If a radical group sets up shop on I2P, are I2P users and devs now terrorists? This is a problem.
What about Monero users/devs? Veilid? Tox? Signal?
foul 1 days ago [-]
It is not unprecedented, but a lot of fools lauded moves like this when these kind of instruments were used with barely a legal net around them against islamic terrorism or cybercrime.
I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you. In this very year UN and ICJ officials have been targeted in a similar fashion though. When the pax americana ends like this, I don't know what else is needed for EU and Asia to raise tougher walls around the woes of any idiot hyped enough to be voted by USA citizens.
vlyan 23 hours ago [-]
8chan's /pol/ wasn't any different than 4chan's. the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't.
filoleg 21 hours ago [-]
> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't
That's certainly a take.
My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.
Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?
I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.
vlyan 18 hours ago [-]
we've seen several websites that do not break US law get evicted by registrars, ISPs, DDoS protection services, and other Internet landlords. 4chan miraculously survived multiple mass hysteria periods of the past decade without (iirc) any major disruptions. same as Russian 2ch -- miraculously untouched by Russia's rapid North Koreaization even though its /pol/ is overwhelmingly anti-regime.
0dayz 14 hours ago [-]
The pirate bay is still up despite being taken down, is this now also a honeypot?
SmashDan 13 hours ago [-]
The Pirate Bay has had legal issues, been raided and taken down in the past. Has 4chan has any issues like this?
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
The UK fined it £520,000 but has no way to enforce it.
ben_w 5 hours ago [-]
In fairness, this at most tells you the UK court system isn't party to any honeypotting.
Despite the memes, the UK is not the 51st state, which is both why it was able to make the fine (1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over the UK) and why it's not able to enforce it (the UK doesn't have jurisdiction over 4chan).
GoblinSlayer 3 hours ago [-]
>(1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over the UK)
It's a matter of enforcement. And who would want to enforce 1st amendment?
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
Neither has the power to be enforced outside its own territory.
The entirety of the US constitution carries zero weight to the court system of the nation that the founders of those United States, ahem, engaged in unlawful violent treason against, with the assistance of foreign powers (France, then Spain and the Dutch Republic). :P
0dayz 7 hours ago [-]
It got raided once way back.
phoghed 5 hours ago [-]
That’s obviously when they delivered the honey, the plot thickens
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
Is the current pirate bay even still the original, or just a mirror or someone trying to mimic the old one?
iririririr 8 hours ago [-]
it's very much the same and backed a political party at their home turf.
tpb.party
gaudystead 19 hours ago [-]
Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:
That article tells me 4chan wasn't a honeypot but used by Epstein for his chaos or at least he thought about using it.
K0balt 7 hours ago [-]
/pol was made in October 2023 after a meeting between moot and Epstein. 4chan may not have been a honeypot but it’s likely that /pol was influenced heavily by Epstein/Maxwell which indicates a plausible link between/pol and Mossad aligned Intel activities at least.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
The emails were from 201* not 2023.
DaSHacka 6 hours ago [-]
But /new/ was from before then and was essentially the precursor to /pol/ anyway
K0balt 6 hours ago [-]
Sure. Epstein/Mossad/CIA was not likely involved in the creation of the Chan. But the creation of /pol apparently in response to moot meeting Epstein (and follow-up meetings) as well as Maxwell’s alleged “janitor” status on the board are both deeply suspicious at least.
BTW someone should probably check in on moot once in a while to see if he’s ok lol. Strange bedfellows and all that.
jasonvorhe 4 hours ago [-]
Wasn't Maxwell also one of the most active Reddit moderators?
michael0church 1 hours ago [-]
Probably not, but the timing is weird. There isn’t a lot of evidence except the name, which is probably coincidental.
feshbach 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sicktriple 16 hours ago [-]
MSNBC is far left? Next you'll tell me Joe Biden is a Maoist.
cholantesh 16 hours ago [-]
I suspect they're a bot, fwiw.
feshbach 13 hours ago [-]
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iririririr 8 hours ago [-]
you're replying to someone who says "far left" of they don't display open hatred for non cis people etc
2 hours ago [-]
13 hours ago [-]
ipaddr 16 hours ago [-]
MSNBC is as far left as Fox news is far right.
K0balt 7 hours ago [-]
I see you are not familiar with the far left lol. What passes for left in the USA is the tip of the left iceberg. The leftmost edge of the identity politics in USA is a funny cartoon version. OTOH, the Fox News right is adjacent to far right, but also misses it substantively, just not by as far.
sicktriple 14 hours ago [-]
There is much farther left than left-libs. The U.S. doesn't get anywhere near as left as it goes. MSNBC is center-left, at most. This is a very right wing country.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
So you agree with me unless you think the furthest right is Fox News which it's not by far.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
This is just not a true statement.
kodoman 10 hours ago [-]
It's was mostly a slightly more edgy 4chan with actually some more varied boards and wider range of political views (/leftypol/) was a thing If I remember. So mostly dumb teens and later the whole Q-Anon mentally ill boomers who took over once the board was brought by one of them much to displeasure of the edge teens. In short if that is a threat to a government and a society it's a weak government and society, comparing it to Al-Qaeda or some kind of comparable threat to anything government or nation is crazy.
0dayz 15 hours ago [-]
Only that 8 was and is just a giant astroturfer for Watkins.
meowface 18 hours ago [-]
1. It is extremely likely neither 8chan /pol/ nor 4chan /pol/ were or are honeypots.
2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.
totetsu 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah That fucking cunt Brenton Tarrant was just ruffling feathers…
sdsd 14 hours ago [-]
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jchook 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder why Epstein was communicating with 4chan's founder in 2011...
gfdd 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
I think the same people who opposed a/i sanctions (not AI sanctions but they're really missing out by not exploiting that confusion) also opposed sanctions for """islamic terrorism""" and for """cybercrime""".
foul 21 hours ago [-]
To some thin extent (opposition to racial profiling and big copyright), mayhaps. People protest against Guantanamo, not for ISIS, and protest against identification, not for looking at pedo porn.
tremeouh0 24 hours ago [-]
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xg15 23 hours ago [-]
It's the logic of Jack Bauer taken to the end. "Come on, it's obvious who the bad guys are, who needs rules?" until suddenly it's not obvious anymore...
antonvs 23 hours ago [-]
My conspiracy theory is that "24" was funded by the CIA (etc.) to build public support for measures like the Patriot Act. "24" debuted 11 days after the Patriot Act became law, so they were being worked on at the same time.
michael0church 1 hours ago [-]
MIC influence is very likely, but 24 was written before 9/11.
The neoconservative wing of the Republican Party had a hardon for war before the attack. What they couldn’t agree on was where… an invasion of Colombia under pretext of drugs, or something in the Middle East after the second intifada.
Once the planes hit, they could all agree where. South America was forgotten for a while.
Any direct connection to 24 would likely be tenuous, if only because (a) MIC propaganda is all over Hollywood even in peacetime, and (b) dark (i.e., on-camera physical interrogation) political thriller was already a high-selling genre in 2001.
GolfPopper 18 hours ago [-]
Don't forget the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. During its pilot episode, first airing March 4th, 2001, members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner and try to crash it into the World Trade Center, blaming anti-American terrorist groups in order to start a new global war on terrorism for the profit of defense industry contractors.
marcosdumay 1 hours ago [-]
Both throwing airplanes at buildings and taking the World Trace Center down were pretty widespread "hidden" ideas at the time. It's not surprising that several people connected them.
Then there are reports of FBI expelling from the USA some 100+ foreign art students after the attack.
There are a lot more dots to connect in this case, so it gets even easier but if people expect to be told the truth by a news anchor it can take 75+ years - that is the word we live in.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
It may also have contributed a bit to the planning - HEAT (the movie) came out before the North Hollywood bank robbery and shootings, but clearly influenced them. I don’t think there is any plausible direct relationship, just zeitgeist/influence.
chrisweekly 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah; how many times in 24 hours can one vigilante commit acts of thinly-narratively-justified but actually-illegal torture without audiences clueing in?
blaufuchs 15 hours ago [-]
Same with Homeland. How many times do you see Carrie stymied by the law and cheer when she eventually breaks it?
Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.
> On October 23, 2001, U.S. representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced House bill H.R. 3162, which incorporated provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill, and a Senate bill introduced earlier in the month.[5] The next day, October 24, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66,[6] with Democrats comprising the overwhelming majority of "no"-votes.
> The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.
SturgeonsLaw 19 hours ago [-]
Depends what counts as "introduced", the Patriot Act was based on the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act written by Joe Biden.
This is something Biden was proud of, and confirmed in his own words many times
even if that were true it would be completely irrelevant to the context in which you replied? Check if you have DDS.
antonvs 22 hours ago [-]
It’s a conspiracy theory in that there’s no evidence of funding, support, or even cooperation in the particular case of “24”.
The 24 pilot was filmed before 9/11. After 9/11, the show had to be modified because reality has become uncomfortably close to it. That included delaying the premiere and removing a scene involving an exploding passenger aircraft.
That article mentions that some of those shows relied on government consultation, with the CIA and FBI, to help with realism, etc. “24” was not one of them. “24” co-creator Joel Surnow is on record saying there was no government involvement.
Quote from the WP for context:
> Coming this fall [2001]: A new primetime drama series takes a close-up look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals.
> The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox.
Some years it's twenty-something sitcoms. Sometimes it's doctors, or vermin-oriented "reality" shows. This fall, the trend is Fed TV: No fewer than five new network series depict the exploits of people with civil-service pay grades, shiny employee ID badges and very large guns.
But it was “24” that did the most to normalize the “torture the bad guys till they reveal the plot” and other such right-wing wet dreams.
rayiner 19 hours ago [-]
Torturing bad guys isn’t “right wing” lol. The second season came out my freshman year of college, and about a dozen of us in our dorm watched it religiously every week. I’m pretty sure only two of us were republicans. The show had universal appeal (to men). There’s like a dozen Bollywood knock offs of the show.
JuniperMesos 19 hours ago [-]
How many of those same people are Republicans today, because of various shifts in the political positions the different American political parties take with respect to demographic groups such as men?
rayiner 19 hours ago [-]
More than a few—this was Georgia Tech and these are all southern white guys—but not the majority.
antonvs 16 hours ago [-]
That’s quite the Overton window you’re living with.
> Georgia
Ah yes, I see.
rayiner 15 hours ago [-]
24 was one of the highest rated shows on television, won 20 Emmy awards and was nominated for 68. People just like torturing and killing terrorists. Not just Americans either—it’s a popular Bollywood trope as well.
antonvs 13 hours ago [-]
Show me someone who "likes torturing" and I'll show you someone who's a social media algorithm away from being MAGA or the local equivalent. "Right wing" is the correct term.
Briefly checking your comment history, it's the correct term for you as well, so what's the issue? You don't want to admit it?
rayiner 13 hours ago [-]
I’m happy to admit it. But I think that there’s lots of democrats who are fine with it too—folks who agree on how to handle terrorists, but just want more generous social welfare. I don’t think its a real dividing line in the electorate.
sudosteph 2 hours ago [-]
My opinion probably doesn't matter to the commenter before you (because I am also from the shudder US South), but I think a few things are true here
First, I agree that 24 did have mainstream appeal regardless of political ideology. Pretty much everyone I knew watched it.
Second, the appeal was not solely grounded in "Torture is good". I walked out or closed my eyes on a lot of those scenes, but watched the first few seasons because I liked Chloe's character and because the the format (every episode as one hour of the same day) was novel. Also because it was something I could talk about to friends and family - back when we all consumed the same media regularly.
But if you think back to the Bush years, it really wasn't until after the Iraq war, and Abu Ghraib in particular (2004), that democrats started to come out more vocally against Fox-news approved "enhanced interrogation". It wasn't that they were also pro-torture before, but I think it felt more theoretical to Americans on both sides back in 2001.
Later on anyone who was paying attention had to confront the reality of it. That's when the sides splintered and the Fox-news machine ramped up on normalizing/praising abuse and characterizing every individual ever captured as a blood-thirsty future Bin Laden. Relatedly, Gitmo was a huge deal to the dems back then, even Obama campaigned saying he would close it (it didn't close). He may not have won the nomination without that promise though.
So it was a real dividing line for a moment, but ever since the financial mess of 2008, the democratic voter base has been more engaged on economic and healthcare inadequacies, so when those took over the news, the party was grateful to not remind people about gitmo.
I will say there were pro-torture, war-hawk dems at the highest level. That's always been a problem for dems. But the tone on the ground was very consistently anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-torture (for a moment at least).
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Note that democrats and republicans are both right-wing parties.
edgyquant 1 hours ago [-]
Only according the far left, in reality this is not true and shouldn’t even be entertained except to a laugh at people trying this hard to shift the Overton window in their favor
rayiner 2 hours ago [-]
Then I guess America is just a really right wing country and I’m correct that most people were okay with Jack Bauer torturing terrorists for the greater good.
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
Indeed, it's absurd people still have this left/right standoff. Boggled my mind as a kid in history class that the Republicans somehow wanted to free slaves in the past but are all in on bombing the crap out of iraq. Well, guess there's no real code or manifesto to follow. It's almost like they're just saying whatever the heck they have to just to get elected, after that all bets are off.
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
Highly doubt, perhaps you're just biased due to your own beliefs. Anyway the left/right divide is really silly -- it mixes economic and political orientation. National socialism would be left because socialism and so my god, Mr moustache man really liked beating bad guys. Alright you can argue about this, then what about the bad guys he hated most, most notably the other Mr moustache, Stalin? Communism surely is very left by today's standard, and guess what -- they enjoyed beating bad guys. Both sides of the spectrum literally call for violent revolution all the time.
Who doesn't like beating up bad people? It's in children's fairytale. Getting what you deserve is codified in human moral ideals since like probably cavemen times and movies today still have this theme.
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
You’re missing something else that happened right before 24 debuted on November 6, 2001.
antonvs 16 hours ago [-]
I’m not missing it, I thought that was obvious. See my other longer comment in this thread.
3hsga14 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mapontosevenths 19 hours ago [-]
>And Epstein friends Lutnick, Larry Silverstein, Sarah Ferguson and Michael Jackson all had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 and all canceled last minute.
I looked into this so I could call you out for spreading disinformation.
Except what I found was that this statement is factually accurate as far as I can tell. Each person had their own separate story as to why they didn't go that day.
Huh. Not sure what to make of this.
toast0 17 hours ago [-]
> Not sure what to make of this.
What was their rate of last minute cancellations? I suspect people in that circle frequently change plans, sometimes at the last minute, so having changed plans on that day would be unremarkable had that day itself been unremarkable.
Not to mention the first plane hit at at 8:46 am. Looking at details, none of these seem remarkable, and wouldn't have been remembered or written about if they happened the day before...
Sarah Ferguson's meeting was scheduled fot 8:45, but she was delayed by traffic after coming from an interview. ... Morning traffic in New York on a business day is not unusual and busy people miss tightly scheduled meetings because of it.
Michael Jackson performed in a concert the day before and was reportedly up late talking on the phone. I didn't see a scheduled time for the meeting, but a missed meeting after a concert doesn't seem surprising to me. Concert started at 7:40 pm according to a ticket stub photo here [1]
Larry Silverstein was reportedly double booked and kept a dermetology appointment his wife had booked after he missed one a month prior. Stuff happens, your wife books medical appointments for you without checking your calendar and you don't miss them twice.
Lutnick took his eldest son to their first day of Kindergarten. Which is something you do if you can. I didn't see any indication that he had a meeting scheduled. I'm guessing there's no consipiracy or even reporting about him going to the first day of Kindergarten for his other three children, but he probably did.
If celebrities keep their appointments say 80% of the time, then for every near miss, there should be four who actually died. Are there?
toast0 10 hours ago [-]
Well Lutnick's brother for one.
But Wikipedia has a list of notable people who died [1]. David Angel, an Emmy winning TV writer and producer. Garnet Bailey, an acomplished hockey player. Carolyn Beug who directed the award winning music video for Van Halen's Right Now. William E. Caswell, a prominent physicist. Charles Edward Jones, an astronaut. Daniel Lewin, co-founder of Akamai. Etc. You can read the list and come to your own conclusions.
No it wouldn't. Parents accompanying children to their first day of school is pretty normal and sometimes required, especially for the fancy private schools someone like Lutnick probably sent his kids to.
ipaddr 3 hours ago [-]
Usually the wife in a rich Jewish family in 2001 would bring the kids to school not the husband. Today no as much. Doesn't mean everyone but it is strange.
tgma 18 hours ago [-]
> Not sure what to make of this.
Not much as the sample has (literally) survival bias.
mapontosevenths 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like it's just a statistical fact that many people used to visit and cancel visits there every day, but it's hard to say how unlikely this was without numbers.
Apocryphon 17 hours ago [-]
Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg were famously supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11, and Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming a movie at the World Trade Center that very morning. I’m sure more near-brushes exist.
podocarp 10 hours ago [-]
Perhaps we should compare how many famous people died, and how many near missed. I'm not great at stats but I'm guessing if it was all near misses that would be pretty insane, suggesting somehow they all got the idea to cancel on that day whereas regular Joes didn't get the memo. Whereas if it was like 80% then yea probably attributable to "a busy schedule".
16 hours ago [-]
jibal 17 hours ago [-]
George Herbert Walker Bush and Richard Nixon were both in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated. What should rational people make of that? Nothing, other than that people have very poor statistical intuitions ... see the work of Kahneman and Tversky.
NDlurker 16 hours ago [-]
Bush being there likely wasn't a coincidence.
jibal 16 hours ago [-]
Really? What is the actual probability attached to that word "likely", and what is the data is support of a Bayesian calculation to reach that conclusion?
I refer again to rational people. Bush was president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, and was meeting with local Texans to build support for his run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His presence had nothing to do with Kennedy. At the moment of the assassination he was in Tyler, 100 miles away.
Even if, contrary to all reason, Bush was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, there would not have been any reason for him to personally be in Dallas that day.
somenameforme 8 hours ago [-]
I'd agree with you that he would not have any reason to be there, but things like this [1] sure look extremely weird.
It doesn’t even need to be secret or underhanded. The government can simply foster the media that drives their strategic goals. Same kind of idea as stochastic terror.
JuniperMesos 19 hours ago [-]
And just like stochaistic terror, it's a label you can apply to basically any media you don't like, that seems to support a political agenda you are opposed to.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Huh? What label? The conversation wasn't about a label.
shevy-java 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know if that is a conspiracy theory; it probably is a bit unlikely to have a direct connection to the CIA. But what is definitely not a conspiracy theory is that the USA uses taxpayer's money to fund propaganda, e. g. a pro-war image. There are numerous examples for this, also for directors who refused to accept such deals since that heavily ruined movies. The movies with bribes from the US military are often incredibly dumb and simplistic. Propaganda often works in such a way that it dumbs down everything. Then again, movie quality also declined a LOT in the last some 20 years or even 30 years now. With AI movies upcoming, the slop spam section has finally won. People are not going to pay money for awful AI slop.
XorNot 17 hours ago [-]
Except people love torture anyway. Even people who say they're opposed to torture usually do so in terms of "it's bad to torture people, but like, it would totally work". It is a ludicrously common sentiment.
The actual conspiracy was the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty producers that the Intel to find bin Laden came from torturing a detainee, which was a straight up lie (namely: under standard interrogation he provided the intelligence they needed...then they waterboarded him over 100 more times which provided absolutely nothing).
mindslight 22 hours ago [-]
Why do you need the detour through the CIA? Our de jure Constitutional government is merely part of a much larger de facto government formed by large corporations and the billionaire (oligarch) class. The same group of people who funded the lobbyists that had the "Patriot" Act ready and waiting on September 10th also funded "24", the politicians and think tanks behind the Iraq War, and so on. The main difference is that production of "24" was a direct bona fide business expense for tax purposes.
antonvs 22 hours ago [-]
A conspiracy theory without a shadowy government organization is just a conspiracy.
mindslight 21 hours ago [-]
Fair!
drgo 6 hours ago [-]
There is an endless supply of fools that can be hyped to become the next US president
RajuChacha108 21 hours ago [-]
Frankly EU India and China need to take a tougher stand here or see themselves getting harassed in future.
drak0n1c 21 hours ago [-]
You may be unaware, but the EU, India, and China have also engaged in their own versions of economically-pressured internet presence takedowns of international activists and dissidents they label subversive. The degree differs according to leverage and their constitutional reasoning, but there is no spirit of opposition to this type of policy if that’s what you’re imagining.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Yep. People have had their homes raided in Germany for hosting online content about the Israeli genocide of Palestine. You don't get any warning - the police just show up and take all electronic devices, no exceptions.
bentley 10 hours ago [-]
People have had their homes raided in Germany and electronics seized for calling politicians dicks on Twitter or Facebook.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
That's actually a crime though and everyone knows it's a crime.
suslik 1 hours ago [-]
The fact that it is a crime (if it is, indeed, a fact), only makes it even more fucked up.
xdennis 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Symbiote 22 hours ago [-]
The British case was overturned on appeal. (Crazy that it had to go that far though.)
