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I've got nothing to hide

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“I’ve got nothing to hide”: I’ve heard it so many times that it took me a while to realise it isn’t a position. It’s a symptom.

It’s what tired people say. People who have stopped asking whether power is behaving itself, who follow the basic rules, feel they fit in, and have already raised the white flag on everything else: do what you like, I’m fine anyway. It’s the sentence that comes out when tiredness finally speaks. This post tries to say what lies underneath it, and why that sentence, besides being wrong, is dangerous precisely for the person who says it convinced they’ve taken shelter.

§The same sentence, seven times

A three-line recap. On 26 August 2026 the US State Department and Treasury designated Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, the one that targets anyone who has “materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support” for an act of terrorism. It’s an administrative act of the executive: no judge, no trial, economic effects the same day. A/I is a volunteer association that has been providing mailboxes, web space and communication tools since 2001. The rest is in the post of 27 August.

After the general part, the State Department fact sheet gives a numbered list: seven cases, seven groups, seven charges. I’ll boil them down, because once you strip out the rhetoric they’re the same sentence written seven times.

  1. The anarchist cells behind the 2026 rail sabotage in France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands used A/I tools to claim the attacks, publish communiqués and spread manuals for incendiary devices.
  2. The cell behind the sabotage of the Transalpine Pipeline in March used A/I tools to claim responsibility, publish communiqués and spread a manifesto pointing to another A/I platform with manuals and infrastructure maps.
  3. The network that since 2011 has been hitting railways and the power grid in Germany, including the attack on Berlin’s grid in January, used A/I tools to claim responsibility, publish communiqués and spread a manifesto. (The fact sheet adds “one victim”; German investigators have not confirmed it, as I explained in the first post.)
  4. A far-left media group uses A/I tools to publish communiqués and appeals from organisations designated as terrorist: FAI/FRI, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, Hezbollah, ELN, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others. The same group is cited in the nineteen-year sentence of a domestic terrorist.
  5. Rose City Antifa, from Oregon, used A/I tools to organise and incite – including, the fact sheet says, an attack on border police helicopters for which there’s a federal indictment – and to spread doxing lists and personal data of immigration agents.
  6. The cell against the police training centre in Atlanta used A/I tools to claim responsibility, spread doxing lists, threaten officials and circulate instructions for devices.
  7. “Jane’s Revenge”, which set fire to pregnancy centres in the United States, used A/I tools to publish communiqués and claims and to incite copycat attacks.

Now read them again. Case 5 is the one that goes furthest – “organise”, not just claim – and it’s the only one where the fact sheet ties a specific event to a use of the platform. But even there, what it holds against A/I is having provided the tool. In all seven, the verb that concerns the collective is that one: it provided the channel through which those groups spoke. Claim, publish, spread, incite, threaten, organise: acts of communication. Nowhere in the seven cases does it say “A/I chose the target”, “A/I built the device”, “A/I moved the money”, “A/I knew”. And in almost all of them, what went through that channel is a text – a claim, a communiqué, a manifesto, an appeal – often published after the attack, in other words a report on something that had already happened.

In the general part the fact sheet lines up the services as if they were counts on an indictment – “encrypted chat and email, hosting, secure videoconferencing and streaming, anonymity shields” – and describes them, verbatim, as “specifically designed” to keep those groups “anonymous, untraceable and beyond the reach of the law”. Encryption, anonymity, secure videoconferencing don’t appear as technologies. They appear as evidence.

It’s like indicting the phone company because the robbers planned the job over the phone. Except that the phone, luckily for it, is also used in Washington.

§“I’ve got nothing to hide”, and why it doesn’t hold up

The classic objection to surveillance goes: if you’ve done nothing wrong, why do you care if they watch you. The text that takes it apart best is by Daniel Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, 44 San Diego Law Review 745, from 2007.

Solove says: that argument works on one condition, that the harm of surveillance is the disclosure of an embarrassing secret. If that’s the harm, anyone without embarrassing secrets sleeps soundly. But that isn’t the harm, or not only. There’s aggregation: data that are harmless one by one but, put together, say things about you that you wouldn’t say. There’s exclusion: you don’t know what’s in your file, you can’t correct it, you can’t challenge it. There’s imbalance: whoever watches you decides what that watching means, and you’re not in the room.

Designations like the one against A/I are exclusion in its purest form. The file the decision rests on can contain classified material that’s never shown to the designee. You defend yourself against charges you can’t read in full. It has happened before, and American judges have said so: in KindHearts v. Geithner, in 2009, and in Al Haramain v. Department of the Treasury, in 2011, two non-profits designated under the same Executive Order 13224 got a court to recognise a violation of due process. Both were based in the United States. A/I isn’t.

