Trump's long arm: how a US blacklist killed an Italian site

“A/I is shutting down. The Autistici/Inventati collective is shutting down and will soon discontinue all of the services we provide. There is no easy way to announce or explain this,” reads a statement issued by the Italian tech collective last week. 

The A/I collective is a volunteer-run provider of email, website, and blogging services to activists and campaigners. On August 26, the United States’ Department of State flagged the platform as Specially Designated Global Terrorist – a blacklist normally reserved for terrorist movements.

According to the US government, A/I provided a wide range of services – including encrypted chat and email, web hosting, secure videoconferencing, and anonymity tools — to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, including Kurdistan’s PKK. 

A/I’s block

Tellingly, A/I received no formal notice of any of this. The collective learned it had been designated a global terrorist entity from a post on X by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — with no official communication, and no explanation, ever sent directly to them. 

As a result, companies offering financial and hosting services to A/I were required to stop doing so. Days after the designation, autistici.org became unreachable: visitors got a DNS resolution failure. Italian lender Banca Etica flagged the collective's bank account as being at risk of suspension, and its PayPal account — a key channel for the volunteer-run group's donations — stopped working as well.

“In this political climate, continuing to offer our services endangers our users and anyone who is part of our communities. In a world where allegations are disconnected from reality, we can only expect repression to be increasingly disproportionate. Under these circumstances, we are no longer able to maintain our original mission - offering secure and non-commercial digital tools,” continues the statement. A/I says it intends to pursue legal action and to try to keep its services running under a different domain.

How the shutdown actually happened

To fully understand the A/I shutdown, it is important to look at the dynamics of the domain’s disappearance. The collective’s own technicians traced the DNS failure to Public Interest Registry (PIR), the US-based nonprofit that administers the .org top-level domain on which autistici.org sits.

PIR is an American organization bound by US sanctions law, and it appears to have acted on the designation almost immediately — even though the Treasury Department's own General License 36 gave operators until September 25 to wind down existing relationships with newly designated entities. PIR, in other words, cut ties well before it was legally required to.

This gap illustrates how these sanctions work through de-risking  — private companies, fearing legal exposure or reputational risk, choosing on their own to sever ties with a designated entity rather than test the boundaries of the law. Banca Etica's move against A/I's account looks like the same pattern. 

The material support concept

The A/I collective was founded in 2001 and described itself as a platform that aimed to support individuals, groups, and communities sharing antifascist, antisexist, antiracist, and antimilitaristic values. 

The US administration said that A/I operates 16,000 email accounts, 10,000 blogs, 5,500 mailing lists, and 1,500 websites, used by thousands of people. Targeting the platform means targeting all users indiscriminately — even the thousands of them who have nothing to do with terrorism. 

US federal law also prohibits providing “material support” to terrorism, a principle that, according to the Trump’s administration, has been violated by A/I. In other words, being a terrorist doesn’t merely require planning an attack or placing a bomb – providing resources that allow a terrorist group to function can be enough.  

The difficulty is that none of the tools cited — encrypted email, hosting, videoconferencing, anonymity software — are inherently sinister. They're standard infrastructure used just as often by journalists, NGOs, and ordinary privacy-conscious users as by anyone plotting violence. Applying "material support" logic to general-purpose digital infrastructure, rather than to money or weapons handed to a specific group, pushes the concept into much murkier territory.

What does it mean to be designated as a terrorist organization? 

The designation did not follow a court ruling; rather, it stems from an executive order issued by the U.S. government. The action follows Executive Order 13224, which “targets terrorists, terrorist organizations, leaders and officials of terrorist groups, and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism,” according to the official White House communication. 

As a result, any assets held by those targeted by the order that fall under U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and American citizens and companies are barred from conducting transactions with the targeted entity.

The US designation doesn’t mean A/I is flagged as a terrorist organization by Italy or by the European Union. However, the order issued by the White House, given the dominance of American companies and services across the web services stack – domain registries, payment processors, cloud hosting —  means its effects reach far beyond the 50 states it governs. 

Targeting infrastructure this way opens a broader debate. Many other technology providers may be indirectly supporting criminals or terrorist organizations in some way — payment processors, hosting services, or any technology that somehow facilitates a group's activity. Who draws that line? And should a platform be responsible for crimes its users plan or commit using it, when it serves thousands of people with no connection to those crimes? 

What does Europe plan to do? 

European Member of Parliament Brando Benifei is preparing an inquiry in the European Parliament to clarify what happened, he informed the Italian newspaper Domani. “The action taken by the U.S. government indiscriminately targets a service intermediary, linking it without evidence to any illicit uses by third parties. The matter must be brought to the attention of the European Commission, which needs to take action to protect this entity based on the principles of the Digital Services Act,” he said in a statement. 

Andrea Casu, an Italian MP and deputy chair of the Chamber's Transport Committee, has separately asked whether Italian authorities were informed or involved before US sanctions produced direct effects on digital services operating in Italy. 

Regardless of the outcome, A/I’s case shows how influential and pervasive an American administrative decision can be. It didn’t take a court ruling or evidence of a specific crime to knock an Italian nonprofit with thousands of users offline within days.