I can't find much left or right coverage of it, there's so much news coverage in the way.
mindslight 22 hours ago [-]
There is a difference between failing to condemn something and gloating/supporting attacks on liberty simply because one's favored political team is now doing it.
Any western /b/ and /pol/ is or has been a church for an ideology of fascism and pedophilia, furthermore politicians and cops LOVE to blame the platform when someone posts a manifesto and then exit the house to kill people with guns. They tend to spot this pattern because they disrupt grassroots movement just like that: agent provocateurs or controlled places will work to ensure that the status quo will not change no more than what is tolerated.
My limits for free speech are very broad and would certainly tolerate a lot of 8chan, but don't ask me to close my eyes and don't ask me to be sympathetic
whattheheckheck 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah epstein emails showed Christopher Poole met with Jeff the day before he made /pol/ and ghislaine was a mod of many subreddits.
And it probably didnt start with them
otabdeveloper4 22 hours ago [-]
Erm, but what about saying mean hateful words??
That makes them, like, the bad guys, don't you think?!
99742808543 22 hours ago [-]
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busterarm 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dpc050505 1 days ago [-]
Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.
sroussey 24 hours ago [-]
They will only catch the amateurs. But they can pat themselves on the back I guess that did something.
OsrsNeedsf2P 20 hours ago [-]
It does more than catch amateurs, it's a heavy blow against the adoption and usefulness
cyberax 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds better and better!
fchicken 24 hours ago [-]
Poor government has to fight crime the old fashioned way.
Ridiculous.
logicchains 5 hours ago [-]
>It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity.
Not really, unless exchanges don't let you withdraw coins into your own wallet? It's trivial for someone to buy another coin like BTC/ETH then use it to purchase Monero via defi.
phrotoma 3 hours ago [-]
Yep. A minor 10 foot speedbump that has me reaching for my 12 foot ladder.
21 hours ago [-]
jijijijij 22 hours ago [-]
This isn't comparable to the legality issues in particular countries, a comparatively minor threat for FOSS software projects. If the US declares your organization as terrorist, you'll lose banking access globally by leveraging the SWIFT system. The US influence has always been problematic, but this is now blatantly abused for MAGA populism.
All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
They can potentially play a cat and mouse game for a while, if none of the transactions actually say "For Signal" on them
jijijijij 3 hours ago [-]
No. It's an anvil dropped onto the mouse.
In this example, Signal itself and anyone associated with it, could not have any bank accounts at all. There wouldn't be any receiving end for donations. Being on the OFAC list means any bank connected through SWIFT wouldn't allow you as customer. Current funds would be immediately frozen, which by itself would probably cause fatal disruption. The OFAC list is an extreme measure, which is why the recent abuse is such a big deal.
As mentioned elsewhere, read up on the Rote Hilfe case to see how this kinda thing plays out right now. "Antifa Ost", four people beating up (NOT murdering) Neonazis were declared a designated global terror network by the Trump admin in 2025. Those four "global terrorist" were all already in custody, on trial in Germany at the time, hardly a threat. Rote Hilfe lost their bank account, because of weak association through legal defense support. Mind you, Rote Hilfe is a traditional German political institution being only cancelled once before: 1933. And the GLS bank who cancelled their account proactively fearing SWIFT exclusion, would be considered a socialist endeavor by US standards. That's the reach of OFAC.
So, to evade sanctions, Signal would need to maintain internationally ostracized money laundering networks on the scale of global terror financing, or North Korean operations. They are not some hidden service black market, where any hosting is sufficient. Paying AWS millions for large scale, low-latency CDN infrastructure with highly suspicious finances ain't gonna fly. I assume, due to statistic correlation, considering the necessary volumes moved, it's probably simply impossible to pull off.
And of course, Signal's income is in large parts coming from various nation's registered funds, which obviously wouldn't participate in highly illegal financing. Individual donations won't cut it (and also expose any donor to being flagged for terror financing, losing access to their own accounts). Not to mention, money laundering infrastructure isn't free, so only a fraction of donations would make it anyway...
The problem here is also Signal's centralized nature. If it was built for a decentralized, self-hostable backend, where only the code itself has to escape repression, it wouldn't be as vulnerable. However, as with other decentralized projects, we likely wouldn't talk about it as hypothetical heavy loss due to wide-spread adoption and foundation of common privacy.
Signal's whole mission is to enable e2ee at scale, for the average person. OFAC listing would be the end of Signal and any similar project.
matheusmoreira 20 hours ago [-]
It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws, we make technology that gets around the laws. Governments must increase their tyranny just to maintain the same level of control they had before. The result is either an uncontrollable population, or a totalitarian state.
I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate some crime because fully policing them would require crossing serious lines. It's becoming increasingly clear though that governments have no limits. There is no cost they are unwilling to pay in the name of maintaining their own power.
mindslight 19 hours ago [-]
I'd say the more salient dynamic is mass communication increasing the power of propaganda (now individually tailored!) making it so people are increasingly tolerant those lines being crossed. People voted for this, right? There are legitimate understandable gripes underlying Trumpism. Propaganda is able to use that frustration as raw input, and twist it to convince people to support things that directly make their gripes worse! How much did we hear about inflation and the price of eggs, and yet forty trillion dollars more in the hole and now they cheer for it.
Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.
logological 23 hours ago [-]
This is hardly unprecedented -- in fact, it looks like the US government has learned a thing or two from the anti-spam community. If you actually want to block e-mail or newsgroup spam at its source, you don't complain to the spammer themselves, but rather to their mail/news provider, and if that doesn't work, you escalate the issue to the upstream provider, the hosting company for the spammer's website, the registrar for the spammer's domain names, and so on. This is time-consuming but is sometimes effective. (Of course, dedicated spammers may then switch providers, or start employing distributed botnets of zombified residential devices, but knocking out their infrastructure at least temporarily does disrupt their operations for a time and drives up their cost of business to the point where they may reduce or even cease their activity.)
LastTrain 21 hours ago [-]
The anti-spam community can’t throw you in jail or fine you.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
It can ban you from the internet though. The whole internet, all of it, no joke. I've been blocked by Cloudflare and Cloudfront several times today, and it's not because of spam, it's because I'm not identifiable through my IP address and therefore offer no advertising value.
colechristensen 23 hours ago [-]
There is a balance that needs to be struck between freedoms and rule of law and it's quite rare to be able to actually have discussions about how to strike that balance because most folks willing to discuss have a simplistic but vaguely absolute position favoring one extreme or another and can never come to the point of deciding of where to draw the lines of enough freedom or enough control.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
If you have real operational security concerns, your provider shouldn't know anything about you; should in fact have bilateral shielding between themselves and you to prevent either counterparty from learning stuff. That's how Signal works.
AnonC 23 hours ago [-]
But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what you mean by all this. Obviously your phone number is tied to your Signal account and Signal knows that linkage at all times - no special action is necessary for them to know it. Signal does not provide anonymity beyond what a phone number provides, and isn't designed to.
Signal's design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil" which makes it good for the average user. If you actually want Session or SimpleX, which sacrifice usability for even more privacy, then you know where to find those services.
tptacek 23 hours ago [-]
There's all sorts of things any service provider could do to sleuth out who its users are. The implication of this OFAC determination is that A/I didn't need to sleuth anything out; they are accused of knowingly and deliberately assisting the PKK.
impossiblefork 19 hours ago [-]
Signal will allow traffic analysis. You send the message to signal, if they wish they can write down to whom they send it on.
It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.
TheqO 7 hours ago [-]
I noticed that more are using Session now and not Signal (no phone number or email required)
Ah, blockchain-based. Maybe it's fine. I prefer my idea with dummy messages and no ledgers or anything.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
They don't have to do that because accounts are associated one-to-one with phone numbers.
impossiblefork 7 hours ago [-]
I don't understand your comment.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Signal doesn't need traffic analysis because it knows the phone numbers of who is communicating.
tptacek 18 hours ago [-]
Again: in every system there's always some kind of sleuthing you could do to attempt to identify a user. That's not the legal standard. The complaint against A/I is that they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK.
impossiblefork 16 hours ago [-]
No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.
Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.
If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.
The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.
A1kmm 8 hours ago [-]
> No. With dummy messages you are guaranteed that traffic analysis will not be possible.
I don't think that's true.
There are two possibilities: If you're proposing that dummy messages are in addition to normal messages, then dummy messages add noise to the signal, but over a long enough time, for known noise distribution, it is possible for the signal to be statistically significant. That depends on there being enough signal, but then things depend on signal traffic patterns, there are no guarantees.
The second possible design is that the node-to-node communication volumes for any pair of nodes is truly independent of the signal - i.e. the statistical model decides how much traffic flows from a node to another node, and that fixed amount of flow is either used for signal or for noise, and if there is more signal, it's dropped or waits. Encryption makes it impossible to distinguish signal from noise without the key known between the pair of nodes. That is secure against a passive adversary who doesn't participate in the network. However, if network users are anonymous and mutually untrusting, then the adversary can use active methods without much risk (i.e. lots of users and nodes can actually be the adversary). Every packet/message delayed or dropped also allows inference about network traffic by other users.
These methods can harden a network and make analysis harder, but they don't guarantee it is not possible.
impossiblefork 6 hours ago [-]
No, you always send a dummy message the appointed time.
If you have a real message, or a network maintenance message, that substitutes for a dummy message. You never send messages other than at the appointed time.
Delayed or dropped messages won't matter, since you only send a message at the appointed time. So the network is literally indistinguishable from one where you have sent no messages to all participants and to even someone with complete control of the network.
mafuy 6 hours ago [-]
Do messages have a visible receiver address of any kind? In that case, you're out of luck. The only way to do make this statistically sound would involve an insane amount of messages, rendering it impossible.
tptacek 15 hours ago [-]
I don't have an opinion about the PKK. My broad take is: if Europe doesn't care, there's no reason for the US to be leading a sanctions effort. I'm confident like everybody else that this is largely pretextual.
All I care about is the claim that if they can do this to A/I they'll come for Signal next. That doesn't follow.
impossiblefork 8 hours ago [-]
The issue is complicated.
Many EU governments care, because Turkey cares, but the problem is that Turkey's position that they're terrorists is legally iffy, so a lot of European courts disagree, and this creates a schizophrenic situation where politicians hold that they're terrorist and will claim that it's the government position, while the actual government position in the courts is that they mostly aren't and that it's a case-by-case question.
tptacek 15 minutes ago [-]
I mean, the PKK definitely was a terrorist organization!
VorpalWay 5 hours ago [-]
A problem with sending dummy messages on something like Signal, is that waking up phones unnecessarily is really bad for battery life. It also doesn't work for the voice/video call feature, since that needs to be realtime.
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
Impossible for a public thing though, noblogs.org will always be traceable to where noblogs.org is hosted because that's how the packets get there.
You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.
tptacek 23 hours ago [-]
Right, I'm only moved to comment by the implications being drawn on this thread that Signal and WhatsApp are next. Different fact patterns and different legal standards.
inigyou 18 hours ago [-]
Signal and WhatsApp are already required to give your communications to the government.
tptacek 18 hours ago [-]
Signal and WhatsApp don't have the plaintext of your communications to begin with.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Then they're breaking the law
tptacek 16 minutes ago [-]
Obviously they are not.
__MatrixMan__ 14 hours ago [-]
Well, a fast broadcast at least. Of you're willing to wait for a pocket switched network to spread the signal, you can hide the source pretty well.
jijijijij 23 hours ago [-]
This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.
Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..
Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.
tptacek 22 hours ago [-]
This OFAC action isn't based on "antifa", though the press release predictably takes shots at it. It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
qahst1 21 hours ago [-]
PKK is the pretext, there is no evidence.
The US does not give a damn about PKK. They used the Kurdish sister organizations in Syria and Iran. They condemn PKK because Erdogan wants it.
The US would have zero issues with a Kurdish state comprising parts of Turkey and Iran that splinters the region even more.
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
I don't think US cares about the PKK either, but that's not my point.
jijijijij 21 hours ago [-]
> It's based on three designated foreign terrorist organizations, notably the PKK.
In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.
The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.
Incidentally, funny how the NSU isn't on that list, hm?
tptacek 20 hours ago [-]
It's neither an explanation nor a tautology; it's an element of US law.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
It was clearly written as an explanation. The alternative is that you didn't intend for the words you wrote to have any meaning, in which case why did you write them?
jijijijij 20 hours ago [-]
So if those prior sentences or yours are not related, your argument is part wrong, part irrelevant/nonsensical. Good talk.
redsocksfan45 22 hours ago [-]
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fnordpiglet 17 hours ago [-]
The picture everyone is missing is voting in November is how this gets resolved. The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy. Theres no reason to put up with this, the other side of a 70% electorate opposition is prison for the lawless incumbent
hightrix 17 hours ago [-]
> The only way radical authoritarians survive on 30% approval ratings is apathy.
And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.
I agree with you in that barring the above, there is no logical reason a vast majority of all elections should lean away from MAGA/GOP considering the state of the country.
veeti 16 hours ago [-]
Even if Barack Obama himself was re-elected and the Democrats gained a 102% supermajority, does anybody seriously believe this sanction in particular would be reversed?
fnordpiglet 39 minutes ago [-]
I expect it will be by the courts regardless and there will be a massive federal register journal based rollback of the Trump administration and a declaration that all regulation reverts to 2024 by default.
aorloff 15 hours ago [-]
If the Dems get the House and Senate, expect a lot of reversals.
I would imagine we might even have some "settlements" with the "DOJ" before the end of Trumps term
hardbass 6 hours ago [-]
There is no resolving this until at least the maga generation dies off.
t-3 5 hours ago [-]
A 30% approval rating means ~75-80% of Trump's base is still fully behind him. A two-party system will only very rarely produce figures with over 50% approval, because roughly half of voters disapprove on GP. The apathy of the 40-50% who don't vote is also a product of a system that only allows for two choices and not something to blame the apathetic for. It really makes no difference whether they vote or not, because there are only two choices and neither represents them.
cindyllm 16 hours ago [-]
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throwaway8980 17 hours ago [-]
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dlahoda 3 hours ago [-]
Are not they sanctioned because of Free Palestine label?
Any sanctioned org for just being p2p/crypto so far?
Seems you misdirect reasons.
wewro 1 hours ago [-]
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forshaper 23 hours ago [-]
In a much lighter but similar move, Suno is now associating exporting generated music with the behavior of "bad actors."
7 hours ago [-]
fchicken 24 hours ago [-]
It's just incredible how spiteful the federal government is towards its constituency
GolfPopper 24 hours ago [-]
Not really. It's not like they're going after actual terrorists.
dadjoker 20 hours ago [-]
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saidnooneever 9 hours ago [-]
a lot of fools beleive that if they facilitate the means somehow they will be free to do so.
Your rights do not matter.
Laws do not matter.
If your technology is used by someone for bad, then someone trying to prevent that bad will some day come knocking. Law or not. Rights or not.
The only thing you can thus do is protect yourself. If you get taken out, that is you relying on your Rights and Laws. They dont exist and wont protect you.
kraken_cult 1 days ago [-]
Isn't it just as likely they are using facebook, instagram, and tiktok?
quickthrowman 24 hours ago [-]
I checked for an official PKK YouTube channel. I found that they don’t have one as they’re a designated foreign terrorist organization* and Google complies with that designation by not allowing them an official presence. Unsure about the others but I doubt any of those companies would allow an official account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.
* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
beej71 1 days ago [-]
And political neutrality isn't going to save anyone. Political alignment with the US government is what they're after.
bjourne 1 days ago [-]
Are we going after free speech now?
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project ruled that knowingly providing material support to designated terrorist organizations is not protected by the first amendment. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1
But I'm curious about your take on this. How would you argue the first amendment protects this?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
So it's trivial that if you are the government and you want to arrest someone for speech, you first call them a terrorist organisation and then you can arrest them for speech? Ridiculous.
hammock 23 hours ago [-]
I don’t know much about this, but are you considering “material support or resources” the same thing as speech?
inigyou 13 hours ago [-]
The government is saying that hosting someone's speech is material support, so yes, they are.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
Where does it say that?
ModernMech 24 hours ago [-]
Not only that, you can disappear them to a remote location and torture them forever without charging them for any crime whatsoever.
bjourne 22 hours ago [-]
I'm uninterested in bot answers. You claimed label X applies so consequence Y applies.
Useless.
Why is providing people with the means to express themselves to an audience wrong? Please think for yourself; don't resort to labels.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
The USA has never had free speech. There's not one time in its history when the government wasn't trying to force people it disagreed with to shut up.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Of course, Hacker News evidently can't fathom this basic truth.
stillpointlab 17 hours ago [-]
I believe there is a double standard here compared to section 230 of the communications act.
Platforms can't be held liable for speech on their platforms for a reason. For full disclosure: I feel ambivalent about that.
I don't know of an equivalent legal protection for I2P-like infrastructure.
15 hours ago [-]
applfanboysbgon 17 hours ago [-]
You feel ambivalent about eg. HN not being held liable for some random user signing up and posting, say, a terroristic threat on it? You realise that if platforms/HN were legally punished for that, no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
stillpointlab 16 hours ago [-]
You are mostly right about my ambivalence (re: liability) but wrong about the conclusion.
> no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
That does not follow. Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision. For example, a site might choose not to have anonymization and then liability passes through a KYC chain. If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public. I think this probably already happens in large extent where images are scanned to avoid bad things appearing on public sites and there is already liability around that.
I know that isn't a popular position. It would change the entire character of the Internet. And it couldn't just be thrust upon people since the current contract is one of promised anonymity (even if that is probably not true wrt state actors).
Terr_ 15 hours ago [-]
> Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision.
To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:
1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.
2. Most sites would not have any incentive to do it either, since knowing the original author's identity would not shield them from liability. In some cases it would increase their liability instead!
> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.
No, for most sites the opposite would occur.
One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does not create involvement and liability for the message. It means you can block things without becoming a sorta-co-author of the things that pass the filter.
Repeal that, and sites will be forced into either (A) basically no moderation so no liability or (B) blocking 99% and letting through the safest 1% they're willing to be liable for.
What doesn't follow? Who said we should repeal section 230? Or to do so without replacing it?
Not me, I said I was ambivalent about it; don't put words in my mouth. My words were: "there would have to be some similar provision [to KYC]". Similar, not the same. Not nothing.
Everything else sounds like you imagining/speculating about what some future provision would look like. And your imagined fears don't play into my ambivalence.
Terr_ 15 hours ago [-]
Here's my paraphrased view of the comment chain:
1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."
2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be ambivalent about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."
3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."
5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."
6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about that happening."
7. [Error: Recursion detected]
In other words, the thread was was steered into "what if Section 230 went away" (at #2) and your reply looks as if you recognized that and proceeded to build on it.
15 hours ago [-]
12 hours ago [-]
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woodpanel 8 hours ago [-]
Why are you leaving out the important details:
You can't as an ISP prevent malicious actors from using your service, but you do can assist the government - in the case of the recent attacks on Berlins electricity that caused a fatality the German - to hand over the data to help assist law enforcement.
If US state-department's claims [1] are true, did noblogs.org do so – help German authorities track Terrorists or did it cover for them?
Because their statement does say nothing about the claims made by the state department.
I2P don't ideologically vet their users nor does Signal. A/I Collective does. That's kind of the pointe of all this.
jmyeet 23 hours ago [-]
Have we forgotten Megaupload? Napster? Limewire? BitTorrent?
Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.
This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.
hereme888 20 hours ago [-]
What sort of logic is this? I use I2P and no one sanctioned me or labeled me a terrorist.
cogman10 18 hours ago [-]
I'd look at the Prairieland Detention Center Case to understand how broadly and aggressively this government is using "terrorism" to go after political opponents.
Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years in prison for moving a box of magazines related to the protest. He wasn't even at the actual protest.
Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
It's very much not far fetched that you as an I2P node could get hit with a terrorism charge if some political enemy ends up using your node. That's on the same level of moving pamphlets for a protest.
