alt Hacker NewsA/I shuts down
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I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.
> 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.
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.
[1]https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
edit: forgot the link to the designation
I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details.
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.
This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.
Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
We must all fight for independent hosting or we will lose the right.
Punish those trying to stop it by coming back stronger. Spin up in a few new countries if you have to.
Friends and I have been giving out free shell accounts, service hosting, and mentorship for anon randos for over 25 years. Apparently this makes us cyber-terrorists. Neat!
We have had our infrastructure taken from us many times, and quickly come back online, often in a new country, every time.
Looking forward to 25 more years of people trying to kill us. Every attempt makes us stronger and smarter.
So the oppression does work. It won't stop.
> History shows that people always choose convenience over autonomy.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.
>Sorry, but we don’t accept Bitcoin.
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...
I've been following the collextive for 10 years. They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity.
Parler was ripped off the Internet for 1% of this.
You reap what you sow. If you don't support the freedom of people you disagree with politically, I don't support your freedom either.
Covid has forced me to take a hard stance on this.
Political risk becoming infrastructure risk ; aservice can be viable technically and still disappear when the institutional environment changes
Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”
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.
I hereby designate the US dollar the currency of an international terrorist organization
What is this nonsense even about? Site I’ve never heard of making bombastic claims without any citations. Can someone please provide context and sources? Because this looks like a hoax or something?
Edit: just so we are clear, I’ve no idea what A/I is, the linked page gave no details, nor do the current top comments. The current top comment is rambling about free shell accounts and stuff. The ones I read after that were mourning the loss of this mysterious site/service/something. Does anyone want to clueinthe rest of us?
The U.S. government’s track record is concerning. After their actions against AntifaOst, numerous NGOs, such as 'Die Rote Hilfe,' were stripped of their banking access in Europe.
I think everybody should read the two Economic Hitmen books by John Perkins.
So I guess they just relaunch under a different name ?
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
Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.
It's interesting how a terrorist organization is now labeling others terrorists. This is how far we've come.
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...
> 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?
A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this
I like how certain HN threads really highlight that the venn of users here and Reddit /r/politics share almost entirely the same area.
Hmm, I would have expected more outrage from the US "free speech absolutists" over this US government decision ;)
"Italian neckbeard collective declared terrorist organization by Donald Trump" - what a world we live in.
I am first hearing about this group today, but here is some context:
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Apparently they provide the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and because of a 9/11 related executive order, the A/I is able to be branded a sponsor of terrorism.
I guess this makes it a crime to give them money or provide aid to them (if you are a US citizen).
EDIT: who is downvoting and why? The 2nd sentence in the PR says "Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) is an Italy-based extremist group that builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world" Are you mad that I quote the article or mad that you disagree with Trump? In either case, why are you downvoting me exactly? I am genuinely curious.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Another reason why EU should be independant of US. Cloudflare never had this kinda of bs...
2 different rules it seems.
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.
I fucking hate the US so much
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.
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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.