It’s Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial: arrested one morning, never told the charge, never allowed to see the papers, and meanwhile everyone around him behaves as if he were already guilty of something. The book is from 1925 and reads like a chronicle of a delisting petition to OFAC.

§With an intermediary, the argument breaks

“What have you got to hide” presupposes an individual being asked to account for their life. Turn it on an intermediary, that is someone who hosts other people’s correspondence and by design doesn’t read it, and the question has no possible answer.

Not because the intermediary doesn’t want to answer. Because it can’t: it doesn’t know the content, and not knowing it is the service’s function, not a flaw. A mail provider that doesn’t read the emails is doing exactly what it exists to do. The postman doesn’t open envelopes, and nobody thinks that’s a hole in the postal service.

But if the test of innocence becomes “show me what’s inside”, then every confidential infrastructure is guilty by construction. Not because of what goes through it: because of the very fact of being built so as not to know. And that’s exactly why A/I’s encryption, in the fact sheet, reads as evidence for the prosecution. The system is designed not to know, and “not knowing” has become suspicious.

There’s a reason this is hard to see from outside. Infrastructure, by definition, is invisible as long as it works: you only notice it when it breaks. The sociologist Susan Leigh Star said so, and Matteo Flora picked it up when talking about this very story, with the image of the rising water main in a block of flats – you don’t know where it runs until someone shuts it off to spite one tenant, and the whole building is left high and dry. A/I’s water main was invisible to sixteen thousand people until 26 August. Now they see it, because it’s the one someone tried to shut off.

§What this sentence has already built

“I’ve got nothing to hide” isn’t just pub talk. It has become law, and the law has a history.

Encrypted communications as evidence. In 2024 the Joint Criminal Divisions of the Italian Court of Cassation ruled on the admissibility of chats acquired from the Sky ECC and EncroChat platforms via European Investigation Order: decision of 29 February, reasoning filed on 14 June, judgments nos. 23755 and 23756. Outcome: admissible, essentially. With a sizeable chunk of legal scholarship challenging the squeeze on technical adversarial process, because the defence ends up arguing about data it could never verify at source.

The European regulation on child sexual abuse, chat control. In November 2025 the Council adopted a general approach dropping mandatory detection orders; the fifth trilogue failed at the end of June 2026 and negotiations resume this month; meanwhile the interim voluntary regime has been extended to 2028. Translation: the proposal to make an intermediary scan the content it carries is still on the table, rejected and resubmitted in cycles.

Client-side scanning. Hal Abelson and thirteen others among the most cited names in applied cryptography, Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning, arXiv:2110.07450, October 2021. The technical thesis is blunt: scanning content on the device before it’s encrypted isn’t a compromise between security and encryption. It’s the end of end-to-end encryption, because it reintroduces exactly the access point encryption was meant to close. The paper’s title already says it: a spy microphone, a bug, in everyone’s pocket.

Three different cases, one thread: in each, an intermediary is asked to see what it carries. It’s no longer pub reasoning, it’s a building site – and every brick assumes that you, law-abiding citizen, won’t object, because you’ve got nothing to hide.

§Historical fatigue

Underneath all this there’s just one thing, and it’s what gives this post its title.

A tired person makes the same move twice. They stop checking themselves – “I’ve got nothing to hide” – and they stop checking power – “the State has nothing to hide, so if it keeps something under wraps it’ll have its reasons”. It’s the exact same gesture, made for the exact same reason: checking takes effort, and effort is what they’ve stopped spending. In A/I’s case the gesture sounds like this: “didn’t they refuse to cooperate with some investigation, and that’s why they got hit?”. There’s nothing of the sort in the fact sheet. But the hole in the story gets filled anyway, with whatever people expected to find there. It’s the conspiracy theorist’s move with the sign flipped: one fills the gap with a hidden guilt, the other with a hidden reason, and both replace “there’s no evidence” with “the evidence exists, they just won’t show it to us”.

Where does this fatigue come from. Someone born in 1950 has seen a lot go by. Vietnam, Chile, the Years of Lead, Craxi, the first Gulf War, Tangentopoli, Yugoslavia, Genoa, Iraq, 2008, Syria. Live, or nearly. And at some point – they say so themselves, I’m not making it up – they get tired. “I’ve seen this film before.” “Only the name changes.” “At my age I don’t get outraged any more.”