Amezarak 17 hours ago [-]
> Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.
> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.
Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.
Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.
cogman10 11 hours ago [-]
> and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest."
He did not, he shot at an officer and missed. He was also the only one of the protestors that shot.
Amezarak 5 hours ago [-]
You dispute that the officer was shot in the neck?
cogman10 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, because no evidence of the injury was presented at trial other than the officer's testimony.
If he was shot in the neck, why didn't the prosecution show a photo of the wound? Why are his neck and shoulder injuries a privacy concern?
What they proved is that shots were fired and that the officer involved was fine and walking around the scene after the shooting. When he said "I'm hit" another officer checked on video and said "your good your good your good".
I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.
dev1ycan 14 hours ago [-]
Signal is a honeypot
DaSHacka 6 hours ago [-]
So true, please use random no-name services with unvetted E2EE crypto or mainstream services with none instead.
Much better than Signal, the platform of choice for politicians, feds, and security researchers for their personal and private communications.
Fnoord 5 hours ago [-]
Haha, no, EncroChat and Anom were. The official clients (Android and iOS) which use it contain known vulnerabilities.
TheqO 7 hours ago [-]
I think you have to assume any USA/5 eyes based org is compromised.
But only NSA/CIA level access and local law enforcement or politicians. So unless you are a terrorist or high level threat it wouldn't be accessed.
otterley 21 hours ago [-]
They're not being targeted for terrorist activity per se; they're being targeted for providing material assistance to terrorists.
Per the Treasury Department:
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
"Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism." https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
Per the State Department: "The A/I Collective provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. Many of these groups have relied on the A/I Collective’s digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiqués by U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure, along with instructions for building improvised explosive and incendiary devices – all routed through a network of foreign servers intended to conceal criminal activity from law enforcement." They then go on to list the specifics. (https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...)
iamnothere 12 hours ago [-]
What about software projects (such as anonymous messengers) with political stances, who state the kinds of people their software is intended to help? Is that material assistance?
How is Signal not providing material assistance if someone alerts them that “terrorists” are now using their platform?
Sanctioning providers who host political groups, even if it’s extreme politics, is something new. It’s reminiscent of the Bush admin going after Indymedia, which was a huge violation of free speech and was obviously politically targeted. It’s extra ridiculous because we fund and supply the PKK (via their YPG affiliates), which makes this look like a fig leaf for the real goal of disrupting left politics. I don’t like the radical left, but I don’t think this is constitutionally allowed.
I feel like we need some bold lines drawn around this to make sure this power doesn’t get misused.
otterley 11 hours ago [-]
It’s all about mens rea. The law distinguishes between people who provide services to anyone, and people who intentionally market their service to criminals, even under coded language. In this case the provider didn’t just allegedly market themselves to them; they also actually excluded others.
iamnothere 10 hours ago [-]
Fair, I guess, although again I’m uncomfortable with how the PKK link appears to be used as an excuse for political suppression. I think in cases like this, it would be best to order the provider to discontinue services to the specific entity in question before resorting to sanctions, since they provided services to other political groups that were not listed as “terrorists”. I’m not sure if we have any information about whether this happened or not.
insane_dreamer 22 hours ago [-]
I agree that ultimately they'll try to target Signal. Meredith (Whittaker) has a tough job on her hands. Much admiration.
shevy-java 23 hours ago [-]
> targeting of infrastructure providers as “terrorists” is unprecedented
It is not unprecedented though. The US military empire always was supported
by the business empire and corruption empire. Trump and his BigBro Epstein
party-goers just make it much more obvious. In reality the terrorists are in
the US government primarily.
giov4 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
99742808543 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
deaux 1 days ago [-]
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US have all deemed a terrorist organization for over 20 years, then of course the US should sanction them and they have no moral ground to stand on.
No moral ground to stand on? Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
This collective of course has much more of a moral ground to stand on than indeed Amazon.
Marha01 1 days ago [-]
> Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
Strictly speaking, unintended collateral damage of civilians in a war does not fulfill the definition of terrorism. The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel. Terrorism is deliberate attack on civilians to achieve a political goal.
r721 1 days ago [-]
>The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.
Bloomberg piece on this topic:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
Strictly speaking, no. If you're going to play semantics, you first need to define how "unintended" is "unintended". If I drive down the highway at 200mph and get someone killed, is this unintentional? Now what if I do so in a crowded street? If I'm sending a missile at a country, how much effort do I need to put into research to be able to say it was "collateral" damage? If I aim them completely randomly, then what's the verdict?
If you're going to go down the semantics route, every word needs proper inspection. You're focusing on only one of them, "terrorism".
Luckily though, we don't need to; the US does more than enough intentional extrajudicial executions of civilians on its own. Even just considering one particular area where it does them, and then only the ones we know about, we're at about 227 civilian executions in just the last few years [0].
Oh okay, how about the deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure?
I love how governments (in the west) are absolutely incapable of campaigns of terror.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
What about intended collateral damage?
zmgsabst 24 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it was intended.
I think that when you’re bombing thousands of targets, a 0.1-1% targeting error rate leads to dozens of unintended collateral hits (and thousands of civilians dead) — and is among the many reasons wars are horrific.
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
What if someone tells you it's an elementary school and you ignore them?
ModernMech 24 hours ago [-]
They hit the correct target. It's that although they could have, they didn’t check to see if it was a school first.
zmgsabst 17 hours ago [-]
They did — in the targeting database which wasn’t correctly updated with the new analysis.
That’s exactly the sort of bureaucratic mistake which gets exposed via wartime mishaps.
georgemcbay 24 hours ago [-]
> The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel.
A mistake in a completely unjust war.
And what about the fishing boats we are bombing in the Caribbean and the Pacific? Not even the pretense of a legitimate war in that situation.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.
careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go. i guarantee more terrorism-related content is discussed via those providers than a/i.
we should probably also go after internet service providers, too. maybe the companies that make the fiber optics?
(has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
ktm5j 1 days ago [-]
All the providers you mention here work with the US government in situations where their platforms are being used by terrorist organizations. It sounds like the a/i folks are specifically offering free services to a militant group, so that's why they're being sanctioned. I don't think your argument flies.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
if the argument is harm reduction and reducing the overall incidence of terrorism, my argument flies.
ktm5j 1 days ago [-]
Removing all the oxygen from our atmosphere would kill 100% of terrorists, that's a good strategy too right?
1 days ago [-]
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
indeed, that would be a very effective way to reduce terrorism to 0.
ktm5j 23 hours ago [-]
My point is, most people are looking for strategies that actually make sense. Shutting down Google to stop terrorism, even when Google is already cooperating with the US government, makes no sense.
cholantesh 20 hours ago [-]
And if the terrorist group that provides the impetus for the sanction is practically nonexistent, it's entirely sensical?
ktm5j 19 hours ago [-]
They aren't specifically supporting terrorism, and in fact are cooperating with the US to stop terrorist groups. This isn't an ends justifies the means situation, as I was trying to illustrate with the oxygen/atmosphere metaphor.
22 hours ago [-]
moron129 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.
>careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go.
No, because they actively respond to removal request. Open by default, supporting request for removal.
The difference comes in when you are open by default and tell the US to fuck off when they ask you to stop supporting terror groups.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>To be explicitly clear, a "neutral infrastructure provider" does not describe A/I so your scenario is hypothetical.
i am replying specifically to your comments about neutral providers (that's why i quoted the part of your comment that i did)
>No, because they actively respond to removal request.
there is still orders of magnitude more conversations going through the providers i mentioned, related to terrorism/csam/etc., which is simply not reported or not known. right now, meta is facilitating significantly more terrorism than a/i.
in any case, this isn't really about terrorism. they've just overused the child-safety angle lately, and needed to drum up some anti-privacy/anti-encryption using the terrorism card.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>So no one knows about these conversations but you know there are orders of magnitude more? Walk me through that.
sure. whatsapp is used by literal billions of people. add in a few more billion people through facebook, instagram, gmail, outlook, amazon.
would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations? or can you extrapolate from the billions of users? now make a guess how many people a/i has facilitated. a few thousand? a hundred thousand?
>Even if that were true how would that change anything? They still comply with the US government and their mission statement isn't to empower, protect, support political extremists.
because it demonstrates that the goal is not to curtail terrorism.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
>would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations?
yes
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
okay, great. we can do this together.
lets start with this: how many terrorists do you think a/i has helped?
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Wait, is this the right analysis? WhatsApp doesn't enter into any kind of agreement with organizations using it about their political alignment or objectives. The allegation (I have no idea how valid it is) is that A/I does.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
upthread, nonethewiser said "They aren't some neutral infrastructure provider. __And even if they were that doesn't mean the US shouldn't sanction them for supporting terrorism.__"
emphasis mine. my assertion is that whatsapp, a neutral provider, facilitates more terrorists than a/i. i.e., the US should consider sanctioning them, if we are to follow nonethewiser's recommendation.
(to be clear, i'm on the pro-privacy, pro-encryption side, and don't actually think the US should be sanctioning whatsapp)
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Right, I get that. I'm also not taking a position on this (in particular, the PKK seems like a Europe problem, not a US problem, and if Europe doesn't care I don't see why we should.)
But the analysis isn't based on "which service enables more terrorists". By that logic, forget WhatsApp, forget Signal; Google Mail probably runs the table in absolute numbers. But all three of those services assist terrorists without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
The claim is that A/I can't say the same thing.
john_strinlai 24 hours ago [-]
from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479169 on, i was talking about the neutral providers and the claim that neutral providers should also be subject to sanctions.
>without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
i think we agree that this is an implicit requirement of being considered a neutral provider.
so, to claim neutral providers should be subject to sanctions implies that a provider who does not know or purposefully facilitate terrorists should still be subject to sanctions (gmail, whatsapp, signal, amazon, etc.)
then we got sidetracked by me being asked how can i possibly know that meta/google/etc. facilitate more terrorists than a/i. which i, and seemingly you, agree is a pretty obvious answer given the scale of the organizations. and i was asked to "walk them through that".
jayGlow 1 days ago [-]
i would agree there as long as the providers are actually neutral they should be free from culpability. we shouldn't encourage providers to restrict who they serve because of potential liability, that's giving them way to much power.
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
Isn't forcing a provider to do business with everyone who asks just as bad? You're saying noblogs should be compelled to host nazi blogs. (Actual Nazis, not a euphemism. People who want Jews to be gassed.) You're also saying wedding cake bakers should be compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings.
jayGlow 12 hours ago [-]
A service can't be refused for reasons like religion or race, a power company cannot refuse to serve a customer because they're black or Muslim. If a company is acting as a platform or provider they should serve customers regardless of their views and this should give them protection for being liable for their customers actions.
Do you think providers should be allowed to refuse service because they don't like certain customers views?
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
It's a good question. If someone comes on my forum and posts "I strongly believe that all Jews should be immediately gassed" am I allowed to ban him or am I obligated to provide equal service?
jayGlow 2 hours ago [-]
I think this comes down to whether you're a platform or a publisher, if you're a provider you're not responsible for what your usera do with your service, if you only allow selective use then you're implicitly endorsing whatever the users you allow do.
MrWiffles 1 days ago [-]
> (has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
Or for that matter, where they get their air?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…
I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.
Gotta reign this insanity in.
dirasieb 24 hours ago [-]
except they aren't neutral, which is the whole point
john_strinlai 23 hours ago [-]
did you read the part where nonethewiser said "And even if they were [neutral] that doesn't mean the US shouldn't
sanction them for supporting terrorism."?
the double-negative might be confusing, so we can reword it to: "And even if they were neutral, the US should sanction them for supporting terrorism"
that's the part i quoted and my comment is about.
andretti1977 1 days ago [-]
So since The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will US sanction him too?
Or since ONU has declared illegal the occupation of territory in West Bank, will US sanction Israel?
Or will the United States only sanction those who simply see things differently from them?
mossTechnician 1 days ago [-]
> If they choose to support the PKK
Did they? There's a lot of implication with that "if", and I saw someone else point out (albeit rudely) that anything that may have supported them was taken down.
lukewarm707 1 days ago [-]
we should be careful not to assume that the eu, uk and us set a good moral standard to follow.
you might ask who is right; the groups like google providing services to the us military, or the groups providing services to those opposing the us military.
foul 1 days ago [-]
It's bullshit made up by Shideler [0], and it's not even the PKK directly either that A/I supported, but some blog that reposts communiqués.
We'll see if the Bush- and Obama-style thoughtcrime back in action will lull USA citizens and make them forget the gas price.
> Their own manifesto says they use their limited resources to support groups they align with.
Woah, with radical statements like that, we might have to go after mutual aid groups, PACs, and churches.
r3trohack3r 1 days ago [-]
I mean, I think it entirely depends on the nature of the groups they support?
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
You miss the point. It establishes they aren't neutral. Of course it's not necessarily bad to support things you agree with.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Amazon also only supports groups it aligns with.
Ar-Curunir 1 days ago [-]
Morality != legality. these anarchists have a much better moral grounding than most US tech companies which gladly support US military destruction.
fn-mote 1 days ago [-]
Cherry picking bad one organization doesn’t make me feel any better about this over-broad order.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
foul 1 days ago [-]
Yeah you're not, what you've done is basing your arguments on a false premise.
Noaidi 1 days ago [-]
> If they choose to support the PKK, which the EU, UK, and US
But they are not choosing to support the PKK.
They accuse it of being “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”
The far left is a terrorist group? Where are all these violent "antifa cells"?
They labeled this groups as a terrorist organization so they could claim that anyone protesting the fascist Trump regime will easily be labeled terrorists and thrown in jail without a trial.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
Can you articulate this more? Are you saying the first amendment gives A/I a constitutional right not to be sanctioned?
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
Yes, we are talking about a communications service, one specifically focusing on political speech.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Email, chat, websites, blogs - these are all speech! A/I's overt political statement (that you are indicting them for) points to their primary interest being to facilitate political speech - a type of speech with some of the strongest protections (that whole "assemble ... and petition the Government" thing)
Beyond that, they're presumably a neutral conduit like every other service provider. If some users of their services are communicating to coordinate crimes, then unless A/I is getting directly involved in those conversations (with the government producing hard evidence of this), it's the exact same dynamic as every other email/hosting provider.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
There is the absolutely perfect Supreme Court case that ruled against your theory.
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
alexgieg 24 hours ago [-]
US courts have made many decisions that go against the US Constitution. This is an example. Notice the US Constitution says Congress cannot do that, period. And it doesn't limit that only to laws concerning US citizens, differently from other articles and amendments that explicitly say this is for citizens only, and that for non-citizens. And yet, the many SCOTUS incarnations look at that and go "naaah!" because reasons.
That's why the US Constitution Americans know is a few pages long, while the one actual US judges, lawyers etc. use is a massive 3,000 pages long volume. That's what it takes to rhetorically weasel oneself away from most of what those few initial pages do say.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
I didn't claim that there was no basis in the legal system for these draconian actions. Clearly there must be, or they wouldn't be happening, right? Positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).
From a normative what ought perspective, a rationalization from an institution that has been slowly chipping away at our Constitutional rights is not particularly compelling. "Bad facts make bad law" is a saying for a reason. You're certainly not the first to casually disregard the freedom of speech!
So make no mistake, this action here is still fundamentally about speech - regardless of the routine legal hack of focusing on the concrete embodiment of said speech to sidestep a restriction on policing the speech itself. A/I is providing a platform for speech to these other groups, which seems eminently reasonable to me. Accepting the government's arguments here would imply accepting that it's also illegal to read what a terrorist group has written, as you would be giving them "material support" by helping their writings reach you by transiting your network and processing them with your computing device.
Which is why I said "weak men create hard times". It is difficult work to look at people you disagree with and acknowledge they too have rights, especially in the face of the powerful pushing rationalizations otherwise. But it's necessary work, lest the next time political winds shift you find yourself staring down the business ends of same exact pointy sticks that you had been cheering on.
mdp2021 23 hours ago [-]
> Only months after Paranoia [their first server] went online, the G8 came to Genoa. Many A/I participants were also involved with Indymedia Italy. They helped construct the movement’s media center, laying cables, configuring servers and building workstations through which protesters could report what was happening across the city. What followed was historic: enormous demonstrations, the police killing of Carlo Giuliani, indiscriminate beatings in the streets, torture and abuse inside the Bolzaneto barracks and the nighttime raid on the Diaz school. Official narratives competed with photographs, recordings and firsthand testimony transmitted through independent infrastructure. Genoa became one of the earliest major demonstrations to be documented from nearly every direction by its participants rather than exclusively through institutional media.
Very curious. My latest submission is the video of Larry Ellison with the "The police will be on their best behavior[,] Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on". (It was triggered by a piece on TheOnion.)
Turns out, other people had been recording events, so that a covering narrative may not prevail over the truth.
Avicebron 1 days ago [-]
I clicked around a bit, read the manifesto, I still have no idea what these people do. I guess they claim to have been around for a while, but a bunch of the links don't work and the manifesto has definitely been updated to reflect 2026 opinions.
What is this?
NoboruWataya 1 days ago [-]
The "About" page seems fairly clear:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.
culi 22 hours ago [-]
The very first sentence on their about page says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
It also says their manifesto was written in 2002.
You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
i thought the page says it pretty clearly.
they are a group of people providing services to activists. services include email, web hosting, chat, and other anonymity services. (see https://www.inventati.org/services/)
0974280943 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
doginasuit 16 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, the people I have known personally who talk like this don't actually do very much except talk like this. Then again, they have never been sanctioned by a government.
inigyou 51 minutes ago [-]
These guys provide web hosting and stuff.
If you knew people who actually did actions, they'd be right in not telling you about their actions until they really really trusted you to defend them with your life. Loose lips sink ships when you're going against a government.
pietervdvn 1 days ago [-]
They host blogs and email used by many activists.
culi 19 hours ago [-]
including the noblogs site which is used by many anarchist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, etc groups
tremeouh0 24 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mzhaase 9 hours ago [-]
They're just anti-capitalist nerds, example, they host Linux user groups in a couple cities, collect computers for schools etc.
jpcfl 1 days ago [-]
It is intentionally vague. From the State Dept:
> The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
KPGv2 23 hours ago [-]
I don't trust the US State Department to tell the truth. At this point, it's like citing a Wikipedia edited entirely by bad faith actors.
baobabKoodaa 19 hours ago [-]
In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly: https://www.inventati.org/about
culi 19 hours ago [-]
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
I don't see anything wrong with that. They make 0 money from this. It's 100% run by volunteers. They don't support any orgs that could afford to do it themselves.
It's like if a group of you and your friends got together and gave tech support to any orgs that care about something you're passionate about (e.g. ending FPTP voting)
baobabKoodaa 18 hours ago [-]
> I don't see anything wrong with that.
Did I say there was something wrong with that? No. Let me repeat what I said: "In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly". Do you disagree with this statement?
inigyou 49 minutes ago [-]
"radical left" is not an accurate recitation of "anti-racist, anti-sexist"
Arainach 16 hours ago [-]
Opposing fascism and racism is not "radical left". It's centrism.
The State Department's words are not A/I's.
jpcfl 11 hours ago [-]
Antifa is not centrist
inigyou 49 minutes ago [-]
Is antifa in the room with us? Who is he?
If opposition to fascism isn't centrism then what is?
mlindner 13 hours ago [-]
Being against facism and racism is centrism, being part of an "anti-fascist" or "anti-racist" group is radical left. If you're part of a "group" that has stated goals of pushing something that is already a norm then its pretty clear what what you're doing is not pushing for what is already the norm as if it was the norm you wouldn't need to push for it.
strbean 8 hours ago [-]
Checks notes
Okay, so the chamber of commerce is a radical organisation, got it.
baobabKoodaa 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
baobabKoodaa 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
culi 15 hours ago [-]
No of course I don't. The State Department is alleging terrorism. In their own words they are alleging anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-war, anti-fascism, etc.
How could you possibly equate those?
baobabKoodaa 9 hours ago [-]
I have never equated those.
Arainach 9 hours ago [-]
> is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly
Declaring that the State Department's language is "accurately reciting" is equating.
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
I suspect they have some "not mainstream" political views; although I think understanding what these views are requires more in-depth reading of the blogs that they host.
jmalicki 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that says pretty much nothing about what they do. It reads like an enterprise tech company webpage saying "we provide solutions to help transform your company into the digital age".
culi 19 hours ago [-]
Will you just click the link? It's like 2 paragraphs and the very first sentence says they "provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements"
How much more specific can you get?
mdp2021 23 hours ago [-]
Solutions to help individuals live through the digital age. Very different - for-profit vs for-survival (etc.).
mdp2021 24 hours ago [-]
> some "not mainstream" political views
I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.
culi 18 hours ago [-]
Anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-militarism?
