Alessandro 'kLeZ' Accardo personal website

The personal website of an Italian developer. /nick kLeZ, since forever.

My email provider is a global terrorist organisation

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Today I’m talking about something that made me spit out my coffee.

On 26 August the United States government put a Tuscan volunteer association on the same list as al-Qaeda’s financiers. The association is called Autistici/Inventati, it has existed since 2001, and its criminal activity consists of giving email inboxes and web space to people who don’t want to hand their correspondence over to Google.

This isn’t satire. It’s the US Treasury’s SDN List, the real one.

§What they did, in a nutshell

State Department and Treasury, joint action, 26 August 2026. A/I is designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224. In the same bundle went Palestine Action, already proscribed in the UK since July 2025, and Masar Badil along with two of its leaders.

Rubio announced it on X with the usual spiel about violent extremists waging war on civilisation. Bessent, for the Treasury, warned that against left-wing extremists and their fellow travellers he would bring the full weight of economic tools to bear. Stuff that would make a Minculpop press release (or the Ministry of Truth) green with envy, but let’s move on.

Who is the enemy of Western civilisation. 16,000 mailboxes, 1500 websites, 5500 mailing lists, 10,000 blogs on Noblogs. Zero employees. Zero turnover. Volunteers who don’t take a single euro, not even expenses, and a trickle of donations that in a week wouldn’t cover half the fee of a Washington law firm.

On those servers, for a quarter of a century, you’ll find social centres, grassroots unions, committees against big infrastructure projects, independent newsrooms, and an industrial quantity of ordinary people who just wanted secure email without targeted advertising.

§What they wrote, not me

Before going on, let’s read the entry on the list. Not the press release, the actual operational line, the one that freezes the accounts, and here I beg you to sit down if you aren’t already.

Name: AUTISTICI INVENTATI.
Address: Strada Statale Abetone e del Brennero 253, San Giuliano Terme, province of Pisa.
Established: 2001.
Organisation type: “Data processing, hosting and related activities.”

Data processing and hosting. The business category Aruba sits in. The one OVH, Hetzner and AWS sit in (ah no, not them, they’re American…). The one anyone who rents you half a gig on a server sits in.

In the document that destroys you, the US Treasury classifies its existential enemy as a hosting provider. Then it walks out the door, stands in front of the journalists and calls it an extremist collective with a horde of radical hackers.

The legal entity, by the way, is the Associazione A/I-ODV. ODV. Organizzazione di volontariato, a registered voluntary organisation, the third sector kind, the kind you tick a box for on your tax return. The global terrorist is a third-sector voluntary body with its registered office on a trunk road north of Pisa.

One last detail, tiny, and for me the most telling of all. In the email address field, the entry reads www.associazione@ai-odv.org.

An email address with a website prefix stuck on the front.

They copied it wrong from a contact page. That’s the level of care in an act that sends the digital lives of 20,000 people up in smoke. Keep that in mind, because further down I’ll tell you the other thing they got wrong, and that one is a lot less funny.

§No, it’s not “the list of terrorist organisations”

I’ve read a dozen Italian headlines saying “terrorist organisation”. Wrong, and on something like this sloppiness is a gift to whoever signed it.

The FTO designation, Foreign Terrorist Organization, goes through section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and triggers the federal crime of material support. The SDGT one is an administrative sanction: they freeze your assets under American jurisdiction, forbid any US person from doing business with you, and put you on the Specially Designated Nationals List. Breach it? International Emergency Economic Powers Act, up to twenty years.

I know what you’re thinking: so what? Does it change anything for someone whose email is there and who lives in Italy?

In practice, no. In principle, everything. The SDGT designation needs no indictment, no trial, no judge, not a single piece of paper that can be contested in front of anyone in a robe. The executive signs and produces economic rubble the same day.

As of today, there are no criminal terrorism proceedings against A/I. Not in Italy. Not in the United States either.

§The accusations. All of them. No discounts

Now comes the part where we look at the facts. Because there are facts, however insignificant.

Dismissing the accusations as fabrications would be convenient, and it would also be the quickest way to get torn apart in the first comment. So I’ll give you all of them, with the caveat that they are unilateral claims without a shred of public evidence attached.

