Activist Blogging Platform Shuts Down After Terrorism Designation

Washington D.C. — On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Departments of State and the Treasury designated a volunteer tech collective behind a popular activist blogging platform a terrorist organization.

Autistici/Inventati (A/I), the Italian collective behind NoBlogs.org, now joins such organizations as the Islamic State group and al Qaeda on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), a category created by former President George W. Bush in an executive order weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Shortly thereafter, Autistici/Inventati lost their domain, autistici.org, and had their Italian bank account closed due to the threat of US sanctions.

NoBlogs was hacked on August 28th, two days after the terrorism designation. A “Free Palestine” button on the NoBlogs homepage was redirected to link to a US government “self deportation” site, and a message was posted claiming that NoBlogs user information had been “saved and given to the United States government.” The hack was quickly promoted on X by right-wing influencer and Pentagon employee Jennica Pounds. On September 6th, Autistici/Inventati announced its imminent closure.

A/I, which provided its services such as NoBlogs to protect activists, feared that maintaining its services would only expose users to additional risk given the “political climate” now that it was labeled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

“Under these circumstances, we are no longer able to maintain our original mission – offering secure and non-commercial digital tools,” explained the collective in a statement. “Now turn off your PCs, get out of your homes, struggle, hug each other and keep on smiling. We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.” In an announcement on September 8th, A/I reported that emails, listservs, and NoBlogs accounts would cease operation within the following ten days.

May First Movement Technology, a nonprofit that similarly provides internet services for social movement groups, released a statement that “emphatically condemns” the A/I sanctions, which it called “excessive and vindictive.” May First had one of its former members, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, likewise designated as a terrorist group by the Treasury Department in 2024. “US government can effectively isolate any organization without presenting evidence or trial,” May First stated, “by simply alleging that they support terrorism.”

“From what we understand,” an A/I member had stated in an Italian-language interview, “any American citizen who interacts with us after [a US Treasury Department deadline of] September 25 would risk 30 years in jail.” Executive Order 13244 bans the “making or receiving of any contribution of funds, goods, or services to or for the benefit of” Specially Designated Terrorist Groups. Designated Groups are “cut off” from the U.S. financial system, with all financial transactions blocked in areas subject to US law. Significantly, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control reserves the right to levy secondary sanctions against non-U.S. individuals, organizations, or financial institutions that have dealings with SDTGs. A/I’s Italian bank therefore faced the possibility of being itself blocked from the US financial system were it to continue providing banking services to the collective.

“The real coercive power of the United States lies in progressively making it impossible to bank, host, or provide services to the designated entity,” said Beniamino Irdi of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. organization promoting transatlantic relations. “The power of sanctions derives from the ability to influence third parties, financial and commercial operators that, for compliance reasons, may decide to sever relations with the designated entity.”

Specially Designated Global Terrorists are distinct from Foreign Terrorist Organizations, which the powerful Atlantic Council think tank refers to as the “gold standard of terrorism sanctions.”

Former Biden administration Senior Director for International Economics Peter Harrell contended in a post on X that sanctions against A/I might be illegal under U.S. law, given the existence of a carve-out for “any postal, telegraphic, telephonic, or other personal communication” in the Berman Amendments to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. A legal challenge to A/I sanctions could have amounted to a “perfect test case” for the communications exemption, per Berman, though the collective’s disbanding would now make such a claim irrelevant.

Autistici/Inventati provided critical digital infrastructure for anti-authoritarian social movements for a quarter-century. Birthed in a Milan hacker space in 2001, A/I saw rapid growth after the infamous Genoa G8 summit that same year, when some 200,000 anti-globalization protesters faced off against militarized Italian police committing “shocking” acts of brutality. Within a couple of years, A/I would host hundreds of listservs and websites from around the world. After an Italian police raid in 2004, A/I moved to a decentralized model spread across various encrypted servers located throughout the world.