Good?
mdp2021 16 hours ago [-]
> Good?
That will depend on what the bearers will want to mean with it, as usual.
culi 19 hours ago [-]
> "not mainstream" political views
Yeah we should ban any non-mainstream political views and designate them as terrorist
dudefeliciano 23 hours ago [-]
It’s a sad day when antifascism is considered not mainstream
inigyou 48 minutes ago [-]
Fascism is mainstream so it makes sense that its opposite is not.
mechanicalpulse 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe a honeypot?
inigyou 47 minutes ago [-]
If it was a honeypot it wouldn't be a sanctioned terrorist organisation.
johnnyApplePRNG 19 hours ago [-]
Most likely a honeypot.
viccis 23 hours ago [-]
The US govt is trying to brand "antifascism" as a terrorist ideology. They host antifa stuff.
Antifa isn't an organisation at all. It's a loosely defined ideology / set of tactics that leftist movements (everything from black block kids to local democratically organised spaces) sometimes use or follow.
pyth0 21 hours ago [-]
Antifa is not one organization, that's ridiculous. It would be like claiming that "Anarchists" are a terrorist organization.
includenotfound 19 hours ago [-]
Feel free to send the White House a letter complaining. I did not write the big "ORGANIZATION" in the title of that EO. Or is it just bike shedding?
SauciestGNU 18 hours ago [-]
The objection is the administration is inventing a group wholesale in order to designate those who oppose their policies as terrorists. The executive order can say whatever, that doesn't make it factual.
feshbach 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
henearkr 16 hours ago [-]
Ridiculous. I am anti fascist, and I have never heard of any of what you are talking about.
I oppose fascism.
That does not magically infuse into my brain mysterious connections to groups of people, nor instantaneous knowledge and mastery of tactics from nazi groups...
That would be actually kind of cool, but no, sorry to disappoint you.
feshbach 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fatata123 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wildrhythms 56 minutes ago [-]
The United States classified Nelson Mandela a terrorist until 2008.
logseman 20 hours ago [-]
You link to that press release like it means something more than changing a lake's name by fiat.
pezezin 5 hours ago [-]
Antifa is as much of an organization as Anonymous.
tartoran 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, yeah, soon any opposition to Trump or Israel is deemed terrorist...
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
It's not soon, it's literally right now.
napolux 1 days ago [-]
Autistici/Inventati is an Italian collective, active since around 2001, that runs free digital services for activists, grassroots groups and anyone who wants to communicate without being profiled.
It provides email accounts, mailing lists, blogs, websites, chat and VPN access.
flumpcakes 1 days ago [-]
Is it truly anyone, or only anyone that politically aligns with them?
culi 22 hours ago [-]
Anyone that politically aligns with them. They say that explicitly:
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
They don't receive any money for this. It's 100% volunteer services.
p-e-w 18 hours ago [-]
Then they are an activist group, not an “infrastructure provider” as claimed elsewhere in this thread, and holding them responsible for what their members do with the accounts they give them seems entirely fair.
culi 18 hours ago [-]
You want them to be "held accountable" for supporting groups that don't align with the ideology of the US whitehouse.
17 hours ago [-]
p-e-w 9 hours ago [-]
If you select who you provide services to based on their ideology, you can’t shrug and say “I’m just an infrastructure provider, same as the electrical grid” when it turns out that some of those individuals committed crimes using the stuff you gave them.
That’s a very different situation compared to the standard “sign up with your email here”. The provider is responsible because they picked their clients, rather than their clients picking them.
mdp2021 9 hours ago [-]
Look, really not. When the bartender glances at the customer and decides whether they have already drank too much, if the bartender makes a mistake and the customer later crashes into something it is not the bartender's responsibility.
If the bartender decides as a rule "first of all, if they seem uncertain on their legs it is already a no", again that is just a codification of the former.
jscd 14 hours ago [-]
being selective about who you provide free services to makes you an activist group?
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, see, if you sell guns, but you only sell guns to people who promise to use them for defense, but don't sell them to people who promise to murder, that makes you an activist gun seller and personally responsible for whatever happens with those guns.
mdp2021 9 hours ago [-]
Either you wanted to be sarcastic or your simile did not work well.
ithkuil 8 hours ago [-]
That simile captures perfectly the logic here. I don't think it's technically sarcasm
EDIT: a better simile would be if guns were giving away for free. You can see how that could be construed as increasing the responsibility of the provider if a receiver then does something illegal with it
mdp2021 9 hours ago [-]
> fair
No, with these limited elements. The filter may just be "of course I will not provide my (free) service to people that may use it in what I call a repugnant way".
When you know Harry is a rogue CEO, say a misinformation spreader or the issuer of unethical products, and you refuse to work for it, to provide it your services: does that make you an "activist"? Many people will call it "just the normal right thing to do". This is similar to people here calling certain positions "centrist" or "extremist" - and that entirely depends on how those positions are interpreted beyond their dumb (not telling) label, and on the dumb labels over said labels.
p-e-w 9 hours ago [-]
> Many people will call it "just the normal right thing to do".
It’s absolutely not a normal thing to do for entities that want to use the “we are just infrastructure, our users are responsible for their actions” excuse.
In fact, such entities (e.g. power grid, telecom) are often legally prohibited from choosing their clients, and in exchange aren’t held responsible for what their clients do with their services.
inigyou 46 minutes ago [-]
The government should pass a law forbidding blog hosts from choosing their clients if that's what they want to happen. Otherwise, blog hosts are allowed to choose which blogs they host.
mdp2021 8 hours ago [-]
Also see my other post.
So if you had a hammer in your yard, and somebody took it and misused it, you would not be responsible, but if you gave it to your neighbour and he used it to crush a skull, you the owner of the hammer would be responsible? It is clearly at least the opposite. Abstract from the "paid service", but see that.
The rule you propose (filtering would create responsibility) makes no sense. Try to show why it would be so, maybe.
dudefeliciano 23 hours ago [-]
Obviously not to fascists, and if you look at their website they make it very clear that you need to align ideologically and explain why and how you will use their services
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
teiferer 1 days ago [-]
Do the US then also sanction themselves? Cause the numer of people they have killed in that region of the globe since 1984 easily exceeds that number by orders of magnitude.
And the platform hasn't done any killing. They merely provide email etc. Are we going to sanction road builders too because a murderer has driven on their road since 1984?
isityettime 23 hours ago [-]
The US sanctions the PKK because we're obliged to do so by our NATO ally Turkey, which gave rise to the PKK by carrying out a genocide against its local Kurdish population.
Meanwhile the SDF, the armed wing of the PYD, follows the same ideology as the PKK and was trained in military tactics by the PKK, and was among our chief allies against ISIS. They fought alongside US soldiers and we even supplied them with small arms.
The history of the PKK is complicated and the state they struggle against has a long history of genocide and (more recently) outright dictatorship. The relation of these countries to the PKK isn't ultimately determined by the PKK's history, morality, ideology, or even the use of terrorist tactics per se.
If you're curious about the bigger picture, there's actually an organized movement whose aim is to "de-list the PKK" as a terrorist organization, and that's probably a good place to start: https://www.peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/activities/delist-t...
There are also some books and some academic papers on the history of the PKK and their ideology. Those written by independent academics are generally neither fully condemnatory nor exculpatory towards the PKK, but give a clear sense of how the term "terrorism" and its use is at least contestable, geopolitical, etc. And any familiarity at all with the history of the conflict makes it clear that the Turkish government is likewise guilty of state terror conducted against Kurdish civilian populations in Turkey for generations now.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
that would technically fall under the definition of "anyone", yes...
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
it would be more reasonable, maybe, if the sanctions weren't primarily being used for the anti-encryption, anti-privacy crusade.
32aGh 1 days ago [-]
They should have hosted for Al Qaida and ISIS. Then they would have been invited to the White House and been sprayed with perfume by Trump:
"Al-Sharaa, who until recently was known by his alias "al-Julani," was a longtime jihadist who was part of the ranks of organizations associated with al-Qaida and ISIS, and even orchestrated an attack against Israel – milestones that led to his designation as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" by the US, with a reward of approximately $10 million for information leading to his capture. President Trump decided to lift the sanctions on al-Sharaa, who has transformed into a political leader following the collapse of the Assad regime in December, when he assumed Syria's presidency as the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham."
MSFT_Edging 24 hours ago [-]
This tidbit should show people how the line between "terrorist", "freedom fighter" and "useful lackey" is razor thin.
You should never take the "terrorist" label at face value.
The US funded the Mujaheddin in the 80s in Afghanistan. Their first moves upon receiving the weapons was to throw grenades through the windows if Girls' schools.
They began as the "useful lackey", and the US lost control of the Wahabist movement that was amplified to fight Communism. Then they were "freedom fighters" to the religious extremists, and "terrorists" to fight a war against.
In your own example, Al-Sharaa(a product of weaponizing Wahhabism) did actual terrorism, and then was able to squeeze back into the "useful lackey" position, like many "terrorist"s have before him.
cindyllm 23 hours ago [-]
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Ar-Curunir 1 days ago [-]
This entire thread you’ve been talking about the PKK with very little evidence in support.
deaux 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mrtesthah 1 days ago [-]
Is that more, or less, than the 1.2 million people Musk has killed so far with the illegal dismantlement of USAID? Musk aggressively advocates for the forcible ethnic cleansing of Europe.
I see people posting links to x.com which he uses to promote those views as well as platform other hate groups calling for violence and genocide against immigrants, trans people, etc.
Do acts gain moral validity under color of law alone?
Mythli 1 days ago [-]
well USAID where I live finances regime changes and I guess these are very net negative in terms of lives killed.
You see it everywhere.
moron129 1 days ago [-]
Don't worry, the regime change part of USAID has been moved directly to Rubio in the State Department. Only the aid part has been removed.
jst1fthsdys 23 hours ago [-]
NED bucks are flowing again too.
tremeouh0 24 hours ago [-]
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exiguus 1 days ago [-]
There is also an article on we will free us [1] if you want to dive deeper into that rabbit hole.
The article is quite long, but these two give a brief idea of what is going on:
a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:
> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.
b) And the issue U.S. has with them:
> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.
OKRainbowKid 1 days ago [-]
So anti-fascism ist deemed an extreme movement by the US government? What does that say about them?
dismalaf 21 hours ago [-]
A tactic of certain "anti-fascist" groups is to simply call anyone they don't like fascist and attack them. Just like actual fascists used to excuse violence as "anti-communist".
Claiming to be anti-fascist doesn't actually make them anti-fascist nor excuse them from breaking laws.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
A tactic of certain fascist groups is to simply claim their opponents simply call anyone they don't like fascist and attack them. How can we objectively decide who's right?
dismalaf 8 hours ago [-]
Have objective laws and prosecute people who break them.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
How will that tell us who the fascists are?
imsofuture 2 hours ago [-]
We should have LLMs decide.
inigyou 46 minutes ago [-]
How will that be objective?
KPGv2 24 hours ago [-]
Looks like you missed it when the US did this exact thing a year ago
Meanwhile, you find weapon stashes and insurgency plans on what political side?
woodpanel 8 hours ago [-]
This is literally the thing you will find when busting groups that have been performing multiple attacks on German electricity and rail infrastructure in the last years.
Attacks that results in dead people and are ok with many more dead
OKRainbowKid 4 hours ago [-]
You mean the ones that haven't actually been busted, their true motivation and political conviction unknown, with the only thing pointing towards left-wing extremism being "Bekennerschreiben" that have linguistic traits of being authored by native Russian speakers?
frumplestlatz 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
luma 21 hours ago [-]
That is a preposterous claim, but maybe you're being sincere. If so, can you provide an example?
frumplestlatz 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
asib 20 hours ago [-]
You're appealing to another proscription decision that is extraordinarily controversial.
frumplestlatz 60 minutes ago [-]
Controversial amongst those of particular political persuasion of supporting a terrorist state doesn’t mean preposterous.
inigyou 45 minutes ago [-]
We get it - everyone you disagree with is a terrorist. You can stop commenting now.
0974280943 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Laurel1234 20 hours ago [-]
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kakacik 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kennywinker 23 hours ago [-]
> they oppose the very system they are trying to use and exist within.
Is there a way to not exist within capitalism and fascism while opposing it? You speak about it like this is some hypocrisy on their part. Is it not the rhetorical equivalent of "oh, you're drowning?? but you're IN WATER.."?
> Maybe not violently, but hardly can one expect sympathies, especially from system itself.
I would never expect the law to be sympathetic to anyone. I want the law to be fairly written, and equally applied. But unfortunately we're living in a time when you can get a life sentence for photocopying an anti-ice zine.
Frieren 22 hours ago [-]
> "oh, you're drowning?? but you're IN WATER.."?
I laughed so hard at that. Best argument is good argument but funny.
anigbrowl 22 hours ago [-]
Yet you participate in communism. Curious!
wat10000 23 hours ago [-]
FYI the comic character saying “Yet you participate in society! Curious!” is meant to be ridiculed, not emulated.
cdrnsf 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
talon8635 18 hours ago [-]
Well the nazis called themselves socialist. I’m not saying this is that, but names are often chosen to mislead people
I don’t think antifa is an kind of organized anything
But I can say with certainty that people claiming that title smashes the shit out of property and people for a few years post Floyd where I’ve been in various areas of the west coast
Some are probably genuine do-gooders who oppose fascism. Others appear to be fascists themselves in that they demand you agree with them or carry out property destruction and physical violence if you dont
It's super easy for me to claim the title of something I don't like, and then go smash a bunch of property. For example I could call myself a Republican, then smash a bunch of property. Would you then believe republicans are violent property smashers?
cdrnsf 17 hours ago [-]
Sure, there are examples like that in any large enough group. The folks who stormed the capitol on January 6th should still be in jail too. Breaking laws usually yields punishment under said laws (unless you support or in the good graces of the current president). Labelling broad swaths of people who protest your agenda and don't like your masked goons killing and kidnapping people in their communities terrorists is a gross abuse of power.
throwaway8980 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fesoliveira 17 hours ago [-]
Ah, yes, never mind the hundreds of documented far right MAGA supporters that got video taped during the protest storming the Capitol, being violent towards police and destroying public property without masks and being easily identifiable. They were clearly infiltrated antifa wearing realistic masks to tarnish the reputation of real patriots!
xienze 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mdp2021 24 hours ago [-]
Do review your logic.
Now since "potential" is not a crime, list the acts that merit the label.
xienze 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kennywinker 24 hours ago [-]
You are ok with 7 people getting life sentences because one person fired a gun in the middle of absolute chaos with no evidence the shot was premeditated or planned by the group?
And surely those swastika carriers are getting similar sentences... right?
Storm the capital to overthrow an election, get a pardon. Photocopy an anti-ice zine, get life in prison. Makes sense.
nielsbot 24 hours ago [-]
define terrorism in this context
xdennis 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nielsbot 14 hours ago [-]
> started from a false premise that "antifascists" are being persecuted because they're against "fascism".
Uh… then WTF are they against?
Also—terrorism is a vague term and defined by the authorities. I’m curious what terrorist acts poster thinks Antifa will commit or has committed.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Anti-fascist isn't a group, it's an adjective.
OCASMv2 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
isodev 14 hours ago [-]
No, it doesn't. That there are different words for it should be a hint it's different things.
Arainach 16 hours ago [-]
Not at all. The Republican party loves to throw both labels at anything it doesn't like, but most people who are against fascism are not communists.
OCASMv2 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sapphicsnail 15 hours ago [-]
The only people who say this are people who don't actually know anyone who is antifascist. Hell, most of the people I've met who strait up identify as antifa are probably closer to democratic socialist than communist and they tend to be pretty dweeby.
OCASMv2 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
catlifeonmars 12 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t that just mean against fascism?
OCASMv2 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hexator 1 days ago [-]
Is there any indication or proof that they are providing services to PKK? Equating supporting protest organizers in the west with supporting an armed terrorist group is laughable and dangerous.
32aGh 1 days ago [-]
If you search for "noblogs pkk" you find a handful, literally less than 10, of pro PKK links, all of which have been taken down.
Could have been a false flag to discredit antifa. What happened to safe harbor?
hexator 23 hours ago [-]
Having "pro-PKK views" (or for other groups designated as terrorists for that matter) is not against the law in the US as that is a first amendment right (as long as that speech is not support).
inigyou 43 minutes ago [-]
The first amendment only applies to US citizens and residents. The US is allowed to stifle the speech of anyone else.
aftbit 22 hours ago [-]
>[The US State Dept's] examples include alleged railway and pipeline sabotage in Europe, attacks on energy infrastructure, Rose City Antifa, resistance to Atlanta’s proposed police-training center, Jane’s Revenge and publications carrying statements attributed to armed organizations.
At least one of these things is not like the others. Why are peaceful protests against "Cop City" (Atlanta's proposed police-training center) lumped in with violent attacks on infrastructure? This isn't the first time either - Samuel Tunick, the man who was charged with destruction of evidence for giving his duress pin to the CBP agents, was being investigated for his connection to the Cop City protests.[1]
And as others have said, what does it say about the current US admin that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists? I will say, at least unlike Cop City protests afaik, Rose City Antifa seems willing to use violence to accomplish their goals.[2]
Which account - the one who keeps trying to push the idea that anti-fascism is terrorism, and has posted a lot of that sort of thing across different threads, or the one that called that one a bootlicker and hasn't posted anything remotely similar recently?
cindyllm 38 minutes ago [-]
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xp84 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 11 hours ago [-]
Please don't post like this here. If a comment is egregious, as this one is, please flag it and consider emailing hn@ycombinator.com to let us know about it.
When it's -30c outside and your house hasn't had heating for days, you might disagree.
fleroviumna 10 hours ago [-]
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AndrewKemendo 1 days ago [-]
Seems like this should be a/the top level link
trinsic2 1 hours ago [-]
Wow sounds like a great organization. Any organization on a sanction list from this criminal government is a friend of mine.
inigyou 52 minutes ago [-]
The best thing you, the reader, can do us create something like this. Doesn't have to be massive, there just have to be enough copies they can't sanction everyone.
Second best thing is give them money ASAP since they're going to be unable to receive it in two weeks.
cvalkz 23 hours ago [-]
Could the persons that mention the PKK all over this thread kindly find links now that noblogs.org is partly dysfunctional and autistici.org is down?
Google Search yields a very small amount of third party support for the PKK, all unreachable now.
I cannot find any evidence at all and neither can LLMs that this organization has ever directly supported the PKK or hosted a PKK website.
culi 18 hours ago [-]
It can't be because of a PKK link because then the US would have to designate themselves as terrorist. They literally armed and supplied to YPG to fight ISIS. The Kurds proved to be the most effective at stopping ISIS
It's because the US hates everyone who disagrees with it, and the PKK thing is just a rationalisation, like when Musk says he banned people from X to support free speech.
4 hours ago [-]
collabs 1 days ago [-]
For those like me who don't have context, here is the New York Times article on this recent news / event
> The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.
> The move is part of the Trump administration’s fight against what it calls a “resurgence of far-left political terrorism” worldwide, a focus that many security experts say is disproportionate.
> In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.
a/I collective in the OP is the third on this list.
> based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world
graemep 1 days ago [-]
Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable). Masar Badil supports "armed struggle". One of the other groups ("hammer") recently designated a terrorist group (and linked to A/I Collective in another article I read ) got its name by attacking people in Germany with hammers.
Designating A/I Collective a terrorist group is different as it is not directly supporting violence, but it is providing free services to people who do, and it says it provides services to groups its aim is to "provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with.". On the other hand their terms forbid "military use" which is broadly defined enough to rule out terrorism.
I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups, n the other hand, unless they have been going out of their way to support violence in some way I do not see reasonable grounds for banning them. Lots of commercial services have dodgy users. My fear is that is is heading in the direction of "if you do not hand info to the US authorities on demand you will be deemed a terrorist"
Fraterkes 19 hours ago [-]
Here's my "nuanced" take: If a pro-zionist group were officialy designated as terrorists for spraying paint into a jet-engine I would find that ridiculous too.
ls612 16 hours ago [-]
Sabotage of military aircraft is political violence.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
It's direct action. Violence is direct action against people's bodies, not property directly involved in genocide.
ls612 1 hours ago [-]
If you don’t like your government’s policy vote for someone else. If you try to change it by force I will cheer on your suppression and incapacitation by force.
graemep 9 hours ago [-]
How are British refuelling and transport aircraft directly involved in genocide?