According to the State Department, the anarchist cells behind the 2026 railway sabotage in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands used A/I tools to claim responsibility, publish communiqués and spread manuals for incendiary devices. Same structure for the sabotage of the Transalpine Pipeline in March. Same structure for the network that since 2011 has been hitting German rail and energy infrastructure, including the attack on the Berlin power grid in January, the one that left 45,000 households without electricity. Then there’s the campaign against the Atlanta police training centre and Jane’s Revenge.

And there’s the accusation that A/I selects its users on ideological grounds. Yes, that’s true, they are an openly partisan, political association.

And?

So it’s true, and it wasn’t the CIA that uncovered it. It’s been written on their website forever. A/I is not a neutral carrier, it never has been, and anyone trying to defend it by painting it as a harmless technical service is lying and will be taken apart in three lines. It’s a declared political project that provides communications infrastructure.

It’s an awkward case. And it’s precisely on cases like this that you find out whether a principle actually exists or is just an ornament for digital rights conferences.

§What I checked myself

I went and verified two episodes. The result is not what they claim, but it is certainly awkward for A/I, and I’m writing it anyway because if I start picking the facts that suit me I become just like them.

The Transalpine: the document is where they say, but it means nothing. The claim of responsibility for the sabotage of the pylon at Tolmezzo, night of 24 March, published on 17 June under the title “Una proposta di guerra” (“A proposal of war”), is on lanemesi.noblogs.org. Noblogs. Meaning A/I. It isn’t hidden, mind, it’s out in the open, indexed by Google, you’ll find it in a split second. The text describes cutting through two legs of the pylon with hacksaw blades. Terna had reported the damage, the Paluzza pumping station stopped, the Udine police headquarters is investigating, the TAL group denies it and talks of a technical slowdown.

But careful with the facts I’ve just verified, because it’s less than it looks.

I verified that there is a post on a blogging platform. Full stop. That’s the fact.

The fact is true and the conclusion is completely off the rails. In a narrative contortion worthy of the worst pulp novels, going from “that text is on their server” to “they are a terrorist organisation” is a gap you couldn’t bridge with one train (ironically, the Transalpine) but with a thousand trains laid end to end. And nobody has justified this leap, no evidence, no judge has ever upheld an accusation like that (and couldn’t have, could they?). If you host the blog of someone who writes something, you don’t become their accomplice. Otherwise the newsagent round the corner is jointly liable for everything in the papers it sells. Work out who’d still be stocking the Daily Mail if that were the case.

Berlin: they’re wrong, and not about a comma, about a death that didn’t happen. The fire at the Lichterfelde cable bridge on 3 January is real: 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses without power for four and a half days, the longest blackout in Berlin since 1945, and the federal prosecutor personally took over the investigation on 6 January, alleging a terrorist organisation. So far it all adds up.

The death doesn’t. There is no death.

The State Department writes in black and white that the attack caused a fatality. German investigators say something else: an 83-year-old woman found dead during the blackout, cause of death not established, link to the power cut not established. The second death doing the rounds on social media concerned a woman who fell on 27 December, i.e. a week before the attack.

So, to recap: in the same document they botched copying an email address and invented a death.

And with this stuff they freeze your accounts.

§Find the lady

Fox News headlined on the link between Portland antifa, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hamas. Big headline. Nice and fat.

Now let’s read what the State Department’s entry actually says, which is public, and which evidently nobody bothered to open and read. Not even whoever wrote it, clearly. The hand of God guiding the writer’s pen, right? Like the Bible.

It says that a far-left media group, which presents itself as a tool for sharing information among militants, uses A/I services to publish communiqués and appeals from organisations designated as terrorist. List: FAI/FRI, Armed Proletarian Justice, IRGC, Hamas, Hezbollah, ELN, New People’s Army.

Let’s write out this chain in full.

  1. A/I hosts a website.
  2. The website republishes communiqués from designated organisations.
  3. Those organisations are terrorist.

Three steps. And in none of the three is there any relationship between A/I and Hamas, or between A/I and the Revolutionary Guards. The entry doesn’t say so, because saying so would require evidence, and they have no evidence. It’s the newspapers that close the circle (or the triangle), and the administration lets them, complacent and complicit.

