“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.

If an Italian association wanted to seriously challenge the OFAC designation it has just had slapped on it, who would it turn to? The short answer is: nobody. Not because it’s hard, but because the court where you’d go doesn’t exist.

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.