Its definitely not OK to vandalise things, and if is not terrorism what is it? War? In which case expect the military to shoot back.
What about their attack that disabled a police officer mentioned in this thread. That is an attack on her body.
Fraterkes 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think a country is well-served by an overly broad definition of terrorism.
You might disagree: the fact that you mention the military "shooting back" when we're discussing a jet-engine being sabbotaged suggests that you believe a state is allowed to be / ought to be disproportionate in its violence towards its citizens.
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
> the fact that you mention the military "shooting back" when we're discussing a jet-engine being sabbotaged suggests that you believe a state is allowed to be / ought to be disproportionate in its violence towards its citizens.
That is in no way a good faith interpretation of what I said.
nailer 11 hours ago [-]
PA hit a police officer in the back with a sledgehammer.
During a 2024 raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, Samuel Corner—a Palestine Action activist—struck police sergeant Kate Evans in the back with a sledgehammer while she was on her knees arresting another activist.
She suffered a fractured lumbar spine, was off work for three months, and later had to give up her rank. Corner was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm and sentenced to seven years and eight months.
Also groups protesting Islamic violence rarely drive their cars through St John’s Wood screaming “kill the Jews rape their daughters” but that’s just my own personal experience.
deaux 1 days ago [-]
> I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups
The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.
vorpalhex 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nish__ 22 hours ago [-]
Right. But when when a group blows up hospitals, schools and other infrastructure and murders 70,000 civilians (Israel)... Why is that not disignated terrorism?
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Because it's the kind of terrorism the king^H^H^H^Hpresident agrees with, and he makes the rules.
nailer 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
deaux 22 hours ago [-]
You're not suggesting that most, if not all of these, are things the US hasn't done, are you? Surely not. The one you might try and dispute is the "50,000 protestors" one, as you know the other ones are clear as day.
frumplestlatz 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vorpalhex 21 hours ago [-]
I notice people always respond with "but the US does this too!" and never actual incidents. No, I'm not going to just high five your vague head nod at wrong doing you can't even describe.
Seriously, sit down, make a list of incidents, including weighing the outcome of those incidents. If it's a case where an officer or a soldier did something wrong, list what happened after (court, punishment, cleared of wrongdoing, etc)
Then do the same for your favorite alternate country that you think is superior. If you want to pick team Iran or Russia, then lay it out for them. Make the same list.
NewJazz 21 hours ago [-]
The shootings took place on May 4, 1970, during a rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces, as well as protesting the National Guard presence on campus and the draft. Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired about 67 rounds over 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom sustained permanent paralysis.
Eight of the shooters were charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, but were acquitted in a bench trial.
I'm not going to make an exhaustive list of all the terrible shit perpetrated by the US government and its agents. It would be too detrimental to my health. But you choosing to bury your head doesn't prove anything either, so I guess I have one up on you.
TiredOfLife 20 hours ago [-]
the difference is literally 10000x
NewJazz 19 hours ago [-]
The obvious key to the whole charade
Would be to run down all of the games they played:
Remember Dita Beard and ITT, the slaughter of Attica
The C.I.A. in Chile knowing nothing about Allende at this time
In the past, as I recollect, Augusta, Georgia
The nomination of Supreme Court Jesters to head off the tapes
William Calley's Executive Interference in the image of John Wayne
Kent State, Jackson State, Southern Louisiana
Hundreds of unauthorized bombing raids
The chaining and gagging of Bobby Seale
Somebody tell these Maryland Governors to be for real!
Everything I mentioned was from the last year. My Lai was more than 50 years ago and the perpetrator was arrested, tried and convicted.
RIMR 18 hours ago [-]
Spraying paint into the jet engine of a military aircraft is not "terrorism". It may be criminal, but it was not in any way a violent crime. Given that it disabled the aircraft, it counts as more than mere vandalism, but calling this an act of terror is outrageous.
The logic seems to be that Hamas has committed terrorist attacks against Israel, and is also the government of Palestine, so anyone fighting for the human rights of Palestinian people is actually materially supporting Hamas terrorism against Israelis. That does not really track if you know anything at all about what's going on in Palestine right now, or what people's actual criticisms of Israel are.
philipwhiuk 14 hours ago [-]
Terrorism is often defined as actions designed to invoke political change.
There's no actual requirement for violence for it to be terrorism.
dbdr 9 hours ago [-]
An event encouraging people to vote in an election or a peaceful demonstration against a proposed legislation are "actions designed to invoke political change". I don't think any of those are commonly understood to be terrorism, nor should they.
Synaesthesia 1 hours ago [-]
Terrorism has to include violence, by my definition at least.
It's in the name. Terrifying people into compliance. Well that isn't the case here.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
I think that's down to people stretching the definition of terrorism to suit their political ends.
nilshauk 9 hours ago [-]
The genocide of the Palestinians (as argued by the UN) triggers the genocide convention obligating states and individuals to act.
It even comes in the effect at the very probability of genocide occuring. Preventing new armaments being sold to Israel is thus the rational and responsible thing to do, for example what Spain has been doing by refusing the transportation of arms through their country. This off course earns you some powerful, heavily moneyed enemies.
Edit: This was an attempt to explain why civilians are spray painting Elbit's military planes.
flumpcakes 1 days ago [-]
You have a very nuanced take that I broadly agree with. I would add that they were probably targeted for political reasons, it's not like the current administration is going out of their way to tackle right wing "terrorism".
18 hours ago [-]
giraffe_lady 24 hours ago [-]
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft
This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.
graemep 23 hours ago [-]
Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades. I would say the case for targetting military equipment is stronger than for damaging most other things.
> This is simply armed conflict.
Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
slowin 23 hours ago [-]
> Damaging property for political ends has been part of the definition in the UK, and I think the US, for decades.
Does that include property in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon? Because if the people who spray painted something are "terrorists", I want to know what the people who wiped Rafah off the face of the earth are called.
Well the definition is flawed, or as the British say, the law is an ass.
Terrorism is widely understood to be the deployment of military force against civilian populations. Of course states do this all the time, but 'state terrorism' is basically dependent on whether politicians in country A align with country B or not; if they don't, they'll call out state abuses in country B as state terrorism, if not they'll say it's law and order.
Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
veeti 17 hours ago [-]
>any kind of property
"Any kind" is quite the load bearing argument there. Let me remind you Europe is under an ongoing land invasion, which is why fucking with its defensive capabilities is unlikely to solicit much sympathies.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
You mean Russia invading Ukraine, right? Were these jets helping Ukraine or were they helping Israel?
graemep 9 hours ago [-]
Neither. They were part of anti-ISIS/ISIL operations.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
So the idea is that Russia is planning on invading the UK?
roughly 23 hours ago [-]
> Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Terrorising means causing terror. I have no real reason to be afraid of Palestine Action, because I am not a military jet.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
Just because it's part of the government's definition doesn't mean that it's true. It's in the government's interest to define as much as possible as terrorism.
KPGv2 23 hours ago [-]
> Damaging property for political ends
Damaging military equipment is a military end, not a political one. If it were otherwise, then a military attacking a military would definitionally be terrorism. At that point, you've removed the utility of the word "terrorism" from English and made it synonymous with "armed conflict."
Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.
Contrast with 9/11, where symbols of American capitalism, filled with civilians, were attacked in order to terrify people who have nothing to do with those buildings into supporting changes in policy that hurt the US.
vorpalhex 23 hours ago [-]
I suppose the UK could declare Palestine Action as combatants and hunt them down and shoot them.. but that doesn't seem very uh, appropriate. I sort of prefer them being arrested and going through courts.
FabCH 20 hours ago [-]
Note that the UK would be committing war crimes in this case, since you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers, you are supposed to capture them and put them in POW camps.
Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…
vorpalhex 16 hours ago [-]
PA was armed.
> you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers,
That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.
To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.
> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens
I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.
FabCH 13 hours ago [-]
An artillery crew is armed with the cannon.
POWs don’t have attorneys, but they do have rights. Limiting food and medical aid is a war crime.
Of course, everybody routinely violates the rights of POWs, and only the losers ever get prosecuted.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
Or you know... they could just prosecute them for their crimes like an actual functioning democracy.
hackable_sand 20 hours ago [-]
You cannot hide behind convenience.
AnimalMuppet 23 hours ago [-]
Are you sure you want to say it's armed conflict? That makes it legitimate to kill members of Palestine Action.
tadfisher 23 hours ago [-]
The labeling of groups as "terrorist" is intended to justify authorization for military action against those groups, where, prior to the Global War on Terror, state affiliation or outright sponsorship was typically needed for a military response.
giraffe_lady 23 hours ago [-]
Do you think that's a different understanding of the situation than the one that the state currently has?
Is it not "legitimate" in the same way to kill terrorists?
AnimalMuppet 22 hours ago [-]
I am not an expert on the legalities. My impression is that, if they are terrorists, you kind of have to catch them in the act, or preparing to act, or providing support for actions. An army, in wartime, can be attacked in broader circumstances.
Corrections welcome if I am wrong.
SiempreViernes 20 hours ago [-]
The US has murdered around 220 people at sea over the last year for the act of travelling like they are "narco terrorists".
throwaway8980 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
TiredOfLife 23 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
oceanplexian 22 hours ago [-]
> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.
I hope no one takes this seriously.
If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.
freeone3000 22 hours ago [-]
Terrorism used to be defined as attacking civilian targets to aid in political messaging.
Attacking military targets is somewhere between an insurgency, partisanism, or an armed conflict.
If we let terrorism mean “any act against the state”, then people who burn police cars are the same as people who plant bombs in shopping malls.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
> Terrorism used to be defined as attacking civilian targets to aid in political messaging.
Not consistently, and its not a clear definition.
The same groups that attacked civilians in places I have lived in also attacked military targets as part of the same strategy. Terrorism is used to threaten, divert resources from front lines, cause economic damage, etc. Civilian targets are attacked in most wars. Is a car bomb outside a military barracks that different from one in a civilian area? What about a suicide bomb aimed at a sentry on a civilian road? I was about to drive past that one. Are the civilians who were killed collateral damage from an attack on a military target or victims of terrorism?
> people who burn police cars
So people who attack a civilian target. By your own definition they are terrorists if they are doing it for political motives.
inigyou 40 minutes ago [-]
If terrorism is defined as X, that isn't in contradiction with someone who does X and also Y and Z being a terrorist.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
A police car is not a human being.
If the same group attacks civilian and military targets then the civilian targets are terrorism and the military targets are not.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah but it's not terrorism. Words have meanings you know.
isityettime 23 hours ago [-]
> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable).
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".
This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.
There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.
Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".
The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.
Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
marcosdumay 51 minutes ago [-]
> which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism"
That's the definition every undemocratic occupying power uses.
inigyou 40 minutes ago [-]
Democratic ones too. In fact pretty much every government uses this exact definition. In Germany they called the French Resistance terrorists.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
> That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions.
British people attacking British forces are not sabotaging an occupying or invading military.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
Are the British allies of Israel? Do they support Israel militarily? Whether or not they are right, I don't think you are engaging with the actual point of the message you are replying to.
galonk 1 days ago [-]
Thank you! Kind of nuts they posted this with that title but no explanation.
Interesting to see that their most important domain, noblogs dot org, seems unaffected.
subvol 17 hours ago [-]
I think the registrar makes the difference:
autistici.org was registered via Gandi, but noblogs.org registrar is Tucows Domains Inc., which points[1] to njal.la, an "offshore" domain hoster that should be more resilient, but isn’t really usable for email hosting, since domains at such a hoster will land on blacklists almost immediately.
"The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure. The group has become a key node in a transnational campaign by violent and criminal far-left networks to destabilize the United States and its partners across Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond...."
"The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide."
bigyabai 26 minutes ago [-]
Most importantly, the corner of their website says "free palestine" and we all know how the DC swamp feels about that kind of free expression.
megous 14 hours ago [-]
So the argument is that it's a communication platform? With such "specifically designed" tools to enable "terrorist activity", such as "encrypted messaging" and other dual-use technologies such as: "a website", "an email".
With such strong proof as "A far-left extremist media group ... relies on A/I ... to publish official communiqués and calls to action for [various organizations]" This is what we in the business call a direct proof A/I materially supports Hezbollah terrorist actions. Clear direct link, simply because all alternate explanations are impossible. Everyone is happy that americans saved the day, again!
State Dept so in the clear that in this "This same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices." they don't name the group nor the "terrorist" because if one would check, improvised explosive device would turn out to be a molotov.
So Casey Goonan throws molotov at a police car -> Abolition Media (the unnamed group) publishes some claims about the attack -> A/I, a comm platform provider on another continent now suddenly provides "material support for violent extremism" in the US, just because Abolition Media used its blog infra. Cool story. Despite both links being tenous at best.
And such it will be with lot of other claims in there, given that US is led by absolute clauns and psychos currently.
svobodamartin 20 hours ago [-]
Do I see "Free palestine" in the corner there?
Fnoord 5 hours ago [-]
Bella ciao.
giov4 37 minutes ago [-]
[...]
E le genti che passeranno
Ti diranno «Che bel fior!
[...]
È questo il fiore del partigiano
morto per la libertà!
Title: A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
giov4 5 hours ago [-]
As from Wikipedia reference to Webster Dictionary in "Definitions of Fascism":
"a: any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition. b: any tendency towards or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control (as over others within an organization)"
"rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition" is what this is. As specifically and publicly declared actions against a group defining itself as "anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism".
if this isn't matching fascism oppression against anti-fa then what is it?
additionally as context the short history link with more facts is even clearer:
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them.
1 days ago [-]
anovikov 6 hours ago [-]
It's hard to imagine how anything like this can legally exist anywhere within legal reach of Western system. Indeed liberty has gone too far.
> A/I (Autistici/Inventati, pronounced [au’tistiʧi]-[iŋ’vɛntati], or [iŋvɛn’tati]) was born in 2001 from an encounter of individuals and collectives of the autonomous anticapitalist movement interested in technology and active in the digital rights struggle. We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible. We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals.
> All of our services are provided for free, without any form of control or commoditization of the personal user data. We don’t receive any form of compensation for our work. We are volunteers exploiting the experiences we accumulated over years of technological, political and legal research while doing radical activism, and we are motivated and inspired by the principles of solidarity and self organization.
From their about page:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements. Our principles are fairly straightforward: the world should not be run on money, should be rooted in solidarity, community, mutual help, equal rights and freedom, and social justice. Easy, isn’t it? We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
throwitaway222 16 hours ago [-]
> We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible
This is like straight out of every evil villains mouth.
epsteingpt 7 hours ago [-]
Sad, but this deplatforming nonsense was always going to cut both ways.
The slippery slope continues.
inigyou 37 minutes ago [-]
Can you elaborate?
hamburga 1 days ago [-]
As far as I can tell, there were no credible criminal charges against this group, except that they are effective organizers on the opposite side of political spectrum. In the White House’s deranged logic, this qualifies them to be officially designated as domestic terrorists [1].
Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
The first amendment only applies inside the US. The US is allowed to cancel the speech of foreigners.
actionfromafar 23 hours ago [-]
And murder foreigners, of course. It's allowed in the Constitution!
forshaper 23 hours ago [-]
Yes, which is why the 2013 drone strikes crossed a line by openly murdering Americans.
CMay 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
senderista 23 hours ago [-]
That seems hugely speculative without any supporting evidence.
polynomial 22 hours ago [-]
TIL people still assume.
CMay 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
dyauspitr 22 hours ago [-]
The biggest free speech violation I can imagine.
cdrnsf 23 hours ago [-]
This administration is on a witch hunt for anything they can identify as "antifa" when no such central organization insists. Instead it's being used as an over broad label to attack organized opposition to it's broadly unpopular policy agenda.
(If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
xboxnolifes 19 hours ago [-]
> (If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?
You cant judge a group by its name. Otherwise, Make America Great Again is great, the National Socialist German Workers' party seems fine, etc.
cdrnsf 17 hours ago [-]
It's not an organized group. It's a label being used as a cudgel to attack anyone who doesn't like the current president (who also happens to have the world's most fragile ego/thinnest skin/whatever his soul crushing pathology actually is).
culi 18 hours ago [-]
It's not a group. There are several smaller orgs that call themselves antifascist but there's no such centralized group or political structure. It's not even a specific ideology. It's just oppositional to fascism
xboxnolifes 3 hours ago [-]
So, its not a group, its just multiple groups with the same label. My point stands. You cant just believe what someone labels themselves as, nor what others label them as. I never called them a centralized group.
inigyou 36 minutes ago [-]
If you're opposed to one antifascist group you're just opposed to that group. But if you're opposed to all antifascism, then you're a fascist. The American government didn't just designate this group as terrorists, but additional designated all antifascism as terrorism.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
The word is being used descriptively. Opposing the National Socialist German Worker's Party doesn't mean you oppose socialists, because those aren't socialists. You could have said that a/i isn't antifascist, but you didn't say that.
xboxnolifes 3 hours ago [-]
I didnt say they weren't antifacist because its both irrelevant to my point and i dont know nearly enough about them to claim so.
mafuy 5 hours ago [-]
In the case of antifa, the content and the label are congruent. They are, literally and practically, anti fascist. That's not the case for the NSDAP.
henearkr 22 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Antifa is short for "opposed to fascism". Which, you know, is the bad thing where you hurt a lot of people just because they are different from the "group" you defined, with the aim of spoliating the outsiders to enrich the members, or make them an inferior cast, etc...
Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...
Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.
drak0n1c 22 hours ago [-]
Nomenclature alone is meaningless. Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which professes anti-fascist messaging and motives both democratic and anti-fascist? I wouldn't assume every "antifa" group is principled and accurate in its diagnosis of what fascism is and who are acceptable targets for their outgroup directed aggression.
cdrnsf 22 hours ago [-]
Perhaps not, but this administration is in no way principled or accurate in its diagnosis of anything so their labelling of any group doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
harimau777 4 hours ago [-]
The fact that nomenclature can be applied arbitrarily doesn't mean it is in this case. In this case, antifa groups do in fact generally oppose facism.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't a democratic people's republic. I don't have to say I oppose democratic people's republics in order to oppose the DPRK, because they aren't one. If I did say that I oppose democratic people's republics, wouldn't that seem mighty suspicious to you? Maybe an indicator that I was a fascist or monarchist?
henearkr 22 hours ago [-]
NK is a dictatorship. I don't know where you got the misunderstanding that they would be "anti-fascist".........
Anti fascist => anti dictatorship.
Anti fascist means that you don't like fascism and that you are not going to let it happen passively.
(Tired of explaining the obvious. But I guess that somebody has to.)
A dictatorship mechanically leads to a situation where the governing group is working for their own wealth, thus in this case the "group" is the governing class. The extent and definition of that class is voluntarily limited so that wealth and power converges to them.
Now you see it? Yes that is a fascism, meaning that:
dictatorship => fascism
And the reverse stems from the "groupism" (i.e. tribalism) of fascism, which entails that you need exclude large portions of the population from the political system.
As this "group" definition becomes narrower and narrower (in order to make more wealth converge to the alleged "true humans" of its center), it becomes a harsher and harsher dictatorship, and finally a strongman regime.
fascism => dictatorship
drak0n1c 21 hours ago [-]
The point is that people who proclaim themselves "antifa", be they in dictatorial power over half of Korea, or merely a band of organized activists, are not automatically due credibility and trust because of some grammatical fixation that magically guarantees alignment. Do you only become skeptical when the message is twisted after winning power?
"Antifa" factions in the Spanish Civil War ultimately did not win and accidentally enable a Spanish DPRK, but they still were perfectly capable of being and doing evil, such as committing mass rape and shooting of nuns.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Are we talking about antifa or are we talking about all people who proclaim to be antifa?
henearkr 21 hours ago [-]
What somebody says != what somebody does.
If somebody says something nice and does nothing, that's good.
If at the same time somebody does something bad, that's bad.
That does not remove the evaluation (nice or bad) of the speech alone.
Saying "I am against this thing that is objectively despicable" is GOOD.
So, saying to be anti fascist is good.
Saying to be anti fascist and doing fascist things is bad.
I don't know how much more obvious things I am supposed to explain...
I guess there is no limit to it.
hackable_sand 20 hours ago [-]
You are assigning this magical reality and then getting mad about it.
Anti-fascists are not concerned with the magical weight of this in-group designation. They are concerned with all things non-fascist.
henearkr 19 hours ago [-]
And you are factually wrong.