It’s pure gobbledygook dressed up as intelligence.

If you apply that criterion with a minimum of consistency, anyone providing connectivity to a website that republishes a Hezbollah communiqué is materially assisting Hezbollah. On X those communiqués circulate in quantities orders of magnitude greater.

X is not on the SDN list. Funny, that.

We could say the same of the domestic terrorists of 6 January and Trump in person reposting their communiqués on Truth, his own social network. Truth isn’t on the SDN list either. Nor, for that matter, are the Proud Boys; Trump needs them.

§And now the part you won’t like

Because if I’m telling you about their holes, I have to tell you about mine too.

Among the platforms hosted by A/I there’s Abolition Media, which appears in the information ecosystem of Casey Robert Goonan. On 1 June 2024 Goonan put a bag with six Molotov cocktails under the fuel tank of a university police car in Berkeley and set it alight. Ten days later he tried to set fire to the federal building in Oakland, throwing rocks at the windows to get the devices inside, and was stopped by security. He took a plea deal and got 235 months, almost twenty years, with a terrorism enhancement.

This is the worst case. It’s documented by court records, not by spin. And anyone who wants to defend A/I by pretending there’s only government propaganda on the other side is wasting their time and mine: political violence in that milieu exists, there are convictions, and some of the platforms that report on that stuff were on those servers.

That said. Goonan’s plea agreement doesn’t contain a single line about A/I. No American prosecutor has ever charged the collective with anything. And between “hosted the site where the convict read his news” and “provided material support to terrorism” lies the difference between an accusation and guilt by association.

By the same method, what would they have done if someone had sabotaged a pylon after reading the Guardian, would they have put the Guardian on the list?

§What A/I’s terms of service actually say

The State Department claims that A/I’s tools are specifically designed to support the operations of terrorist networks and spread instructions for building devices.

Fine. Let’s go and read A/I’s terms of service, which have been public on the site for years and which anyone could have opened before signing an international measure.

Use of the services for any military purpose is forbidden. Distributing information or instructional material on the use of firearms and combat techniques is forbidden. Cyber warfare is forbidden. The development and production of weapons is forbidden. Break the rules and they delete your account without notice. And while we’re at it: no commercial projects, no religious ones, no party-political ones.

You can object that a contractual clause is worth little without proactive moderation, and that’s a serious objection. What you can’t do is write that a tool is designed for a purpose the provider forbids in writing, unless you prove that the ban is a sham.

The State Department doesn’t prove it. It doesn’t even try. I suspect it never opened the page at all.

And here’s the best bit. There’s a detail I found in the Daily Caller investigation from October 2025, that is, in a source that has it in for A/I and so can hardly be suspected of doing them any favours. Scenes from the Atlanta Forest, one of the platforms in the dock, had at one point published a criticism of A/I because the collective was being a pain by asking them to limit publication to legally obtained information.

The provider was putting limits on its users. The users were complaining publicly. It’s the exact opposite of the complicit infrastructure described in the entry, and it’s written in an article that was written specifically to nail them.

§So it isn’t terrorism, then

Of course not. Because it’s hosting. And hosting works in a different way, which we’ve all known for twenty years.

Whoever carries or hosts other people’s stuff is not liable for that stuff until they have actual knowledge of it and refuse to act. In Europe, article 6 of the Digital Services Act tells you so. In the United States, section 512 of the DMCA and section 230 of the Communications Decency Act tell you so. It’s the principle half the internet stands on, including all the American services that same administration uses to tweet, or truth-burp.

Sanctions law knows nothing of these mechanisms. No notice and takedown. No distinction between those who know and those who don’t. No way to put yourself right by removing a piece of content. It has just one formula, written in 2001 with people wiring money to jihadists in mind, which catches anyone who provides goods and services in support of an act of terrorism.

A hosting contract, to the letter, is a provision of services.

Which means, in a nutshell, that the internet’s liability regime can be dodged by switching tools. You don’t go after the content, you sanction the infrastructure. No judge, no hearing, and without even having jurisdiction over the target.

The scope of that definition, if you take it seriously, is monstrous. Riseup hosts the very same user base and is based in the United States. Tor makes the anonymity tool par excellence. Proton and Tuta sell encrypted email to anyone who pays. Self-run Mastodon instances moderate sod all. The Internet Archive preserves claims of responsibility of every stripe.