As a retrospective published by Sabot Media explained, A/I’s platforms like NoBlogs supported “movement organizations, personal writers, dissidents, artists and NGO workers operating in dangerous environments.” NoBlogs topics ranged from Indigenous rights to DIY music, climate change to anti-militarization, and gentrification to healthcare reform. But the federal government accused A/I of supporting “violent Antifa cells” and “far-left terrorist networks” around the world through provision of services like web hosting, citing the NoBlogs pages of initiatives like pro-choice direct actionists Jane’s Revenge and the movement to Stop Cop City. The State Department described the latter as a “violent campaign” engineered by an allegedly still-active “anarchist cell.”

Right-wing public figures close to the Trump administration began publicly targeting Autistici/Inventati and NoBlogs late last year. In September 2025, following the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump declared Antifa domestic terrorists and unveiled NSPM-7, a “comprehensive national strategy” to prosecute “self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” One month later, Kyle Shideler of the far-right Center for Security Policy spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on the topic of Antifa “political violence.” Shideler, who would later serve as a prosecution witness in the Prairieland trial, explicitly referenced NoBlogs in his October Senate testimony. He accused the NoBlogs site Abolition Media of providing “material support” to terrorism, describing it as functioning akin to the “media arm for a terrorist organization.”

“Abolition Media is just one of hundreds of such websites hosted on NoBlogs,” Shideler testified, accusing A/I of supporting “Antifa and related left-wing extremist groups while hiding personal data from law enforcement.” In his Senate testimony, Shideler referenced reporting by Hudson Crozier published by Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller just days earlier. Crozier’s article, which described A/I as a “shadowy foreign tech group” working to “keep police off Antifa’s trail,” in turn quoted Shideler as an expert on Antifa. Each of the domestic NoBlogs accounts enumerated in the State Department’s terrorism designation announcement was first identified in Crozier’s reporting.

The Trump administration falsely claimed that Portland’s Rose City Antifa used A/I services, apparently confusing the group with the NoBlogs site Rose City Counterinfo. But this conflation, combined with Abolition Media’s republication of announcements from Palestinian resistance groups, was sufficient for Fox News to breathlessly report on Autistici/Inventati as the nexus of a supposed “Portland Antifa connection to Hamas.” This tenuous link echoes Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks at the July 2026 Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, in which he warned dignitaries from 67 nations that “old ideological boundaries are now giving way to new operational alliances… between international Marxism and radical Islamic movements.”

The designation of A/I as a terrorist group marks an unprecedented departure in U.S. counterterrorism strategy. As the editorial staff of Crypto Briefing identified, “targeting a tech infrastructure provider represents a different approach.” In this case, an organization was labelled a terrorist group not because it committed or advocated for acts of terrorism but because of the political speech appearing on an internet platform it provided as a service.

“The government’s public statements do not show that A/I planned those actions, selected targets, transferred weapons, directed the cited groups or authored the material hosted on its systems. They do not establish when A/I learned of any particular act or whether it knew about it before it occurred,” clarified the authors of the Sabot Media article. “Instead, the designation advances a broader and more consequential proposition: building communications infrastructure for radical movements can itself be treated as terrorism.”

As Matthew Petti wrote for Reason, the Trump administration “is attacking the group for running an online platform that the U.S. government can’t spy on and for facilitating communications the U.S. government doesn’t like. But precisely because Autistici/Inventati is based in another country—Italy—the U.S. government has basically unchecked power to impose counterterrorism sanctions on it.”

“The most interesting part is not so much the sanction against this organization, but the fact that the logic of material support to terrorist organizations is being extended to the infrastructure layer,” explained the German Marshall Fund’s Irdi. “Washington is looking not only at what an entity does, but at what it enables others to do through its services, including in third countries.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York told The Intercept that “going after the messenger” in this way will have “huge” ramifications for free speech and expression on the internet. It’s unclear if the Trump administration may target other platforms used by activists and security-conscious individuals such as Signal, Proton, or Telegram.

A member of Autistici/Inventati emphasized to Freedom News that there is now an urgent need for “1,000 more infrastructures of dissent to be born, new, safer, stronger.”

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