing?
Otherwise there is a way to look at this as A/I getting away scot-free for failing to administer their policies, failing to hold bad actors accountable and ultimately letting down individuals and organizations who lawfully used their services.
I'm also not surprised that A/I themselves never anticipated something like this happening and did not have some sort of protocol in place to deal with it. They had 25 years to do so.