And Cloudflare, whose market share is orders of magnitude larger, has been keeping up infrastructure for far more compromised groups for years.

Guess who’s not on the list.

But let’s take the reasoning all the way, it’s more fun.

If the provider is liable for what its users publish, then let’s take the numbers the companies declare themselves. In the last quarter of 2025 alone, Facebook, Instagram and Threads sent over 2.6 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the relevant American centre. In 2025, eight companies - Meta, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, xAI, Grindr and Roblox - sent more than seventeen million, 81% of the total.

Seventeen million. Apply Rubio’s criterion and you don’t even need a lawyer: you throw Zuckerberg behind bars by lunchtime, and you shut down Musk’s shop before the after-dinner truth-burp. Illegal material, on their servers, in industrial quantities, declared by them.

Except that’s not how it works, and everybody knows it. Those platforms have a reporting obligation, a removal obligation, and no liability for the mere fact of having hosted the content. It’s the only way the internet can exist, and it’s the regime the United States itself wrote and defends in every international forum.

For Meta, notice and takedown applies. For a foreign volunteer association, outside its jurisdiction but out of favour with the King, an asset freeze without trial applies.

Same trade. Double standards, and the short end of the stick always goes to whoever doesn’t have the lawyers.

§Why them

Not because they’re dangerous. Because of the political cost. That’s all there is to it, there’s nothing else.

A/I is small, foreign, has no lawyers in Washington, no lobbyists, no board of directors that can pick up the phone to someone who matters. Hitting it costs nothing and produces two things: a propaganda headline on Fox and a precedent. The headline lasts twenty-four hours but lingers as an echo in the heads of those on the receiving end of its propaganda. The precedent stays, and the precedent is the real product of the whole operation.

Oh, and about the great investigative discovery: the links between A/I infrastructure and radical sites had already been lined up by the Daily Caller in October 2025, ten months earlier. Stuff you could see with a WHOIS query. In November 2025 the designations of Antifa Ost, FAI/FRI and two other European groups had already arrived. On 16 July 2026 the State Department hosted a ministerial on the resurgence of political terrorism.

This isn’t intelligence. It’s a programme announced ten months in advance, and A/I was the easiest name on the list.

§How to strangle a server without touching it

This part should interest you even if you couldn’t give a toss about A/I, because it concerns your server.

The SDN list needs no Italian cooperation whatsoever to do damage. The technical and financial layer of the internet is almost entirely American, so they already have the lever in their hands.

The domains autistici.org, inventati.org and noblogs.org sit under .org, run by Public Interest Registry, a US body headquartered in Virginia (the free, decentralised internet, yes). What happens when an OFAC-bound registry meets a listed party we saw two months ago: in July 2026 Telegram’s entire t.me domain ended up in serverHold because one t.me address appeared as a contact in the entry of a sanctioned VPN service. The .me registry, American, switched the lot off.

And it couldn’t do anything else, because EPP doesn’t allow you to suspend a single path inside a domain. Either you block the whole name or you block nothing. Overblocking by design, not by malice: the protocol was born that way in 2004 and nobody ever thought about it, because nobody imagined it would become a foreign policy tool.

The TLS certificates for half the non-commercial internet are issued by Let’s Encrypt, run by ISRG, American. Since June 2026 the subscriber agreement contains an explicit declaration: you warrant that you are not a party subject to sanctions restrictions. An entity on the SDN list can’t sign that declaration. No signature, no certificate, no padlock, and your auntie’s browser tells the world the site is dangerous.

Add to that the payment networks for donations, DDoS mitigation, and the European banks that cut ties with listed parties long before anyone forces them to.

Nobody issues an order. Nobody signs anything. Nobody takes responsibility. Quite simply, one piece at a time, the server stops existing. Not even a body: it just vanishes.

And who are the real victims? The users. Almost all European, almost all Italian, who find their personal email on infrastructure at risk of being switched off and their own address tied, in every automated screening system on the planet, to a designated terrorist entity.

