On August 26, 2026, the United States government classified the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” citing the collective’s “far-left” politics to justify the designation. They announced similar designations of the British group Palestine Action and the transnational Palestinian movement Masar Badil in the same statement.

Founded in 2001, Autistici/Inventati is a volunteer-run provider of privacy-oriented email, websites, mailing lists, blogs, and communications tools for users who prefer not to rely on corporate platforms. According to the US State Department, Autistici/Inventati hosts “roughly 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, and 10,000 ‘blogs’ on its custom-built platform.”

Autistici/Inventati explain their values and goals in their manifesto:

We believe that communication must be free—and for free—and, therefore, universally accessible.

We try to accomplish all this by offering internet services (web sites, e-mail, mailing lists, chats, blogs, newsletters, and more) using our best skills and knowledge to defend both individuals or groups sharing our same aims or ideals. […]

We believe that media and communication should not be the exclusive domain of information professionals. We believe in the value of self-management: this is why we have no sponsors or funding of any kind, apart from voluntary donations from those who believe that our project is important and must survive. None of us earns a cent from this project (in fact, quite the opposite).

Many book fairs, radio programs, and other cultural projects rely on the Autistici/Inventati platform noblogs.org for website hosting. According to one anti-fascist research group, “Some of the most well-known NoBlogs sites belong to researchers who solely report on far-right hate and radicalization, never doing anything aside from showing you what exists.” Such researchers helped to identify the fascists who participanted in the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, during which one Neo-Nazi murdered Heather Heyer in an actual act of terrorism.

The US State Department is rationalizing this designation by alleging that Autistici/Inventati “provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups,” including Portland-based Rose City Antifa. Their claim about Rose City Antifa seems to be false, however, conflating Rose City Antifa with another project called Rose City Counterinfo.

On the basis of this error, the State Department rushed to proclaim an alleged “Portland Antifa connection to Hamas” and “Iran’s IRGC” [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], with the sole justification being the allegation that an unnamed “extremist media group”—which they do not allege had any relationship to Rose City Antifa—had republished statements from Hamas and the IRGC on a website hosted by noblogs.org. This is representative of the dishonesty and erroneousness of the State Department press release as a whole.

When a military force carries out an attack on a village, the first thing they do is attempt to cut the communication lines that connect it to the outside world. We have to understand the attack on Autistici/Inventati the same way. Now that tech corporations from Meta to the platform formerly known as Twitter have showed that they are willing to ban whoever the US government instructs them to, the US government is going after groups that provide web services on a non-commercial basis.

Because there is no “domestic terrorist organization” designation in the United States, the Trump administration began its criminalization of anti-fascists by designating European anti-fascist groups as “terrorists.” They are targeting an Italian tech project for the same reason: they aim to put the pieces in place to criminalize domestic protesters by associating them with designated “Global Terrorist” groups.

According to the United States Department of the Treasury, starting on September 25, 2026, any transactions with Autistici/Inventati will be “prohibited by the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations.”¹ The press release from the Treasury stipulates:

Violations of US sanctions may result in the imposition of civil or criminal penalties on US and foreign persons.

Autistici/Inventati have released a short statement about the designation:

We deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.

We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from their own violence and warmongering.

Anti-fascism and anti-capitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.

Building on the social media bans of the preceding years, the terrorist designation of Autistici/Inventati is an effort to suppress dissident media and a significant step towards state repression on the basis of ideology alone. This will not stop with anarchist projects, but will eventually extend across the political spectrum to everyone who does not fall in line with the administration, unless the administration is removed from power. The danger to all will increase until that occurs.

Of course, Donald Trump’s successors could keep repressive policies like this in place, much as Joe Biden did. We must make sure that there is enough political pressure on any political formation that could succeed the Trump presidency to compel them to roll back the repressive measures that Trump‘s administration introduced.

---

Further Reading

For a legal analysis of this designation, you could start here.

• US Sanctions Three European Activist Networks, Including Italian Privacy Collective
• Make Ready: Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression

---