You are probably thinking about the Communist factions among the Republican forces opposed to Franco.
ALL of the Republican factions were opposed to Franco and to fascism, not only the Communists.
And, besides, nobody was calling themselves "antifa" at that time, because that was damn obvious that if you were in the Resistance, you were opposed to that despicable tyrant. But they were absolutely anti fascists, all of them and not only the Communists.
includenotfound 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
henearkr 21 hours ago [-]
And if a Christian group is doing Demonic stuff that's a problem.
And seeing slop where there is not, you are being rude to me without purpose.
Not everybody is born in an English-speaking country.
I laid down the ideas logically, maybe that is what sounded foreign to you.
By the way you are the person writing nonsensical stuff such as "Antifa is a terrorist organization", while everybody is repeating tirelessly that it is just an adjective meaning to be opposed to fascism:
No any such organization exists. It is a movement, and a description one can describe one's self or actions: "anti-fascist".
But of course, their logic for sanctioning-by-association would mean that they all - Trump, Bessent, Rubio etc. - with their innumerable contacts with "violent terrorist groups and regimes" everywhere around the world, and just themselves really - should have been sanctioned, arrested, tried, or just disposed of like the US does with so many it dislikes.
cdrnsf 22 hours ago [-]
Yes. The president fomented a violent insurrection and then pardoned its participants (who should all still be in prison). He shouldn't be in office and you could similarly sanction his own social media platform, X and any other number of their supporters.
einpoklum 20 hours ago [-]
Well, maybe that too, but I meant the Gaza genocide and the slaughter of civilians in Iran, Yemen, on Venezuelan boats etc.
cdrnsf 20 hours ago [-]
Or the long tail of bodies that will come out of the USAID cuts.
einpoklum 8 hours ago [-]
What makes you think the tail of bodies dying due to the cuts will not be offset by the tail of bodies not-dying due to the cuts?
breppp 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Opposing someone who happens to be anti-fascist doesn't make you anti-anti-fascist or fascist any more than opposing someone who is blue makes you anti-blue or yellow.
However if I say all blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot blue on sight. Then I'm anti-blue. If I say all anti-blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot anti-blue on sight, then I'm very pro-blue. It doesn't matter if there's a bunch of green over there calling itself blue. If I meant the green calling itself blue was terrorists, then I would have said that.
breppp 8 hours ago [-]
yes, that's exactly my point
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Trump's doing the latter thing. He's said all anti-blue are terrorists. He's not opposing specific anti-blue people except when an example is needed. That makes him pro-blue.
cdrnsf 17 hours ago [-]
While we're doing hypotheticals, what does Elon Musk's destruction of USAID and the downstream deaths resulting from it make him?
kg 17 hours ago [-]
If someone is opposed to Communism they should oppose Communism, not anti-fascism. Seems pretty straightforward
Oddly the US is very cozy with some modern Communists!
Given administration's obsession with Antifa being in the room with them at all times, it's impossible to take anything they say in relation to this as even close to factual.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
Keep in mind we're talking about communications services here, and one focusing on political speech at that.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
There is the absolutely perfect Supreme Court case that ruled against your theory.
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
mindslight 11 hours ago [-]
As I said to your first comment: positive arguments rooted in what is aren't terribly compelling when the government has gone off the rails (unfortunately).
Can you elaborate? The positive argument being that the law and judiciary disagree with you? The court decisions was 15 years ago when Obama was president btw.
GolfPopper 1 days ago [-]
The current United States government is very keen on pushing the idea that there is a vast and shadowy international left-wing conspiracy waging war on it.
This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
And despite it being transparent garbage, millions of Americans are eagerly lapping up Red Scare 2.0
CMay 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
rileymat2 23 hours ago [-]
Google says the Chinese military budget is 281 billion. They probably get lower cost labor and production, but that’s significantly lower than the United States.
Adjusting for Purchasing Parity, an imperfect measure, that still only like 600 billion, significantly lower than the United States.
CMay 22 hours ago [-]
They're vertically integrated so a lot of materials are cheaper. They also steal a lot of technology, so they save a lot of money on having to do the research the US already paid for. Finances alone don't make the military and your argument doesn't change anything I said.
rileymat2 22 hours ago [-]
Vertical integration is an interesting claim, because we have been told that the government outsourcing to private companies is more efficient due to competition than the government doing the work themselves.
mechanicalpulse 22 hours ago [-]
It depends on the vertical. If you're outsourcing a sixth-generation fighter jet or an aircraft carrier, your options are fewer than if you're outsourcing building construction or office supplies. You don't want to trust your nuclear-powered supercarrier to Joe's Boat Emporium.
well_ackshually 22 hours ago [-]
>shadowy
brother we're not discreet about it, the US is a stain on the world and the world would be more stable and better off if it disappeared, it is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world. It's not a deep, hidden conspiracy.
It also turns out that only one side of these two has the means to wage war and is also the biggest arms dealer in the world. Bully gets called mean names, boo hoo :(
CMay 21 hours ago [-]
We didn't start World War 1, or World War 2, or the Korean war, or the Vietnam war. We didn't make Russia attack Ukraine. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran or Kuwait. We didn't make Iran fund terrorism around the region and the world.
We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.
What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.
Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.
adtra 20 hours ago [-]
I don't know where to start. The US supported Saddam after his Iran invasion:
Maybe read how de Gaulle viewed the US "promoting peace in Europe" or how the British did after the US stole the Suez canal and kicked the British out of the Middle East.
CMay 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, after Saddam invaded Iran, because Iran was trying to export its revolution to Iraq. We didn't make Iraq attack Iran though. It was just one more war caused by Iran exporting revolution which has happened several times in the Middle East already.
It was an opportunity to weaken Iran which is a far worse problem in the Middle East than Iraq was. Iran had fired most of its airforce pilots for not being Islamic radical enough and with their airforce in shambles, Saddam saw an opportunity. Then Iran had to rush to rehire their old airforce pilots regardless of their dedication to the revolutionary cause or regime just to fight back.
arrosenberg 20 hours ago [-]
And what lead to Iran exporting Islamic revolution? Possibly something involving Kermit Roosevelt Jr and the CIA?
CMay 20 hours ago [-]
Britain was exporting oil from Iran, which was understood and agreed on.
Russia was trying to turn Iran communist, so it spread the message that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil and stealing the country blind in order to help overthrow the government.
The Islamic revolutionaries and the communists helped overthrow the government.
Then the Islamic revolutionaries executed the communists after they complained that they weren't being given an opportunity to help administer the country.
The Islamic revolutionaries were basically chanting "neither east, nor west". No capitalism taking advantage of Iran's resources, no Russian communists taking control of their government.
From there, the revolution now had a state and it could leverage the state's resources to export and fund its revolution to other countries which it has done extensively.
arrosenberg 19 hours ago [-]
I guess you'll be as disingenuous as needed to avoid mentioning America's involvement in overthrowing the legitimate government of Iran in 1953.
CMay 18 hours ago [-]
That wasn't the question you asked. The question you asked was about a couple decades later. When we helped overthrow the previous leader, it was because the fear was that he was establishing communism in Iran. He was unelected, removing the actual elected representatives and undermining the Shah. Of course after removing him, the Shah ended up not being much better, but can't win'em all.
The spark that caused the whole thing as far as I understand, is that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil which kept upsetting the population until they wanted something to be done. This probably gave communists an opportunity to come in, nationalize the oil and be the saviors, before then simply becoming the new oppressors of the population.
I don't think anybody was a hero, just Brits, Russians and the US strategizing around a country that seemed lost.
arrosenberg 18 hours ago [-]
It really wasn't, but in either case your answer takes us back to the original point being made...
> it [the US] is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world
These aren't independent events. Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries, the echoes winds up being worse, with a very, very limited number of exceptions.
> but can't win'em all.
We barely win any of them, but if your attention span is only a single generation, then I can see how you might fail to notice.
CMay 17 hours ago [-]
> Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries
The US isn't an empire. Is Germany a US territory? Is Japan a US territory? Is Iraq? No. Is Panama? No. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are happily part of the US. We don't have to use military force or economic leverage to keep them part of the US. If the US government was destroyed, we would recreate it, because it is good.
The US also championed natural rights globally, which recognizes that people have rights that are not derived from any government, but are inherent. Guess which countries reject this? China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and others.
> We barely win any of them
Winning depends on what you wanted to achieve. We don't need to win, we just need to get what we want. Our military won in Vietnam, but when conflict started again the government voted not to get involved. The Vietnamese love the US and hate China. South Koreans love the US. North Korea's leader loves the US and hates China. Japan loves the US and hates China. Saddam Hussein was killed in Iraq and we established forward bases to use against Iran. Afghanistan hates Iran. Osama bin Laden was killed. European countries and most Middle Eastern and most Asian countries are friendly with the US.
Everyone seems to recognize how Russia, Iran and China align. Our allies are getting stronger, because we're giving them tough love, while Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Iran are all getting weaker.
You can interpret all of that however you'd like, but it doesn't sound like losing. People can delude themselves all they want and the media can yell from the top of the trees how everything is awful and we're losing and so on, but reality gets a vote. Don't let other people tell you what is real. Figure it out yourself and come to your own conclusions.
well_ackshually 18 hours ago [-]
>World War 2
Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
>Vietnam war
Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
>Korean War
True, not your fault, you just bombed an entire country into non existence.
>Iraq attack Iran
Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
>Iran
You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
>We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO
Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
> We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East
By spending hundreds of billions on a country that, since its inception, has continuously been at war, an aggressor, colonizing, genocidal theocracy? Working out GREAT.
>What country is it that you're defending
Watch out, your paranoia is seeping through. The US is a net negative to world peace is the only thing that was said.
>Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
While none of those countries are angels, and a lot of them are also victims of political power plays outside of their own control (hint: it involves the US being so violently anti-communist that it would rather raze a country to the ground rather than see its hegemony ever so slightly threatened), I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice. It's really hard to catch up to the US on the scale of atrocities committed.
I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
>[free speech word vomit]
I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
CMay 17 hours ago [-]
> Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical. Comintern was aiming to conquer the Earth with global communism. It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2. The Soviet Union has caused more death on this planet as a result of its communist expansion threat than any other country in history. So yes, we are anti-communist. And you should be too.
> Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
It was largely symbolic and demonstrative. Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using. There wasn't any guarantee Japan was going to surrender and you have the benefit of being in the future, which they did not. You should also try understanding what Japan was doing to other countries. It was horrific in every sense. They had to be stopped by any means. You could argue part of the strategy of using the nukes to end the war early was to pre-empt the Russians gaining ground in Japan and getting stuck with a second communist split like in Germany. That concern was certainly validated by Russia's push for Korea decades later. Korea would have been fine without Russia trying to gain communist control there.
> Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
Countries do all kinds of things to achieve their strategic aims, the US isn't remotely unique in that regard. Still, we didn't encourage him to invade Iran and we only supported him when he started losing to prevent Iran expanding into Iraq.
> You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
It was more complicated than that. Britain was taking advantage of Iran and Russia was trying to establish communism in Iran. The new leader was essentially getting rid of elected members of government and becoming a dictator. It wasn't a good situation to start with and the US didn't want Russia to establish communism there. Even decades later when the revolutionaries took over, the communists helped them overthrow the government and then the revolutionaries executed the communists. If everyone had left Iran alone, we probably wouldn't have gotten involved.
> Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
Peace in Europe does not exist because of the EU. The US formed NATO with the European countries. That established a mutual defense agreement so if anyone attacked anyone else, everyone would join in and defend.
> I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice.
I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes. Far more people died from other weapons than nukes and the US has done more to prevent the proliferation of nukes than any other country. Nuking Japan also wasn't a single country decision. Multiple countries had to agree to it, because of what Japan was doing. Nobody is going to use nukes today unless they want to end their country.
> I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
You can't change the whole world at once and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. That's a communist thing. There are monarchies and dictatorships that are largely tolerable, like Singapore. Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something. I can't know every strategic plan we've ever had or why we had it.
> I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
The US dollar, defense agreements, preserving international waterway navigation and aggressively pushing back against communism has done far more to improve the stability of countries than any time in history. The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
I think you have your feelings way too invested into your opinions. If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind, but I don't think the same could be said about you. If you don't have the freedom to change your mind, then you'll stagnate.
2legit2quit 14 hours ago [-]
> Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical.
McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
> It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2
I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
> Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using.
How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal. Rockets weren't even in use, yet, because the V2 only came out during WWII. So, no ICBMs. At best, there was the rail gun that Germany was developing but that was a "their" weapon and not an "our" weapon.
> The US formed NATO with the European countries.
Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
> I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes.
Ok, Agent Orange? People are still dying from cancer, to this day, from that.
> Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something.
You're so close to getting it... "it'll be conditioned on something" is the pivotal point: As long you get what you want(ed), consequences be damned. Iran-Contra comes to mind, here.
> The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
> If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind
Everything in your statements seems to be bathed in American Exceptionalism and I'm doubting that anyone could change your mind.
CMay 12 hours ago [-]
> McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
It worked out fine?
> I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
Many communists were armed and had guns, aiming to take over every country on Earth. The US, Japan and Germany were fighting back against them in China, Spain and Germany.
> How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal.
I figure objectively. Far more Japanese were killed by fire bombings, which could be done extensively, at scale, with impunity. Nukes were important and consequential, but if the goal was simply to kill Japanese or destroy strategic targets then we already had that problem well solved.
Japan had thoroughly spread propaganda of racial superiority and being divinely chosen. One of the benefits of dropping a nuke compared to fire bombing, is that it immediately leaves a humbling impression.
> Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
The US created the League of Nations, which was the first known collective security organization like that to prevent a repeat of World War 1. Ironically, the idea came from a German. World War 2 demonstrated that Europeans weren't prepared to defend each other.
The Western Union was mostly an attempt to demonstrate to the US that European countries were now ready to defend each other, rather than failing. This is relevant right now, because there are concerns that Putin wants to test NATO to see if their resolve collapses the same way it did during World War 2 under the League of Nations. In order for NATO to be formed, the US had to be convinced that European countries could be active participants rather than passive consumers of defense guarantees, which is also again relevant since we've been pushing harder for European countries to meet their defense spending commitments.
> Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
People actually traded in other currencies for USD rather than ditching it after 2008.
well_ackshually 8 hours ago [-]
>>McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
>It worked out fine?
Please stop giving people ammo to take the piss out of you, it really shows how ignorant you are. Although it's very fun to find a blind exceptionalist in the wild and to make fun of it: every single one of your answers has been a demonstration of how the US likes to act with impunity and pretend you have a mission of divine importance. From saying you have a "duty" to stall communism, to willingly destroying other countries for your own benefit, you remain a perfect example of why the world is better off with the US gone.
PS: if you want to count deaths from famines as "caused by the communists", whether it was the USSR or the great leap forward, at least have the decency of admitting that these countries were suffering from famines for centuries beforehand, and that they were the last famines they ever lived through at this point. Communism stopped those famines. The US is perfectly happy to let a few dozen million die every year of famines, lack of access to medication, clean water, all things it has in large amounts and refuses to give because "it's not profitable". War profiteers, murderers and dangers to the world.
CMay 2 hours ago [-]
> Please stop giving people ammo to take the piss out of you
So I should change my mind, because other people are wrong and it's easier to simply be wrong with them and avoid insults and attacks? What kind of weak minded nonsense would that be? Oh right, it would be communism, because that is exactly how it works. Conformance through oppression.
> From saying you have a "duty" to stall communism,
Everyone has the duty to stall communism. I never said it was only ours.
> to willingly destroying other countries for your own benefit
Cuba was destroying itself fine without our help. It had help from Russia, China, Venezuela and Spain yet despite that insisted on keeping its people poor and failed to maintain basic infrastructure. It has had increasing blackouts for years before the US intervened. This is not simply the result of sanctions, it's the result of extreme neglect. Even when it had steady oil imports from other countries, their energy grid was beginning to fail.
Venezuela had openly stated it was going to attack its neighbors and had moved its military into position. It had been breaking many international laws before that and there was widespread understanding that Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. That's on top of keeping its people poor. Terrible Chinese communist construction collapsing during the recent earthquake killing thousands of people didn't help an already suffering and poor population. Venezuela was destroying itself and couldn't even maintain its energy infrastructure either despite help from Russia, China and so on. They spend their money on military hardware that didn't do them any good.
If you are worried about Iran being destroyed, you need to get educated on Iran. Iran is so bad even people from Iran generally want this. They are evil in the most pure sense of the word and nobody likes them. To Russia and China, Iran is just a useful idiot for a strategic purpose.
> if you want to count deaths from famines as "caused by the communists", whether it was the USSR or the great leap forward, at least have the decency of admitting that these countries were suffering from famines for centuries beforehand
Isn't that true of many countries? The difference is that the communists caused it directly in multiple countries as a result of horrifically bad policies which could have been avoided by simply asking other people their opinion. Different kinds of famines in the past with different causes are no excuse for extreme negligence and ignorance. If you are excusing that, you are lost. Cubans, Venezuelans and North Koreans have been starving for decades in extreme poverty, so even if you try to excuse past famines, keeping their people poor and hungry is a choice. At least Russia, China and Vietnam all made free market reforms.
> The US is perfectly happy to let a few dozen million die every year of famines, lack of access to medication, clean water, all things it has in large amounts and refuses to give because "it's not profitable".
The US has provided aid to countless countries, but the problem in many places is that the aid then gets stolen by the dictators and redirected for profit or whatever and the aid doesn't reach the population. If you think the US hasn't done a lot of things to help other countries despite it not being profitable, that is insane.
> War profiteers, murderers and dangers to the world.
We don't generally profit from wars. World War 1 and World War 2 were extremely expensive. We didn't come out of it richer, because we stole everyone's money and resources like grinches. Do you think we made a profit on Iraq? Afghanistan? Are we making a profit from Iran? Sure the defense industry and private contractors make money, but they don't decide what the country does.
cindyllm 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mindslight 23 hours ago [-]
We've got a billionaire funded conspiracy openly ignoring the Constitution, wantonly trashing our American liberties, and yet you're still raging about "communist billionaires" ?
The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.
The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!
CMay 21 hours ago [-]
From what I've seen, freedom of speech has been improving. It used to be that people could barely speak their mind on Reddit, Twitter or at universities without getting attacked or cancelled over who knows what. Now, people are expressing themselves more regularly in all of those places. Universities still have a ways to go, but it is improving.
There have been some television networks that also had public licensing to broadcast over the air, but that requires a broadcast license which has stipulations of serving the public interest. To maintain this license, you require locally relevant content, a variety of viewpoints expressed and they cannot distort the news.
Increasingly, shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and The View which are all broadcast over the air with public licenses, became more than simply interview shows with interesting guests. They became actual political hit jobs that masquerade as news while day in day out insulting politicians and spreading provably false out of context lies which people could debunk themselves with their own research. Yet, these networks used this entertainment loophole as if it was a blank check to go against the public interest broadcast license.
No doubt, people can argue the same about politicians themselves, but politicians aren't restricted to this legal standard, because they need the flexibility to achieve whatever they think the country needs at the moment. Public broadcasting is its own thing and does allow for a significant range of content, so long as you adhere to the standards.
If PBS ran a decent journalistic report investigating some problem in an administration that is in the public interest and is an entirely different thing than these political hate shows that all seem to echo the exact same thought with different words. They can exist just fine, but I fundamentally agree that it stretches the definition of what is acceptable public interest programming for over the air broadcasting.
Putting pressure on them to change up their programming is probably a good thing for the country. What ever happened to the old high quality high integrity debate shows and intellectual interviews? It's all insults or propaganda now and "I don't know, they're crazy!", so nobody understands what's going on in the world or why it's happening. It's like they make it obvious that they have no interest in informing you, because if you understand it, you can't hate it as much as they need you to.
It would be fine for those networks to continue running those shows, but they would have to move it off to some other channel that isn't broadcast using an over the air license.
As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
Companies are largely pro-American and if they feel like woke helps resolve some kinds of political tensions that have been dividing America, then they will feel like that is the patriotic thing to do. When it turns out that is actually Marxism in disguise aimed at destroying the country, they push back. These things just happen slowly and it takes time to adjust.
inigyou 30 minutes ago [-]
How can you say freedom of speech is improving when the government has just declared a blog hosting service to be terrorists because of the speech of the blogs hosted there? Is this satire?
mindslight 19 hours ago [-]
> As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
CMay 16 hours ago [-]
> The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy?
Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.
The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.
China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.
The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.
I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.
> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?
Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.
Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.
What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.
> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.