None of them is accused of anything. None of them has the slightest means of untangling themselves. If you have a mailbox there, congratulations, you’ve become a reputational risk while minding your own business. Try explaining that to your bank’s anti-money-laundering algorithm, then let me know how it went.

§Europe won’t cover your arse one bit

Regulation 2271/96, the blocking statute, protects European operators against the extraterritorial application of certain American measures.

Certain ones. The ones in the annex, which is about Cuba and Iran.

Counter-terrorism sanctions aren’t there. No shield, no obligation for a European company to ignore the designation, no cover for anyone who decides to play the hero.

The Union has its own terrorist list, under common position 2001/931/CFSP. A/I isn’t on it. So, to recap: under Italian and European law the Associazione A/I-ODV is a third-sector body operating legally, under American law it’s a terrorist organisation. The two coexist, and guess which of the two has effects on Italian soil.

And there’s worse, also written in the entry. There’s the wording secondary sanctions risk, section 1(b) of E.O. 13224 as amended in 2019. Translated from bureaucratese: the risk isn’t only for American companies. A foreign party that keeps providing significant support to a designated entity can end up designated itself.

A German registrar, an Italian bank, a Dutch provider that stood by A/I risk ending up on the list themselves. With their offices, their staff, their bank accounts.

That’s why they’ll all run. Not out of ideological zeal, not out of cowardice. Because they’ve been shown what happens to those who stay, and no board of directors bets the company on a principle (let alone someone else’s principle).

This is European digital sovereignty measured in the field, rather than in the panels where we tell each other how clever we are with GDPR. It’s worth zero. Absolute zero.

§No judge, no lawyer, no defence

Whoever ends up on the SDN list doesn’t receive an indictment. They receive a public entry a few lines long and an administrative file that can also rest on classified material they won’t let you see. Defend yourself against that, if you can.

The way out is a delisting petition to OFAC. In other words an appeal to the very office that stitched you up, with no binding deadlines, so they can take three years and be fine with that. A real challenge goes through the federal courts of the District of Columbia, with a standard of review so deferential to the executive that when national security is involved the judge practically apologises for the intrusion.

Mind you, though: American judges have already said the mechanism is rotten. In KindHearts v. Geithner (2009) a court in Ohio recognised a due process violation for a non-profit designated under none other than Executive Order 13224. In Al Haramain v. Department of the Treasury (2011) the Ninth Circuit ruled that an asset freeze is a seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes and that the Fifth Amendment requires them to tell you why and let you respond. The government decided not to take it to the Supreme Court, which means it knew perfectly well how it would end.

Sounds like good news, doesn’t it?

It isn’t. Because both cases concerned entities based in the United States. And in the same ruling the Ninth Circuit notes, almost in passing, that most designated parties are not US citizens or entities.

That sentence is everything. The protections that saved a foundation in Oregon don’t apply to foreigners without substantial ties to the country. A volunteer association in San Giuliano Terme sits squarely in that majority without remedies.

A defence exists, by all means. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. To be paid by people who get by on 20-euro donations.

§Aruba, June 2004

It’s not the first time someone has tried to take A/I apart via an intermediary. It’s just the first time the intermediary is a continent.

On 15 June 2004 the postal police, on the orders of the Bologna Public Prosecutor’s Office, turn up at Aruba’s server farm where the association’s server is co-located. Aruba unplugs the machine, lets them copy the disks, hands over the keys that make the webmail decryptable, and tells its own staff to keep their mouths shut.

The administrators, who were calling in desperation to find out why the server wasn’t responding, were told there had been a power fault.

They found out on 21 June 2005. A year later. A whole year in which the email of all users was potentially readable, while the investigation concerned a single address. That’s where the R* Plan came from, the distribution of services across multiple jurisdictions that still underpins the collective’s architecture today. In other words: their current security is the offspring of a stitch-up suffered on home soil, by our own magistrates, with the complicity of our own provider.

Twenty-two years later the structure of the attack is identical, only the size of the intermediary to be persuaded has changed. In 2004 an Italian provider that didn’t ask questions was enough. In 2026 you need the domain registry, the certificate authority and the banking system.

All three of which are American. Bon appétit.

§Who decides who the terrorist is

Before the actual opinion, a question nobody ever asks: who is it that’s compiling this list?