Put like that it sounds like wisdom, the detachment of someone who’s worked out how the world goes round. It’s the opposite. It’s surrender, and a comfortable one at that, because it excuses you from doing anything. For instance from admitting that you’re the one who ran the world into the ground, and that you ought to stop thinking about your own wellbeing and think about those who come after – who meanwhile have grown old too, got tired too, and are far worse off than you.

And the tired mind is precisely the one propaganda works on best, not because it’s stupid, but because taking the ready-made frame – the official press release’s, whatever’s on the menu – costs nothing, and building a new one costs everything.

“That’s globalisation, sweetheart” isn’t an analysis. It’s a way of not doing one, said in the tone of someone who’s doing one for you.

And here’s the thing that really pisses me off. This fatigue isn’t the private quirk of some gentleman answering emails bored in the evening. It has become a climate. A mass disposition. The background noise of an entire slice of the electorate, and not just ours.

§“It’s war, baby”

There’s a geopolitical version of the same shrug, and I hear it all the time: you’re an antagonist, you use an antagonist platform, and you complain that the empire you antagonise antagonises you back? Amen. It’s war, baby.

No. It isn’t war. There are rules.

There’s a mutual legal assistance treaty between Italy and the United States, there’s the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, there’s the UN Charter, there’s the principle of non-intervention, there are procedures for asking a foreign authority for the data of one of its citizens. The United States signed those rules, and largely wrote them too. “It’s war” is the sentence you use to justify not respecting the rules you gave yourself.

In The Sword in the Stone there’s the wizards’ duel between Merlin and Madam Mim. They agree the rules together: no animal, vegetable or mineral, only animals; no make-believe things like pink dragons and stuff; no disappearing; no cheating (that one from Merlin, who knows his opponent, unlike Europe). Madam Mim disappears immediately, and at the climax of the fight, when she’s about to lose, she turns into a purple dragon. When Merlin points it out, the witch doesn’t bat an eyelid: “did I say no purple dragons?!”. And throughout the film she sings, with evident satisfaction, about being the nastiest of them all. There you go: if you sign up to the rules of a game and then break them the moment it suits you, “wicked” isn’t an insult. It’s the correct classification. The same one the witch deserves.

§Same tool, other targets: Albanese and Khan

And here the matter stops being theoretical, because the tool used against A/I is the very same one the United States has used over the last year and a half against people who had absolutely nothing hidden.

On 6 February 2025 Trump signs Executive Order 14203, Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court. It freezes the assets of the Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and gives the executive the power to designate anyone who has assisted Court investigations into US or allied citizens. Khan is listed in February, after seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. (He’ll leave office in July 2025 over a disciplinary matter that has nothing to do with the sanctions: those had arrived months earlier, and for the Court’s work.) Then the list grows: four judges in June, two more judges plus the two deputy prosecutors in August, two more judges in December, and the Court’s president. Four expansions in one year. The US entry ban is extended to family members. When Khan was listed, his institutional mailbox – hosted on Microsoft 365 – stopped working, and the International Criminal Court had to migrate its infrastructure.

On 9 July 2025, under the same Executive Order, Francesca Albanese is sanctioned, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Her “offence”: publishing, on 30 June, a report naming over sixty companies – including Google, Amazon and Microsoft – and accusing them of profiting from the occupation. Assets frozen under US jurisdiction, a ban on any US person doing business with her, an entry ban. The United Nations pointed out that a special rapporteur enjoys functional immunity. It made no difference. One detail says it all: once listed, Albanese couldn’t even open an account at Banca Etica – the Italian ethical-finance bank, the one for NGOs and cooperatives – because a dollar transfer still makes a technical stopover at a correspondent bank in New York, and the OFAC list reaches it there all the same.

The same bank, after A/I’s designation, suspended operations on the collective’s account and is working with the Ministry to find a way not to close it: it issued a scathing statement against the “improper use” of OFAC lists for political ends. But in the same statement it had to write that keeping a relationship with a listed entity exposes its 130,000 customers to secondary sanctions – everyone’s cards, everyone’s international payments. The bank that publicly condemns the designation still isn’t free to ignore it. PayPal, for its part, simply blocked A/I’s account, full stop.

In May 2026 a federal judge, Richard Leon, grants a preliminary injunction against the sanctions on Albanese: her recommendations to the Court, he writes, are “nothing more than her opinion”, and punishing them violates the First Amendment. The Department of Justice appeals, arguing that a foreigner living abroad simply doesn’t have a First Amendment. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals stays the injunction. Within two weeks Albanese is back on the list.

Look at the structure, which is the same as A/I’s: an Executive Order, an entry on the OFAC list, asset freeze, transaction ban, entry ban, no judge, no trial, no challengeable charge. Only the Executive Order changes: 13224 for terrorism, 14203 for the Criminal Court. The machine is identical.

