FBI Subpoena Forced Google to Testify in Court Before a Grand Jury to Identify Two Admins of AnarchistFederation.net

Over the past several weeks, we have published two transparency notices concerning an FBI investigation related to AnarchistFederation.net, a website hosted on infrastructure maintained by No Gods No Masters Network:

• On July 15, we disclosed that Cloudflare had received federal legal process concerning AnarchistFederation.net
• Later, we learned that Google had also received legal process, including a demand concerning an old administrative Gmail account used for infrastructure-related purposes.

Today, we learned that the FBI investigation have escalated again with a new subpoenas targeting two personal Google accounts, and because the new documents significantly clarify the scope of the investigation, we believe our community should know.

IMAGE: https://www.nogodsnomasters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/fbi-003-mail-768x282.png

^ Two collaborators of the tech team received this message from Google today

FBI sought personal records to identify NGNM administrators

The most significant new development is that investigators did not stop at the general administrative account. A separate, third legal process sought records concerning personal Gmail accounts that investigators appear to have found through shared identifying or connection records.

The personal Gmail addresses targeted by this subsequent subpoena had never been associated with either the Cloudflare account or the administrative Google account targeted by the previous subpoenas. We therefore do not know how investigators identified it. One possibility is that the account was linked through IP-address or billing records obtained during the earlier stages of the investigation, but the documents disclosed to us do not establish the method used.

It’s important to note that we have never attempted to hide our identities to the government, and that would have been simply impossible. Operating a legitimate datacenter infrastructure necessarily requires real identifying, billing, and payment information with registrars, providers, banks, and other third parties, and we have no reason to hide because providing hosting infrastructure, maintaining servers, and administering domains are lawful activities. The concern is not that investigators can identify people connected to the infrastructure, but whether that technical association is being wrongly framed as evidence of authorship or editorial control.

Google was requested to testify in court before a federal grand jury

A Google subpoena was issued through the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky and requested Google Legal Investigations Support to appear before the Lexington Grand Jury.

The heavily redacted subpoena asked Google to provide a long list of records, including personal names, residential addresses, local and long distance telephone records, IP addresses, credit card and billing records, and more.

We have confirmed this request is directly connected to the two previous subpoenas related to AnarchistFederation.net, but we have found no public indictment or criminal case arising from this investigation, and we still do not know what alleged offense the FBI was investigating because the court documents remain under seal.

IMAGE: https://www.nogodsnomasters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/fbi-003-768x979.png

IMAGE: https://www.nogodsnomasters.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/fbi-003-b-768x860.png

At this stage, there are two possibilities. One is that the grand-jury investigation produced no charges, which would explain why no public criminal case has appeared. The other, more serious possibility is that federal criminal charges or an arrest warrant exist under seal and are being kept confidential until an arrest can be made, after which the case and allegations could become public. We have no evidence that either of this has happened, and the absence of any public indictment means it remains only a possibility we cannot completely rule out.

If authorities were nevertheless to pursue an arrest, our position would remain that we have done nothing illegal and that any such action should be considered for what it is: an attempt to intimidate activists providing legit technical infrastructure to autonomous political projects in the broader context of Trump’s weaponization of the DOJ to silence his political opponents.

NGNM is the infrastructure provider

NGNM provides hosting infrastructure and technical administration. AnarchistFederation.net is separately operated by its collective, which independently chose which external sources are aggregated. Articles are then imported automatically through RSS feeds. The tech team maintain servers, domains, networking, security and related systems. They do not manually review every article imported from hundreds of external third party websites.

This separation is not something new, it has been documented for multiple years in the project’s existing legal framework.

NGNM’s Domain Custody Agreement expressly states:

“Client retains exclusive control over: Website operations. Publishing decisions. Moderation policies.”

The NGNM Non-Commercial Web Hosting Agreement likewise states:

“The Host shall not be treated as the publisher or speaker of content provided by Clients or end users.”

AnarchistFederation.net’s own Contact page states plainly:

“We do not write any original articles, we are a distribution platform and not an editorial media.”

And its article-reporting policy explains:

“The multitude of daily articles is not subject to manual approval before publication.”

The footer appearing throughout the site separately identifies the entities involved:

“This website is independently operated by a local collective. Hosting infrastructure is provided by NGNM Non-Commercial Web Hosting LLC.”

It further states that neither NGNM nor AFed collective exercises editorial control over the material supplied by the external publishers.

These distinctions are also documented in AnarchistFederation.net’s platform description, moderation procedure, AFed collective, automation disclosure, and the editorial autonomy declaration.The site also maintains a formal DMCA and takedown procedure to comply with valid legal requests.

These documents reflect the actual division of responsibilities: NGNM maintains infrastructure, the collective operates the aggregator and selects sources, and external publishers create the articles.

Our position: an RSS aggregator is not an editorial newsroom

Hosting infrastructure does not make NGNM the editor of every hosted website. Maintaining a server does not make an administrator the author of everything published on it. Maintaining a domain does not transfer editorial control where a written custody agreement expressly says otherwise. And an automatically imported RSS article does not establish that an infrastructure administrator approved or endorsed that article.

AnarchistFederation.net automatically imports a large volume of political material. Some of it could be seen as controversial or radical. The existence of such an article in an automated RSS database does not mean an NGNM administrator personally read, approved or endorsed it. That is precisely why there is a reporting mechanism. If an article is reported, moderators can review it and remove it where appropriate.

The site’s About page describes how the platform works: hundreds of external sources are automatically republished when new content becomes available. The automated aggregation system posted more than 300,000 articles, infrastructure administrators cannot reasonably pre-screen every article flowing through hundreds of RSS feeds.

Operating our own infrastructure matters more than ever

About two years ago, long before we knew about this investigation, we began building our own data center with physical hosting infrastructure to reduce our dependence on commercial providers. Today, more than a hundred hosted websites run on servers that we own and operate in our own data-center environment rather than on rented servers controlled by third-party hosting companies. That project was about autonomy and resilience from the beginning, but the importance of that decision is now even clearer.

Had we remained dependent on a commercial infrastructure provider, investigators could potentially have directed legal demands, seizure requests, or other intimidation pressure at that intermediary, creating another point where our services or data could be disrupted without our direct involvement. Owning and operating the underlying infrastructure does not make us immune from legal threats, but it removes a major third-party pressure point and makes the network more resilient against attempts to obtain data, interfere with operations, or shut down hosted projects simply by leaning on a commercial provider.

We will continue to publish transparency notices as we learn more about the FBI investigation. So far, we still don’t know what we are being accused of, if anything, but we are prepared for any scenario and we’re not going anywhere.

Thanks to everyone who reached out with messages of solidarity and support.