The country that has just decided a Tuscan volunteer association is a threat to Western civilisation is the same one where, in July 2026, the House passed a law on lawmakers’ conflicts of interest that, as one representative summed it up on the floor, bans trading while allowing trading. Passed 232 to 198.

What it says, in practice. You can’t buy new shares. The ones you have you keep, and you can sell them, as long as you give seven days’ notice. Penalty for breaking the rules: two thousand dollars, or ten per cent of the transaction if that’s higher. Two thousand dollars. For people moving seven-figure portfolios. And they even bolted a voter ID provision onto it, because in Washington ethics always travels with a plus-one.

The previous law, the STOCK Act, dates from 2012. It bans lawmakers from using confidential information to enrich themselves. In fourteen years nobody has ever been prosecuted. Not one. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2021, one lawmaker in three traded securities and financial assets, with at least 3,700 trades potentially conflicting with the matters they were legislating on.

It’s not insider trading, it’s insider trading, with public office used as a private Bloomberg terminal. And if you do it, they arrest you. Oh, do they arrest you! And throw away the key to the cell, because you’re an enemy of the system!

Then there’s the other business. The one you can’t talk about without someone calling you a conspiracy theorist, which in itself should already tell you something.

November 2025: Congress passes the Epstein Files Transparency Act almost unanimously, requiring the Department of Justice to publish its files within thirty days. The law says explicitly that nothing may be withheld on grounds of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity concerning officials, public figures or foreign dignitaries.

What happens. The DOJ misses the deadline. In January 2026 it publishes three and a half million pages, admitting it has more than six million: half, then, stays in the drawer. Some victims’ names end up online unredacted, while names of Epstein’s associates turn out to be covered. In June a federal judge rules that the administration has probably broken the law and orders it to hand over the documents in full. The Department responds by asking for another sixty days, or alternatively for the judge to make do with their explanations.

Sixty days to obey a law passed almost unanimously and signed by the president himself.

A president who is in those files up to his neck, and not by hearsay. Let’s line up just the documentary stuff, that’s enough.

November 2025, emails from the Epstein estate handed over to the House Oversight Committee: in 2011 Epstein writes to Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump spent hours at his house with a trafficking victim, and calls him the dog that didn’t bark. In 2019 he writes to Michael Wolff that Trump knew about the girls, so much so that he had asked Maxwell to stop. In 2015 Wolff and Epstein discuss how to use it: if Trump denies having been on the plane or in that house, it becomes political currency. December 2025, 30,000 documents released by the Department of Justice: an email from a federal prosecutor in January 2020 notes that Trump flew on Epstein’s jet at least eight times, more than was known. On a 1993 flight the listed passengers are two: Epstein and Trump. On another there’s a third person, name redacted, who was twenty at the time. On two others there are two women identified as possible witnesses in the Maxwell case.

Now the part I have to write even though it makes me sick to write it: none of these papers contains a formal accusation against Trump, and Virginia Giuffre, who was the most credible witness there was, in the memoir published after her death says she met him only once at Mar-a-Lago and has nothing to accuse him of.

So I won’t write that he’s a paedophile, because that word carries weight in a courtroom and these papers don’t carry that weight. The papers say something different and still indefensible: a twenty-year friendship, eight confirmed flights, an associate who claims in writing that he knew, and a president who called the demand to publish the files in which his name appears a Democrat hoax, then signed the law, then missed the deadlines, then haggled with the judge over delivery times.

Is that how someone with nothing to hide behaves? Make up your own mind, the documents are public anyway. Almost all of them.

Meanwhile the DOJ dumped more than three million pages in one go, with over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, largely redacted, and the deputy attorney general came out to explain that no, there is no secret list of names. About 250,000 documents are now public, almost all of them from civil suits, FOIA requests and estate productions, that is, from everyone except the department that was legally required to hand them over. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, resigned from the House in January after being battered by Trump for pushing for publication.

These people. These people here decide who the global terrorist is. This gang of corrupt chancers, enriched at the expense of the poor people who even voted for them. The Rust Belt workers voted for this lot. Two hundred people who can’t buy shares but can sell them, a justice department haggling over delivery dates with a federal judge, and an administration that doesn’t think twice about using tools born for counter-terrorism to declare a volunteer association in San Giuliano Terme an enemy of the nation and of the free world, listed in thirty-six hours without a hearing.