If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.
jrflowers 11 hours ago [-]
Can you name some of the communist billionaires
inigyou 30 minutes ago [-]
George Soros
nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
24 hours ago [-]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I support PKK because I run an IPFS node and I'm sure at least one person connected to PKK has uploaded at least one thing to IPFS at least one time. What's with you and your obsession with PKK? You probably support them too through some equally convoluted mechanism, but you're all over this thread saying anyone with any connection must be terminated.
nonethewiser 6 hours ago [-]
PKK is the reason cited for sanctioning A/I.
>I support PKK because I run an IPFS node and I'm sure at least one person connected to PKK has uploaded at least one thing to IPFS at least one time.
That does not break the law. Knowingly providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization does.
If you can show specific details of you knowingly providing material support of a labeled terrorist organization please share.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
I know that st least one person connected to the PKK used IPFS at least one time. So it's knowing. And it's material support as shown by the a/i allegation.
polski-g 19 hours ago [-]
Their infrastructure and services were used in domestic terrorist attacks on pregnancy centers in the United States, by the CHAZ operation in which two black teenagers were lynched, attempts to crash police helicopters, attempts to burn police officers alive.
Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
mindslight 11 hours ago [-]
Basing an argument around the unavoidable physical embodiment of speech is sophistry. There is no "above". The "material support" you speak of is all just republishing speech.
By the argument laid out by the government here, merely reading writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.
Varelion 23 hours ago [-]
Remember, Trump and his cultists are symptoms -- not the cause. I.E. Cuba's embargo was in place long before the orange buffoon, and that is the same force at play here. Fear that the people will get a taste of a fairer, more just alternative.
> “are you antifa or are you fa?”
And - the list of people that were originally put in this category when G.W. Bush issued this executive order has 29 people/organizations: Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaida, and various affiliated/related organizations.
So, yesterday it was Bin-Laden, today it is some Italian left-wing tech guys, and tomorrow it might well be you or me. Get ready to be branded a terrorist at some point.
includenotfound 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
happosai 21 hours ago [-]
The point is not what kind of policies the "radical left" tech guys had. The point is they had quarter century run in which law enforcement in Italy could not find anything illegal in their actions.
And The current US administration was like "we don't care that running a webserver for activists is legal in Italy, we will just declare them terrorists".
Which is precisely why it's important that criminals and even terrorists have rights and due process. Else they can just declare YOU a terrorist and suddenly you have no rights.
einpoklum 20 hours ago [-]
> Very far to the left,
Well, a proto-fascist government would consider hosting anti-fascist websites as being "far left".
wilburx3 21 hours ago [-]
Don't worry guys, fascist are always looking out for free speech.
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism."
32ikU 1 days ago [-]
How quaint. The MEK (Iranian People's Mudjahheddin) were designated as a terrorist organization but collected money in EU streets all the time. Now they are useful against Khamenei.
The US would also like to use the equivalent of the PKK in the large Kurdish part of Iran against Khamenei.
Nothing to say of using the PKK rebranding of SDF in Syria as well as receiving "global terrorist" Al Jolani in the White House.
etc-hosts 22 hours ago [-]
US cynically removed them from the Terrorists list in 2012.
MEK is probably just 300 really old guys now, they have strict rules against marrying outside the org.
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
What does it entail, in practice?
They are sanctioned, okay, and? What happens practically.
etc-hosts 22 hours ago [-]
US sanctions mean if you trade with the santioned org.. YOU get sanctioned (lose access to trade or financial systems controlled by US or US companies like Visa)
inigyou 28 minutes ago [-]
Then I want to trade with so many orgs the whole world is sanctioned. Maybe the world will finally decouple from the US.
apopapo 1 days ago [-]
They will become pariahs financially speaking. Nobody will be authorized to wire money to/from them. It's brutal.
mdp2021 23 hours ago [-]
> Nobody
In the USA - the consequences should be only related to USA pertinent actors. The newspapers in Italy say, "there is no judgement against them in Italy".
The same mechanism that was used to sanction Russia, Iran - will be used to sanction A/I Collective.
polski-g 19 hours ago [-]
If Italy doesn't shut down their services, the Italy itself will be shut out of SWIFT.
2legit2quit 15 hours ago [-]
>...then* Italy itself will be shut out of SWIFT.
SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium. Only 2 banks out of the total 24 on the board of directors is US banks. Unless there's a hostile takeover of the SWIFT organisation by the US, I think this is a bit of a stretch. (Plot-twist: Italy is on the board of directors.)
polski-g 15 hours ago [-]
SWIFT abides by international law and local laws. Including those against processing money transfer requests for terrorist organizations like A/I.
marcosdumay 42 minutes ago [-]
SWIFT refused to shunt out the Brazilian banks that kept providing services to the public figures involved on the Bolsonaro trial last year.
2legit2quit 14 hours ago [-]
> SWIFT abides by international law and local laws. Including those against processing money transfer requests for terrorist organizations like A/I.
A US sanction is neither a local (to all of SWIFT) or international law. The question still stands.
mdp2021 14 hours ago [-]
> Italy itself will be
Because of a decision from the USA administration? ?!
inigyou 27 minutes ago [-]
Yes. It's the same mechanism that was used against Russia and Iran.
tencentshill 23 hours ago [-]
If you donate to them from the US, you probably get put on a no-fly list at a minimum. Maybe even a friendly visit from the feds at your home!
inigyou 27 minutes ago [-]
I can't wait to waste the feds' time investigating nothing. They've already done it to me a few times.
tokai 1 days ago [-]
Anything between having their google profiles deleted to abducted and tortured at a CIA blacksite.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
in this case, it mostly means trouble getting money, as they are funded via donations
• Bank accounts and payment processing.
• U.S.-linked donations and fundraising services.
• Hosting, cloud infrastructure and upstream network services.
• Domain registration and related technical services.
• Certificate, security and email-delivery accounts.
• Software and communications services.
• Relationships with non-U.S. providers frightened by American secondary sanctions.
• Access for people in the United States who currently use A/I’s services.
My question now is whether European hosting providers sprouting up in the face of the US CLOUD act will step up to provide those services.
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
No, because they don't want to be banned from banks. With few exceptions, the US has power over all global financial systems. Also tier 1 ISPs (even the European ones), which trickles down to all ISPs.
someguydave 24 hours ago [-]
Do you think many banks worldwide would enjoy declaring themselves the enemies of the US government in order to assist left-wing lunatics?
iza 23 hours ago [-]
You misplaced "lunatics" in your sentence, though sadly the likely answer remains the same.
14 hours ago [-]
alescalaios 7 hours ago [-]
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Transformanshen 20 hours ago [-]
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dfilppi 23 hours ago [-]
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shadowtree 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Jackpillar 24 hours ago [-]
*˙ᴉuᴉlossnW oʇᴉuǝq - uoᴉʇɔɐǝɹ sᴉ ɯsᴉɔsɐℲ
mftrhu 23 hours ago [-]
Thank you. Almost didn't recognize the name, as upside-down as it was.
OKRainbowKid 1 days ago [-]
Anti-fascism is reaction to fascism, it's in the name, even.
shadowtree 20 hours ago [-]
Antifa is a leftist movement, nowhere on this planet is not anti-capitalist.
The two flags in the logo, black and red, represent the anarchist and the communist movement.
Marxism came first. Mussolini was a Marxist, then developed Fascism as a reaction to it.
When Marxist talk about "reactionary forces", what do you think it means?
mito88 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
izolate 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
gverrilla 1 days ago [-]
Clueless.
ninjin 1 days ago [-]
In my experience, groups like this have a fairly hostile relationship to State Communism as well. The Kronstadt rebellion for example is frequently cited [1]. But then you have groupings like Anarchist communists [2], which you would then risk lumping together with the anti-Communism part (not to mention that anti-Communism as a term is usually associated with forces staunchly opposed to people like this). Plus, if you are "only" anti-authoritarian, how do you suggest avoiding getting lumped together with Anarcho-capitalism?
Furthermore, these organisations operate in what they perceive to be Fascist and/or Capitalist societies, so why state opposition to something that is not "there" and has been pretty much gone from the global scene for nearly forty years?
In conclusion, yes, you have a point. But given the reasons above I find it really hard to get worked up over it and Anarchists do not generally get along with Leninists, Stalinists, or Maoists anyway.
stonogo 1 days ago [-]
Of fascism, capitalism, and communism, only two are going concerns in these people's lives. If they're going to declare themselves "anti-communist" they might as well also take a strong vocal stance against ghosts and flying cars.
joemazerino 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
AndrewKemendo 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Yep I just donated $1000
aliasxneo 24 hours ago [-]
Can I ask what you're hoping the organization does with that money? I'm genuinely interested in understanding what the expected outcome is.
mdp2021 23 hours ago [-]
Servers, connection and maintenance costs... That is what they do. Read the manifesto.
> We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals
Yes, they select the users. But clearly to exclude services to those they would judge as bad actors!
aliasxneo 22 hours ago [-]
So you're in it purely for freedom of expression? I can get behind that, but after reading further it doesn't seem like they are about that at all, but rather are extremely selective and it has nothing to do with "bad acting."
inigyou 25 minutes ago [-]
If you are helping only certain people express freely is that not still helping freedom of expression?
Should a blog platform be forced to help everyone express themselves or no one?
mdp2021 21 hours ago [-]
> reading further ... extremely selective and it has nothing to do with
What paragraphs inclined you to think that?
aliasxneo 17 hours ago [-]
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism.
Those stated beliefs are shockingly close to far-leftism. So I'm guessing the same radical exclusionary zeal is also being applied here.
Also, for clarity, I'm not taking those definitions literally, but rather as dog whistles for a very specific group of people (I'm from the Portland, OR area and I'm _very_ familiar with this group that has been terrorizing my poor city).
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Is it really radical or exclusionary to say no racists allowed, no sexists allowed? I don't think so.
mdp2021 16 hours ago [-]
> very specific group of people
These are Italians. There are all possibilities the spirits are different - unless globalization (of information and communication, "of culture") had merged the two.
inigyou 13 hours ago [-]
Which group of people are you taking it as a dog whistle for?
2legit2quit 15 hours ago [-]
>I'm not taking those definitions literally
Given that fascism had quite the bloodied history in Italy (see: Mussolini), and we're talking about a group literally based in Italy, why wouldn't you? Is it because you were unaware of said history in Italy and never experienced fascism first-hand, yourself?
aliasxneo 13 hours ago [-]
Why did you pick one thing on the list and ignore all of the others?
2legit2quit 5 hours ago [-]
> Why did you pick one thing on the list and ignore all of the others?
Pointing out the solipsism of your take with a single "thing" was enough to demonstrate your myopic world view, I thought, however we can expound upon that further by covering them all.
Would you care to address the first "thing", before we continue on?
mdp2021 10 hours ago [-]
Very probably because he took all the others for granted and thought that only the one he got explicit about was that which some may perceive as odd.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
That's a standard anti-gish-gallop tactic.
BeetleB 23 hours ago [-]
Ouch.
A good friend of mine was charged with providing material support to terrorists for providing similar donations. And all his donations were prior to the US designating the recipients as terrorists. The government's arguments were "Yes yes, but you knew what you were supporting even though we hadn't designated them as such..."
Hope you're not in the US.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Hope I loudly go to jail so everyone can see how corrupt things are. Hope there are street riots about it.
AndrewKemendo 23 hours ago [-]
Your friend has integrity and should hold their head up high they are fighting against oppressive bullshit
BeetleB 23 hours ago [-]
Naive world view. They also filed other less serious charges against him (of which he may have been guilty). He intended to plead "Not guilty", but after 2.5 years of him being held before trial[1], they offered him a deal. Plead guilty and get 5 years, including time served.
He likely would have beaten the terrorism charges, but for the lesser charges it wasn't clear that he'd get a better prison sentence than the one he was being offered.
He took the deal and pleaded guilty.
Also, lawyers cost money - perhaps he couldn't afford to keep fighting through a trial. I also have another friend who had the same charges leveled against him (not for donations, but volunteering services). He did fight the charges and got acquitted. I don't know if it's true, but I heard it cost him well over $1M for his legal defense.
[1] Trials like these take a long time to prepare for, by both parties.
AndrewKemendo 19 hours ago [-]
I already agreed he has great integrity you’re just proving it further
Having values is expensive
Many people pay with their lives
BeetleB 19 hours ago [-]
Well, after getting deported to a country he's never lived in, and separated from all his children, and possibly never getting a stable job because he declared he was involved in terrorism, and having his elderly mother not have anyone to take care of her while he was in prison ... I'm just not sure he wants to "hold his head high".
But sure, if anyone wants to pay in this fashion, I won't stop them.
22 hours ago [-]
xdennis 22 hours ago [-]
Do you really not care to know what the terrorist organization was before you assume that "they are fighting against oppressive bullshit"? Is A/I and ISIS the same to you?
AndrewKemendo 24 hours ago [-]
Nice! That’s genuinely worth praise
xyzal 23 hours ago [-]
You are a good person.
CurbStomper 1 days ago [-]
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lokibumdo 9 hours ago [-]
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throwitaway222 16 hours ago [-]
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deep_state_shil 1 days ago [-]
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nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
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moron129 1 days ago [-]
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nonethewiser 1 days ago [-]
and another
inigyou 24 minutes ago [-]
can dang and tomhow please just ban 5 hour old accounts from commenting in politics threads, it's exhausting
kevinthedigger 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ball_of_lint 16 hours ago [-]
Same. I wonder if there's something I don't understand here? But afaict it doesn't seem to involve autistic people in particular?
hereme888 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kevinthedigger 20 hours ago [-]
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spullara 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
TurboTveit 20 hours ago [-]
Do you regularly laugh at poor people?
nickyisonline 21 hours ago [-]
Laugh in what way?
logseman 20 hours ago [-]
13000 euro a year is the yearly drinking budget of an outgoing San Francisco resident.
spullara 21 hours ago [-]
i wouldn't characterize it as very expensive or even expensive. it is in fact super cheap. even in italy.
OsrsNeedsf2P 20 hours ago [-]
Maybe help donate then? 13000 Euro is a lot of money to poor people
spullara 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Computer0 20 hours ago [-]
Capitalism is the single most powerful destroyer of the world the world has ever seen. It remains undefeated.
cm2012 20 hours ago [-]
Do you think people in the world, on average, have better life outcomes now or a hundred years ago?
inigyou 22 minutes ago [-]
Why is that the comparison? It should be "do you think people in the world, on average, would have better outcomes today if there wasn't capitalism?"
gnuplustoejam 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Do you see how a removal from a private app store, while bad, is different from an arrest or a sanction?
zmgsabst 24 hours ago [-]
Parler experienced a government coordinated shutdown across app stores and infrastructure providers like AWS.
I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make, when their infrastructure (AWS) was shut off due to the government labeling them terrorists due to some users (who Parler had banned) using the service.
inigyou 24 hours ago [-]
Did the government force AWS to shut them off or just ask nicely? Hard to say. Any message from the government comes with implied threats. We'd only find it which was the case, if AWS had refused and the government had either punished AWS or not.
Can you see how it's different from an explicit sanction or an arrest?
phainopepla2 23 hours ago [-]
In some ways (not all, of course) an implicit demand from the government is worse than an explicit one. An explicit one at least puts all the cards on the table.
inigyou 13 hours ago [-]
It's impossible to know if the government intended a threat. Do you see the difference between a government worker using the report button on twitter, and the police arresting someone?
fg137 24 hours ago [-]
I think these are very different things, private company's actions vs government actions.
"HN cheering", true or not, doesn't really matter in the end, either.
the first few sentences of this link, and their about page, and their services page all make it clear what they do. i am unsure of where you confusion comes from.
mrtesthah 1 days ago [-]
They host blogs and digital infrastructure for autonomous anarchist/leftist collectives and are deeply connected to global free speech movements since their founding in 2001. If you expect to see a two sentence
mission statement or a product summary, you’re going to be disappointed.
mmaunder 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
adjejmxbdjdn 1 days ago [-]
From HN guidelines:
> Off topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
So you’re incorrect. HN isn’t off bounds for all political posts, but yes, they do have to have an “interesting new phenomenon”.
The U.S. sanctioning a decades old technology collective is clearly new. Whether it’s “interesting” I can’t speak to because that’s subjective to every individual, but that’s where the useful voting system comes in.
InsideOutSanta 1 days ago [-]
> For the majority of organizations one can tell what they do in a few seconds
Have you ever opened the website of any B2B software/services provider? By your logic, they're all the most suspicious people on earth, because none of them seem to be able to explain what they actually do.
drngdds 1 days ago [-]
There's an "About" link on the top of the page and if you click it it fully explains what they do and for who in the first sentence of the first paragraph.
You're getting a negative response because ignoring that and implying that they're secretly doing sketchy things makes it look like you're doing bad faith criticism
mrtesthah 1 days ago [-]
Reason.com is political. EFF.org is political. Anti-ChatControl sites are political. Do you flag those, too? If not, why not?
epolanski 1 days ago [-]
They aren't?
They are very clearly providing IT support for free to anti fascist organizations.
ecshafer 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
4MOAisgoodenuf 1 days ago [-]
In the United States, your example is explicitly protected by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. It is the legal defense of arms manufacturers who's product is sold legally and in good faith but is used by a third-party for illegal actions.
Rather than a vague insinuation that this group has taken some action deserving of economic blackballing, perhaps you could point to some specific action this group has done?
sailfast 1 days ago [-]
Sure you can. Gun makers do it all the time!
forestrywat 1 days ago [-]
Which terrorist groups, specifically? And what support are they offering specifically?
You say provide tools for communication. Presumably that's every communication platform worldwide - almost undoubtably some sort of terrorist has used each of them.
ecshafer 1 days ago [-]
They provide services to PKK which is a terrorist group, specifically.
dam_jackalopes 1 days ago [-]
The PKK is in the process of disarming. If this decision is based on the PKK specifically, the timing seems strange.
dirasieb 24 hours ago [-]
so you admit they are still armed
forestrywat 16 hours ago [-]
Which services, and where is the evidence they do so?
mrguyorama 1 days ago [-]
Can you demonstrate that? What evidence is there that they have provided services to PKK
cholantesh 1 days ago [-]
>They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups.
As per a government who puts cycling and expressing distaste for inflation in the same camp.
jasonlotito 1 days ago [-]
> So I don't think this is as innocent as they seem.
Well, they are innocent until proven guilty.
> They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups.
By all means, present something that shows they are knowingly supporting terrorist groups so we might judge for ourselves.
I mean, we have organizations that supported the January 6th terrorists that haven't had anything done to them, so I'm looking for something more serious than murder, storming the capital, riots, attacking the police force, and attempted assassination of a Vice President.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
> they are innocent until proven guilty
In modern US law this is incorrect, it is now guilty until proven innocent, and then still guilty after that.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Without judging this or trying to axiomatically derive the logic, I think the claim here is that a/I knowingly and deliberately provides services to the PKK, which the US and the EU designate as a terrorist organization.
agentcoops 1 days ago [-]
It’s more than that, I think. I read through the various government statements as I was curious about rationale and precedent: the other two groups impacted by the order are rather unambiguous extremists, so understandable. In the extended justification for this a/I group, the US gov lists a large number of US and EU “Antifa” groups that variously leverage their services, including one that the individual recently arrested for wiping his phone is meant to be connected to. It suggests to me this was the result of some considerable network analysis and that the intent is to now have stronger legal tools to go after those groups.
I think that second (speculative, of course) step would be the more worrying precedent: if the use of technical infrastructure also used by designated groups was formally made to be incriminating/right-waiving. Why wouldn’t that apply to Signal, for example? The OP suggests the dividing line should be between true infrastructure open to all, including unsavory actors, versus tools that advertise services to a particular faction. It’s not an entirely disagreeable distinction, but I think in practice it’s rather fuzzy (Moxie of signal is/was rather far left himself, if I recall).
EDIT: Re-reading the document, the state department emphasizes that a/I “manually vets all potential users.” OP’s distinction stands for now.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I share most HN'ers priors about this administration and its motives and am commenting positively, not normatively, and only about the specific claim the Treasury Department made.
Signal doesn't knowingly and deliberately provide services to any organization, let alone one formally designated by the US and the EU. The whole point of Signal is to eliminate all pretenses of the service knowing who its users are or what they're doing. To the extent that's also true of Autistici Inventati, the OFAC designation is invalid.
agentcoops 1 days ago [-]
Yes, I originally only meant to note that in the extended statement on a/I the PKK isn’t mentioned and the focus is rather on a network of “antifa” groups [0]. With respect to your legal point, I reread the document and we’re in agreement: the state department goes to lengths to demonstrate that a/I “manually vets all potential users.”
