Keep the Internet free

We are not terrorists. Autistici.org is an infrastructure of dissent

Open Letter

Defend Autistici/Inventati and the right to build resistant communication

On August 26, 2026, the United States designated the Italian volunteer technology collective Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and placed it on the Specially Designated Nationals list under Executive Order 13224. A temporary authorization covering certain wind-down transactions ends at 12:01 a.m. Eastern on September 25.

Autistici/Inventati has provided noncommercial email, websites, mailing lists, Noblogs and other communications services since 2001. It emerged from Italian hacklabs, autonomous media and social movements. Its infrastructure was built in response to censorship, covert surveillance and server seizures. It minimizes identifying data, uses distributed systems and treats privacy as a condition of political participation rather than a product.

The United States’ public announcements point to material and organizations that allegedly used A/I infrastructure. They do not publicly show that A/I planned the cited actions, selected targets, directed users or authored hosted material. The designation therefore raises a question extending far beyond one collective: can maintaining privacy-preserving communications infrastructure for disfavored movements itself be treated as terrorism?

That theory threatens independent hosts, encrypted communications services, radical libraries, movement archives, publishers and small volunteer projects everywhere. It invites banks, registrars, hosting companies and technology providers to sever relationships first and ask legal questions later. It turns data minimization into suspicion, privacy into concealment and infrastructure into guilt by association.

Large commercial platforms are ordinarily distinguished from the speech and conduct of their users through intermediary-liability principles, including Section 230 in the United States. Those protections are not absolute and do not override sanctions law. That is precisely why this designation is so consequential: executive sanctions power can impose economic isolation without resolving the ordinary question of whether a provider is legally responsible for third-party material in court.

Autistici/Inventati is not politically neutral; political affinity, however, is not operational control. Providing an email account, publishing platform or server, does not mean sharing everying a user may later say or do.

For this reason we ask that you read this letter, sign it, and share it as much as possible, among all of your groups and communities. This story concerns all of us, our freedom of expression, and the possibility of having access to information and communication networks that are private, anti-fascist, and free.

We call for:

  1. The immediate revocation or prompt, transparent review of the designation, with publication of the legal basis sufficient for a meaningful public scrutinity and eventual challenge.
  2. A clear distinction between providing a communication infrastructure and the conducts of its users.
  3. Privacy, encryption, pseudonymity, and refusal to collect and handle unnecessary identifying data not to be treated as evidence of terrorism.
  4. Protection for independent reporting, research, archiving and public advocacy. Journalists, libraries, researchers, and community organizers to be able to document this story without begin treated as “accomplices” to the A/I project.
  5. Banks, registrars, and similar entities to openly declare what external rules they are binded to (e.g., SWIFT protocols for banks, PIR policies for registrars), and to distinguish said rules from their own discretional choices. These bindings should not be exploited as pretext to act beyond necessity, for example by suspending accounts or domains “out of precaution” when not explicitely directed by law. Limits to their repressive actions should coincide with actual legal requirements, not go beyond it.
  6. A public response from public digital-rights, free-expression, and civil-liberties institutions. The targeting of autonomous infrastructure cannot be allowed to become a precedent through silence.

The purpose of economic designation is isolation. Our answer is independent, informed and disciplined solidarity: preserve the public record, examine the government’s claims, resist over-compliance and defend the ability of movements to communicate without surrendering themselves to corporate or state surveillance.