Capitalism isn’t something companies do. It’s something the State does, when the State is the executive branch of capital. And you can see it perfectly well from who ends up on the lists and who doesn’t.

§Now the opinion, the real one

That’s the facts. From here on down it’s my own stuff, and anyone looking for even-handedness knows where to find it, plenty of sites sell it cheap.

Cards on the table: I’m anti-imperialist, therefore I’m anti-American. Not anti-Americans, who are people like everyone else (maybe a touch thicker, but still human beings) and on top of that the first to pick up the bill. Anti United States of America as a political project, as a machine, as an empire.

And I’m starting from here, because if you don’t start from here you won’t understand this story.

The United States isn’t becoming a banana republic. It has been one for decades. The only difference is that before, they grew the bananas in other people’s back yards, literally and figuratively, and now they’ve stopped bothering with the pretence even at home.

I know what you’re thinking: ah, but it was different under the Democrats.

No. It wasn’t different. It was a different shade.

The dance between Democrats and Republicans is as fake as a three-pound note. They’re the jacket and trousers of the same suit, worn mismatched so they don’t look identical in photos. Then you look at what they do when they reign, and the big stuff doesn’t change one iota.

War: the one who bombed seven countries in eight years with drones wasn’t Trump.
Borders: the record number of deportations isn’t from this administration, it’s from the one before the one before.
Welfare: the reform that dismantled assistance for the poor is from 1996, and a Democrat signed it.
Prisons: the crime bill that filled the jails with Black people is from 1994, same signature.
Healthcare: they had the majority and the White House and couldn’t even manage to give birth to a public option, let alone a national health service like any European country has, even the most clapped-out ones.
Guns: after every massacre a minute’s silence, a prayer, and the NRA carrying on paying both sides of the table.

And sanctions, while we’re at it. Executive Order 13224 was signed by Bush in 2001. The material support formula has been used by every administration for twenty-five years, Democratic ones included. The SDN list couldn’t care less who wins the elections: it outlives whoever compiles it, and every president puts his own enemies in it. In the end everyone will be an enemy, it doesn’t take a genius to work that out.

Which proves the thesis, it isn’t the exception. There’s no Trumpian anomaly to be corrected by voting the right way. There’s an imperial machine that runs the same with any driver, and that every so often changes the colour of the paintwork to get itself re-elected.

American voters fall for it every four years. And the gullible Europeans fall for it too, or rather the European stakeholders dive right in (because it’s very lucrative, and it offloads responsibility when you say it’s the Americans’ fault, and that’s just how the system is, and honestly, dear, you can’t even invest in a few shares these days without being called a degenerate capitalist…), with the aggravating factor that they don’t even live inside that stuff: they’ve had their brains colonised by proxy, generation after generation, by their own cultural and economic tormentors. Morons by parthenogenesis, basically.

That said, within the machine the driver does change something, and this driver is particularly nasty.

Trump has a problem with dissent that isn’t ideological, it’s temperamental. He couldn’t care less what you think, he cares that you lower your head and bow to the king. It’s the trait he’s shown in every single context where he’s had power, and now he’s found an administrative tool elastic enough to hit anyone without going through a court. Put a man who considers personal loyalty a criterion of government in front of a lever that involves no hearing, and he’ll pull that lever. He has pulled it, several times.

And then there’s Rubio. Ah, Rubio. Perhaps the most clueless (and bought) Cuban patriot memory can summon.

Rubio in 2016 went on television explaining to Republican voters that Trump was a con man. A fraud. He campaigned on it.

Then he got promoted.

Today he signs communiqués about the war on Western civilisation against a volunteer association with four servers and a certified email address. I don’t know the exact moment a politician decides his career is worth more than the memory of his own words, but in his house that moment passed a long time ago and without much drama. Changing your mind happens to everyone, fair enough. Changing all of them, always in the same direction, and funnily enough in the direction of whoever signs the appointments, has a shorter and far less noble name.

Then there are those who object that calling an elected government autocratic is pub talk.