And the ad personam cases are more serious, not less. With A/I they hit an association. Here they hit an entire international court – prosecutor, deputies, eight judges, the president – and a UN official who was doing, in broad daylight, exactly the job her mandate requires. They expanded the list four times in twelve months. They put the families in. And when a judge from their own country said this violates the Constitution, they appealed and within days put everything back as it was.

Albanese and Khan had nothing to hide. Everything they did is public, on the record, required by a mandate. It didn’t protect them. It made them the target. Transparency, in those two cases, was the provocation.

§The archetypes

Now the mental image, because it’s needed.

There’s your average boomer: the one who forwards chain letters and believes everything that crosses his feed. He exists, but he’s folklore, and he’s the type everyone is happy to point at, because pointing at him costs nothing and lets everyone else off the hook.

Then there’s the one I’m talking about: the one who has read, who has travelled, who has a byline he’s been writing under for half a century, the one who, when he says something, plenty of people take it as gospel. He has the exact same set of flaws. Not watered down: identical. There are three, and they show up clearly in this story.

Boomerism. Not age: a pattern that keeps running after the world it described has gone. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if the only tool in the box is “black bloc, secret channels, people conspiring in the shadows” – stuff from 2001, calibrated on Genoa – then even a 2026 American administrative sanction becomes a nail to hammer in: it’s a different animal, a different subject, a different tool, a different procedure, but you see Genoa. It’s the general always preparing for the last war. And the ones who trip over it are precisely those who’ve been chewing on the subject for a lifetime, because they recognise an established frame instantly and apply it without thinking: when it’s the wrong one, they fall for it before everyone else. A processor does it too: it’s called speculative execution. It recognises a recurring pattern, bets on how things will turn out and starts working on the most likely branch without waiting for confirmation – which is exactly what an old frame does with a new fact: it sees a pattern, takes a guess at the next event, and does so because waiting is expensive. The difference is that the processor knows it’s often wrong, so it keeps a mechanism ready to throw away the work done on the wrong branch and restart from the right point. We don’t have that mechanism, and we should. Call it another piece of functional illiteracy, if you like.

Functional illiteracy, in the technical sense: being able to read the words without being able to reconstruct the reasoning. The OECD measures it with the PIAAC survey; in the latest one, whose data came out at the end of 2024, 34.7% of Italian adults stop at the lowest level of reading comprehension, against an OECD average of 26%. One in three. Anyone who reads “material support” and understands “terrorism” has read the words. The fact sheet’s reasoning is a three-link chain: A/I in the first, the designated organisations in the third, and the second – the one meant to connect them – isn’t there. It’s the South Park underpants gnomes: phase one, collect underpants; phase two, question mark; phase three, profit. The missing phase two is everything.

The frame. An SDGT designation is administrative sanctions law. On the way from the documents to the Italian headlines it became “privacy versus security”: convenient, moral, and false. I counted a dozen outlets with “terrorist organisation” in print. A/I isn’t on the American Foreign Terrorist Organization list and isn’t on the European one: the first triggers a federal crime, the second is an administrative sanction of the executive. Calling the second by the name of the first is a gift to whoever signed it, because the word “terrorist” does the work the document, on its own, can’t do.

§Nobody can punish it, and thank goodness

At this point you might think: right then, let’s pass a law against people who write rubbish in the papers.

No. To enforce a law like that you need an office that decides, case by case, what’s true and what’s false. The day that office exists, you’ve got the Minculpop. The Ministry of Truth in 1984 is called that on purpose: the name is already the indictment. The power to decide what may be published is what every government dreams of at night, and you don’t hand it over, not even nicely gift-wrapped.

So writing rubbish is legal, unless it becomes something else – defaming a specific person, not much more. Outside that, the only brake is reputation, and readers make you pay for it, one by one, deciding whom to trust. It works on one condition: that readers are capable of doing so. Critical thinking, here, isn’t civics. It’s the only sanction the system can afford.

And in Italy it doesn’t work, because a journalist’s standing is measured by how old their byline is, not by how verifiable what they write today is. Someone who covered wars well for thirty years gets the credit when they write about sanctions, about digital, about a subject they’ve never touched. The wrong, in the end, is just one: writing without reading. And it’s the same wrong whether it’s the veteran byline or the student on their first piece. The document was public. It was a few pages. All you had to do was open it.

§Trump

The boomer par excellence was born on 14 June 1946. First year of the boom, right at the top of the list. And he’s no ordinary boomer: he’s the one who took historical fatigue, made it a personality, and then carried it into the White House. Twice.