Right, we need to have a little chat about this one, because it’s the stupidest objection in the repertoire and it keeps doing the rounds as if it were an argument.

Hitler and Mussolini didn’t arrive with a coup in the dead of night while the people slept.

Mussolini became head of government on 30 October 1922, appointed by the king after the strong support the fascist movement had built up through the various demonstrations of the fascist revolution, culminating in the March on Rome. Then, at the elections of 6 April 1924, the Listone took 4,305,936 votes, a good 60%, 355 seats out of 535. Yes, with the squads burning newspapers and breaking up rallies, and with a socialist candidate murdered during the campaign. But four million three hundred thousand ballots weren’t each stuffed into the box by Amerigo Dùmini personally.

Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg on 30 January 1933, and he got there because his party was the largest in the country: in the free elections of July 1932 it had taken 37%. Mein Kampf had been in the bookshops since 1925. It was all written down. Who had to disappear, how, and why.

And here’s the point that interests me.

Neither of them hid anything. They said in advance, in writing and out loud, what they would do. The violence wasn’t an unforeseen side effect, it was the free sample, the product demo. Squads killing people in the street in broad daylight, with the newspapers reporting it.

And they got the votes anyway.

Actually, let me correct that, because it’s worse: they got them precisely because of it. That was the programme, and loads of people liked the programme. The landowners, the industrialists, the bourgeoisie who were scared of the workers, and a heap of ordinary people who just wanted someone to bring order to their chaos.

So no, “but he was elected” is no defence. It never has been. Consent doesn’t disinfect a damn thing, and the history of the twentieth century is there precisely to remind us of that, for those who deign to read it.

Autocracy isn’t measured by how you get to power. It’s measured by what brakes you accept once you’re there.

An executive that labels a foreign party as terrorist without bringing a scrap of evidence before a judge, and that with that label devastates the digital lives of twenty thousand people who have nothing to do with anything, has just finished demonstrating what brakes it accepts.

None. Zero brakes. There’s no pedal at all.

But he didn’t remove the pedal, mind. It wasn’t there before either. It wasn’t there because it served to cement US soft – and in this case also hard – power over the world even further, in a way that calling it the playground bully of the globe is actually paying it a compliment. He simply has different values, or rather, he has very few values, and lots and lots and lots of enemies.

§What Italy will do

Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

The bare minimum would be a formal request from the Foreign Ministry to see the evidence, given we’re talking about a party resident in Italy never investigated in Italy for terrorism. And an assessment by the Data Protection Authority of the effects the designation has on thousands of European data subjects who have bugger all to do with it (the kind of thing where, if Aruba had done it with a client’s data, the Authority would have stormed its offices by Tuesday).

It won’t happen, and we all know why. The victims are unpresentable, and no Italian government in the last thirty years has ever spent half a gram of political capital with Washington to defend an online social centre.

But let’s make a note of that silence. It’s the exact measure of what digital sovereignty is worth when it stops being a conference topic and becomes a diplomatic nuisance.

§The end

Let’s do one last exercise. Let’s take all the accusations as true. All of them. Every communiqué cited really was published on a site hosted by A/I, the manuals were there, the maps too.

In a normal country this produces a criminal trial against whoever wrote those texts and carried out those attacks, with a prosecutor bringing the evidence before a judge, and if anything a takedown order served on the provider.

What happened is something else: the administrative erasure of a service provider from the global economic circuit, decided by an executive, without a hearing, without a judge, with collateral damage to 20,000 people unconnected to the facts. The word terrorism here describes nothing. It only serves to unlock a legal instrument that allows no defence.

And if you’ve made it this far thinking the problem is A/I’s political colour, look more closely at the instrument. The instrument has no colours. Wait for the next occupant of the White House, the one in the other-coloured jacket, and see if he dismantles it. He won’t. He’ll put his own enemies in it.

From today, hosting other people’s communications without keeping logs is an activity that a foreign administrative decree can classify as material support to terrorism. And encryption counts against you: in the State Department’s entry, encrypted chat and email, secure video conferencing and anonymity tools don’t appear as technologies.

They appear as evidence.

If you run a mail server, a Mastodon instance, hosting for your mates, read that entry in full. And then count how many of your features are described in it as aggravating factors.

I did. I got to seven.

§Sources