Trump doesn’t analyse anything, he doesn’t need to. His entire repertoire is that very shrug, inflated into a slogan: it’s all a hoax, it’s a witch hunt, the papers lie, nothing to see here. It’s the same move as the old man dismissing the A/I story with a quip, just shouted from a stage and repeated until it becomes common sense. And a slice of the electorate worn down to that same shrug – “they’re all the same”, “nothing changes anyway”, “at least he says it like it is” – put him there. Not once by mistake: twice.

The two Executive Orders I’ve cited in this post, 13224 and 14203: one was signed by Bush in 2001, the other by him. Today he pulls both levers. The old man with the email shrugs at the abuse; he signs it. It’s the same generational gesture at its two opposite ends, and the damage he’s doing – to institutions, to agreements, to one’s given word – won’t be absorbed within a single term. At a guess, the United States will need a quarter of a century to get back on its feet after the typhoon has passed. If they manage at all.

§What they did with their share

There’s a heavier charge than fatigue, and it comes first.

Their parents and grandparents – those who fought the war, and those before them, who don’t even have a name – worked for those who came after. Not just to be comfortable themselves: to leave something behind. Mass state schooling, university you could pay for with a summer job, healthcare for all, council housing, pensions, the Constitution, a union settlement that held. They built it starting from much less, knowing it would be their children who enjoyed it.

The boomers inherited all that at its peak. Born inside the boom, they grew up in the broadest prosperity the West has ever known, found a job for life at twenty and a guaranteed pension. They had their ‘68, and they took something from it. Then, in their prime – the eighties, the nineties – they stopped. The ebb tide, the private in place of the collective, “Milano da bere”, hedonism as a life plan. Let’s call it by its name: selfishness, on the scale of an entire generation.

What they’re leaving us, measured against what they received, is a worse world on almost every count. The job for life is gone, a home is a mirage, the pension we’ll pay into for them to enjoy now, and they’ll be the last to get one. And all around: wars coming back, propaganda and disinformation running at full steam, the law of the strongest put back at the centre and passed off as realism, a climate crisis known since the seventies and ignored by choice, and loneliness – loads of it, like never before.

Autistici/Inventati is a small piece of all this, in miniature. A shared infrastructure built with bare hands in 2001 by people who were twenty back then. Twenty-five years later it’s being crushed by a system the older ones let take shape, and about which, if you ask them now, they shrug and say that’s globalisation, sweetheart.

That’s why the fight matters, and it isn’t nostalgia for a generational war that never happened. It’s that they spent their share – and boy did they spend it – and the bill has landed on us. We pay it twice: once now, to keep standing what they let fall apart, and once later, when we’ll have to rebuild from scratch – if we still have the strength, and the people, to do it.

The people, exactly. Between those who can’t afford children and those who soaked up their elders’ hedonism to the point of not wanting any, the new generations are talked about less and less: ever fewer in number, with ever more weight on their backs. Then again, they’d be the children of the “lads”, wouldn’t they? The eternal youngsters who, even with grey hair, still call themselves “the lads”, think like lads, get up to lads’ stuff. And they certainly can’t be in charge, the kids.

§The reckoning

The tired citizen who says “I’ve got nothing to hide” thinks he’s taken shelter. He hasn’t. He’s the easiest target there is, because he won’t make a fuss. He won’t ask to see the papers, he won’t write to anyone, he won’t go to a lawyer. He’ll wait for it to blow over.

And meanwhile he’ll find his life hooked to a designation decided by a foreign executive without a judge having seen a shred of evidence – like Albanese, like Khan, and like the sixteen thousand people who just had a mailbox on those servers. The teacher who ran the school-trip mailing list. The domestic-violence helpline that put its website there because it cost nothing. Your friend who wanted to send emails without giving his address book to Google. None of them did anything, and none of them has the faintest way of unhooking themselves.

The real divide isn’t privacy versus security. It’s between those who still make the effort to understand and those too tired to. And that fatigue isn’t neutral: it’s exactly the soil this kind of power grows best in.

The boomers fought with their elders. With us that handover never happened: the seat was already taken, and nobody challenged them for it, because by the time we grew up they were already holding all the microphones. The clash between one generation and the next that history books take for granted simply never happened for us millennials.

We’re doing it now, late, one piece at a time, from the depths of a blog that few people read, or rather nobody. It’s not much of a reckoning, I get that. But it’s the one they’ve left us. It’s our garden, the place they don’t know how to get into yet, except through an executive order designating us as SDGT.

And no, it isn’t war. There are rules. Whoever signs them and then breaks them because it suits them has a name, and it’s that of a cartoon witch.

§Sources