I feel much more confident saying that regardless of the validity of the underlying legal argument, this administration's messaging (on everything) is unhinged and partisan. I'm purposefully not reading into or out of what they're saying.
13 hours ago [-]
feshbach 13 hours ago [-]
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jasonlotito 1 days ago [-]
My understanding is that this is only coming from the US government. Do we have any reliable information to back this up? Because if it's just the US government, I can safely assume it's all lies.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
I have no idea, but --- non-normatively --- there is some signal to be gleaned from this particular provider being targeted and not other, better-known and more systemically important ones.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
The signal is only that they are small enough the collateral damage is not too great for the government to bear.
24 hours ago [-]
dudefeliciano 23 hours ago [-]
The question stays the same: “are you antifa or are you fa?”
redsocksfan45 21 hours ago [-]
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rvz 1 days ago [-]
> Our financial strategy relies exclusively on voluntary donations.
That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term. Sure after this news they will get lots of donations, but long term it is not something that is realistic.
Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
[0] *Unless you now know why this collective needs crypto more than ever.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term
they've been around 25 years, which is nothing to sneeze at
xyzal 23 hours ago [-]
> Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
There are many of us who do not live in the US, so many still can. Just not through paypal.
culi 18 hours ago [-]
That's not how US sanctions work. When the US sanctions something, nobody is allowed to donate to them. Basically any country that trades with the US (most) has to follow according to their trade deals. Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers
inigyou 21 minutes ago [-]
I'll happily accept being sanctioned by the US. I'll wear it as a badge of honor, and then I'll start paying cash for everything.
2legit2quit 15 hours ago [-]
> Any bank that wants to be in SWIFT must block any transfers.
Given that SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and Italy's major bank is one of the 24 banks on the SWIFT board, how does this "blockade" in SWIFT happen? Is the inference that all of the banks bow down to the US, even though the US only represents 2 out of the 24 banks on the board?
The US can say any bank that does business with SWIFT may not do business with the Federal Reserve. We all know who will win that battle - the one where the money is, like always.
rireads 10 hours ago [-]
The capitalist mind cannot comprehend this
1 days ago [-]
tokai 1 days ago [-]
Maybe they should try couping the Italian government, rename themselves to Ragazzi Orgogliosi. That should help.
In threads about the Russian war if you mention that the US has done worse your comments are removed and people complain about "whataboutism".
In this thread, on the other hand, people keep bringing up that the US has done worse but those comments are upvoted and there is no mention of "whataboutism" in the entire thread.
inigyou 24 minutes ago [-]
This is a thread about bad stuff the US did, so bad stuff the US did is not off-topic here.
etc-hosts 23 hours ago [-]
This is getting too big to ignore and is leaking into mainstream popular culture.
In the most popular streaming show atm (new season of Reacher), a main plot point is CIA and State Department and Green Berets involvement in a village massacre in Indonesia in the 90s (in the land of the tv show), this is of course a reference to the CIA and State Department indirectly murdering 1 million Indonesians 1965-1966.
TiredOfLife 23 hours ago [-]
> US has done worse
They have not.
r053bud 23 hours ago [-]
They have.
henearkr 22 hours ago [-]
Which of Trump or Putin is worse is irrelevant. Trump's US is maybe on par with Putin's Russia, maybe better or maybe worse (which depends on which aspect is looked at). That cannot deter us from fighting against what is bad in both of them.
This is NOT a competition nor a championship about which dictatorship can inflict the most pain and destruction to the world.
Nobody is rooting for such a "winner".
Criticize all the despicable actions of such stinky regimes, regardless of if they are in Putin's Russia, in Trump's US, or wherever else.
We are NOT in a race to the bottom.
We shall never forget our values, as Humans and as Earth-dwellers.
senderista 23 hours ago [-]
the asymmetric deployment of "whataboutism!" is hypocrisy about hypocrisy
elmer2 4 hours ago [-]
noblogs encourages and hosts violence and other terrorist activities.
They doxx people they don't like and pass around kids schools/addressess/home addresses/names of spouses, for the sole purpose of violence.
They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there, which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.
I've been following this 'collective' since 2016.
It's about time the US did something about it.
giov4 3 hours ago [-]
>noblogs encourages and hosts violence and other terrorist activities.
how does it encourage it? can you show an example?
>They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there
what does this mean?
>which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.
Which group? reference? link? examples?
>I've been following this 'collective' since 2016. It's about time the US did something about it.
well this explains a lot about your point of view, but can you expand or prove your above statements?
inigyou 19 minutes ago [-]
Laser pointers are the limit for violence, huh? I have to assume you're talking about shining them in people's eyes because I don't see otherwise how that could be considered violence at all. Did you know common laser pointers are considered eye-safe because they are weak enough that your blink reflex protects your eye from damage?
If a radical group sets up shop on I2P, are I2P users and devs now terrorists? This is a problem.
What about Monero users/devs? Veilid? Tox? Signal?
I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you. In this very year UN and ICJ officials have been targeted in a similar fashion though. When the pax americana ends like this, I don't know what else is needed for EU and Asia to raise tougher walls around the woes of any idiot hyped enough to be voted by USA citizens.
That's certainly a take.
My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.
Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?
I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.
Despite the memes, the UK is not the 51st state, which is both why it was able to make the fine (1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over the UK) and why it's not able to enforce it (the UK doesn't have jurisdiction over 4chan).
It's a matter of enforcement. And who would want to enforce 1st amendment?
The entirety of the US constitution carries zero weight to the court system of the nation that the founders of those United States, ahem, engaged in unlawful violent treason against, with the assistance of foreign powers (France, then Spain and the Dutch Republic). :P
tpb.party
https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole
BTW someone should probably check in on moot once in a while to see if he’s ok lol. Strange bedfellows and all that.
2. Untrue. I heavily used both (not as a right-winger; just as a decades-long anonymous imageboard user who sometimes finds it fun to rile people up in /pol/ boards). 8chan's was a lot worse and was shut down for a reason.
The neoconservative wing of the Republican Party had a hardon for war before the attack. What they couldn’t agree on was where… an invasion of Colombia under pretext of drugs, or something in the Middle East after the second intifada.
Once the planes hit, they could all agree where. South America was forgotten for a while.
Any direct connection to 24 would likely be tenuous, if only because (a) MIC propaganda is all over Hollywood even in peacetime, and (b) dark (i.e., on-camera physical interrogation) political thriller was already a high-selling genre in 2001.
There was also an art exhibition called 'The B-thing', before the attack: https://publicdelivery.org/gelitin-b-thing/
Then there are reports of FBI expelling from the USA some 100+ foreign art students after the attack.
There are a lot more dots to connect in this case, so it gets even easier but if people expect to be told the truth by a news anchor it can take 75+ years - that is the word we live in.
> On October 23, 2001, U.S. representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) introduced House bill H.R. 3162, which incorporated provisions from a previously-sponsored House bill, and a Senate bill introduced earlier in the month.[5] The next day, October 24, the Act passed the House by a vote of 357–66,[6] with Democrats comprising the overwhelming majority of "no"-votes.
> The bill, which removed most of the changes from the Senate version, passed Congress on March 2, 2006, and was signed by President Bush on March 9 and 10 of that year.
This is something Biden was proud of, and confirmed in his own words many times
https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-joe-b...
The surveillance state has bipartisan support.
The 24 pilot was filmed before 9/11. After 9/11, the show had to be modified because reality has become uncomfortably close to it. That included delaying the premiere and removing a scene involving an exploding passenger aircraft.
The Washington Post reported on a trend of shows about counter-terrorism and spies, on August 4 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/08/04/...
That article mentions that some of those shows relied on government consultation, with the CIA and FBI, to help with realism, etc. “24” was not one of them. “24” co-creator Joel Surnow is on record saying there was no government involvement.
Quote from the WP for context:
> Coming this fall [2001]: A new primetime drama series takes a close-up look at an elite federal agency and the dedicated men and women who hunt deadly terrorists and treacherous criminals.
> The new show's on CBS. It's also on NBC. And ABC. And Fox. Some years it's twenty-something sitcoms. Sometimes it's doctors, or vermin-oriented "reality" shows. This fall, the trend is Fed TV: No fewer than five new network series depict the exploits of people with civil-service pay grades, shiny employee ID badges and very large guns.
But it was “24” that did the most to normalize the “torture the bad guys till they reveal the plot” and other such right-wing wet dreams.
> Georgia
Ah yes, I see.
Briefly checking your comment history, it's the correct term for you as well, so what's the issue? You don't want to admit it?
First, I agree that 24 did have mainstream appeal regardless of political ideology. Pretty much everyone I knew watched it.
Second, the appeal was not solely grounded in "Torture is good". I walked out or closed my eyes on a lot of those scenes, but watched the first few seasons because I liked Chloe's character and because the the format (every episode as one hour of the same day) was novel. Also because it was something I could talk about to friends and family - back when we all consumed the same media regularly.
But if you think back to the Bush years, it really wasn't until after the Iraq war, and Abu Ghraib in particular (2004), that democrats started to come out more vocally against Fox-news approved "enhanced interrogation". It wasn't that they were also pro-torture before, but I think it felt more theoretical to Americans on both sides back in 2001.
Later on anyone who was paying attention had to confront the reality of it. That's when the sides splintered and the Fox-news machine ramped up on normalizing/praising abuse and characterizing every individual ever captured as a blood-thirsty future Bin Laden. Relatedly, Gitmo was a huge deal to the dems back then, even Obama campaigned saying he would close it (it didn't close). He may not have won the nomination without that promise though.
So it was a real dividing line for a moment, but ever since the financial mess of 2008, the democratic voter base has been more engaged on economic and healthcare inadequacies, so when those took over the news, the party was grateful to not remind people about gitmo.
I will say there were pro-torture, war-hawk dems at the highest level. That's always been a problem for dems. But the tone on the ground was very consistently anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-torture (for a moment at least).
Who doesn't like beating up bad people? It's in children's fairytale. Getting what you deserve is codified in human moral ideals since like probably cavemen times and movies today still have this theme.
I looked into this so I could call you out for spreading disinformation.
Except what I found was that this statement is factually accurate as far as I can tell. Each person had their own separate story as to why they didn't go that day.
Huh. Not sure what to make of this.
What was their rate of last minute cancellations? I suspect people in that circle frequently change plans, sometimes at the last minute, so having changed plans on that day would be unremarkable had that day itself been unremarkable.
Not to mention the first plane hit at at 8:46 am. Looking at details, none of these seem remarkable, and wouldn't have been remembered or written about if they happened the day before...
Sarah Ferguson's meeting was scheduled fot 8:45, but she was delayed by traffic after coming from an interview. ... Morning traffic in New York on a business day is not unusual and busy people miss tightly scheduled meetings because of it.
Michael Jackson performed in a concert the day before and was reportedly up late talking on the phone. I didn't see a scheduled time for the meeting, but a missed meeting after a concert doesn't seem surprising to me. Concert started at 7:40 pm according to a ticket stub photo here [1]
Larry Silverstein was reportedly double booked and kept a dermetology appointment his wife had booked after he missed one a month prior. Stuff happens, your wife books medical appointments for you without checking your calendar and you don't miss them twice.
Lutnick took his eldest son to their first day of Kindergarten. Which is something you do if you can. I didn't see any indication that he had a meeting scheduled. I'm guessing there's no consipiracy or even reporting about him going to the first day of Kindergarten for his other three children, but he probably did.
[1] https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/michael-jackson-30t...
But Wikipedia has a list of notable people who died [1]. David Angel, an Emmy winning TV writer and producer. Garnet Bailey, an acomplished hockey player. Carolyn Beug who directed the award winning music video for Van Halen's Right Now. William E. Caswell, a prominent physicist. Charles Edward Jones, an astronaut. Daniel Lewin, co-founder of Akamai. Etc. You can read the list and come to your own conclusions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_in_September_2001
Not much as the sample has (literally) survival bias.
I refer again to rational people. Bush was president of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company and chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, and was meeting with local Texans to build support for his run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His presence had nothing to do with Kennedy. At the moment of the assassination he was in Tyler, 100 miles away.
Even if, contrary to all reason, Bush was involved in the assassination of Kennedy, there would not have been any reason for him to personally be in Dallas that day.
[1] - https://youtu.be/pukqrmTm65Q?t=81
The actual conspiracy was the CIA told the Zero Dark Thirty producers that the Intel to find bin Laden came from torturing a detainee, which was a straight up lie (namely: under standard interrogation he provided the intelligence they needed...then they waterboarded him over 100 more times which provided absolutely nothing).
I can't find much left or right coverage of it, there's so much news coverage in the way.
That said:
> Canada debanked right wing truckers
Who were participating in the illegal blockade: https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/news/general/fca-upholds-2...
The government also exceeded their authority, but there's a gap between "I don't like (left/right)" and "blockade".
> multiple American platforms coordinated to silence Trump in 2021
After this happened and he was impeached twice for his performance regarding it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...
(No comment on BBC link save for this not being novel by UK standards nor specific to left/right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial)
And it probably didnt start with them
That makes them, like, the bad guys, don't you think?!
Ridiculous.
Not really, unless exchanges don't let you withdraw coins into your own wallet? It's trivial for someone to buy another coin like BTC/ETH then use it to purchase Monero via defi.
All this means eg. Signal would not be able to escape jurisdictions, because no bank anywhere relevant will endanger their SWIFT access opposing the US. Sanctioned Signal would stop providing services for everyone, since they can't pay for servers, neither being able to receive donations, nor wire any money themselves. It's similar prior situations involving payment processors (e.g. in case of Wikileaks), but has totalitarian reach affecting almost all banking globally.
In this example, Signal itself and anyone associated with it, could not have any bank accounts at all. There wouldn't be any receiving end for donations. Being on the OFAC list means any bank connected through SWIFT wouldn't allow you as customer. Current funds would be immediately frozen, which by itself would probably cause fatal disruption. The OFAC list is an extreme measure, which is why the recent abuse is such a big deal.
As mentioned elsewhere, read up on the Rote Hilfe case to see how this kinda thing plays out right now. "Antifa Ost", four people beating up (NOT murdering) Neonazis were declared a designated global terror network by the Trump admin in 2025. Those four "global terrorist" were all already in custody, on trial in Germany at the time, hardly a threat. Rote Hilfe lost their bank account, because of weak association through legal defense support. Mind you, Rote Hilfe is a traditional German political institution being only cancelled once before: 1933. And the GLS bank who cancelled their account proactively fearing SWIFT exclusion, would be considered a socialist endeavor by US standards. That's the reach of OFAC.
So, to evade sanctions, Signal would need to maintain internationally ostracized money laundering networks on the scale of global terror financing, or North Korean operations. They are not some hidden service black market, where any hosting is sufficient. Paying AWS millions for large scale, low-latency CDN infrastructure with highly suspicious finances ain't gonna fly. I assume, due to statistic correlation, considering the necessary volumes moved, it's probably simply impossible to pull off.
And of course, Signal's income is in large parts coming from various nation's registered funds, which obviously wouldn't participate in highly illegal financing. Individual donations won't cut it (and also expose any donor to being flagged for terror financing, losing access to their own accounts). Not to mention, money laundering infrastructure isn't free, so only a fraction of donations would make it anyway...
The problem here is also Signal's centralized nature. If it was built for a decentralized, self-hostable backend, where only the code itself has to escape repression, it wouldn't be as vulnerable. However, as with other decentralized projects, we likely wouldn't talk about it as hypothetical heavy loss due to wide-spread adoption and foundation of common privacy.
Signal's whole mission is to enable e2ee at scale, for the average person. OFAC listing would be the end of Signal and any similar project.
I always hoped we'd find some sort of equilibrium. A state where governments learn to tolerate some crime because fully policing them would require crossing serious lines. It's becoming increasingly clear though that governments have no limits. There is no cost they are unwilling to pay in the name of maintaining their own power.
Sometime during the Obama years I came up with the realization that the primary information flow in democracy (especially a two-party democracy like the US) isn't the commonly accepted people->government, but rather goes parties->people. The act of "choosing" a candidate makes people have an affinity for everything that politician goes on to do, even when they would have rejected most of it. Trumpism, specifically how people who considered themselves "conservative" didn't look at his abject failure of a first term and send him permanently packing in favor of someone with leadership or patriotism, has thoroughly proven this out.
Signal's design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil" which makes it good for the average user. If you actually want Session or SimpleX, which sacrifice usability for even more privacy, then you know where to find those services.
It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.
https://getsession.org
Because you connect to the network, then start sending messages to everybody continuously, a message every second, or every ten seconds, or every 100 seconds, you will, every second, or every ten seconds, or 100 seconds, be able to send a message to whoever you want, and you will not be distinguished in any way from the other network participants, even if an adversary controls all nodes but that of the person you want to communicate with. Without dummy messages, traffic analysis will always be possible.
If they knowingly and deliberately assisted the PKK in a forbidden way, there would likely have been an Italian prosecution. Since this hasn't happened, it probably isn't true.
The illegality of the PKK in the Europe is also something quite complicated. The commission have declared it a terrorist organization, but here in Sweden such declaration have no judicial meaning and we define terrorism by whether the organization satisfies objective criteria defined in our law, which the courts determine from case to case (which in Sweden means that if you send money the PKK and prosecutor brings the case and argues that they're terrorist organization, and you argue badly, and he wins, then you might be convicted, but when another guy does the same thing, and argues well, he wins); and the situation in Belgium is similarly complicated, with a legal dispute about whether PKK was a terrorist organization, which PKK won, and thus the PKK was, in Belgium, declared by a court to not be a terrorist organization.
I don't think that's true.
There are two possibilities: If you're proposing that dummy messages are in addition to normal messages, then dummy messages add noise to the signal, but over a long enough time, for known noise distribution, it is possible for the signal to be statistically significant. That depends on there being enough signal, but then things depend on signal traffic patterns, there are no guarantees.
The second possible design is that the node-to-node communication volumes for any pair of nodes is truly independent of the signal - i.e. the statistical model decides how much traffic flows from a node to another node, and that fixed amount of flow is either used for signal or for noise, and if there is more signal, it's dropped or waits. Encryption makes it impossible to distinguish signal from noise without the key known between the pair of nodes. That is secure against a passive adversary who doesn't participate in the network. However, if network users are anonymous and mutually untrusting, then the adversary can use active methods without much risk (i.e. lots of users and nodes can actually be the adversary). Every packet/message delayed or dropped also allows inference about network traffic by other users.
These methods can harden a network and make analysis harder, but they don't guarantee it is not possible.
If you have a real message, or a network maintenance message, that substitutes for a dummy message. You never send messages other than at the appointed time.
Delayed or dropped messages won't matter, since you only send a message at the appointed time. So the network is literally indistinguishable from one where you have sent no messages to all participants and to even someone with complete control of the network.
All I care about is the claim that if they can do this to A/I they'll come for Signal next. That doesn't follow.
Many EU governments care, because Turkey cares, but the problem is that Turkey's position that they're terrorists is legally iffy, so a lot of European courts disagree, and this creates a schizophrenic situation where politicians hold that they're terrorist and will claim that it's the government position, while the actual government position in the courts is that they mostly aren't and that it's a case-by-case question.
You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.
Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..
Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.
The US does not give a damn about PKK. They used the Kurdish sister organizations in Syria and Iran. They condemn PKK because Erdogan wants it.
The US would have zero issues with a Kurdish state comprising parts of Turkey and Iran that splinters the region even more.
In this context, "designated foreign terrorist organizations" is not an explanation, but a tautology. The matter at hand is how and why something got onto that list.
The antifa remark relates to the Rote Hilfe situation. In my opinion, it's an example of how populist rhetoric became a major overreach with real consequences prior to the incident at hand. Rote Hilfe had a very weak relation to "Antifa Ost" (hardly worth US attention). That's how they got cancelled: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
So the antifa moral panic is indeed very much relevant.
But decide for yourself, if "Antifa Ost" deserves US anti-terrorism attention to the extent of OFAC sanctions, or if it's maaaybe populist action... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_left-wing_extremism_tr...
Incidentally, funny how the NSU isn't on that list, hm?
And voter suppression, vote manipulation, or simply force.
I agree with you in that barring the above, there is no logical reason a vast majority of all elections should lean away from MAGA/GOP considering the state of the country.
I would imagine we might even have some "settlements" with the "DOJ" before the end of Trumps term
Any sanctioned org for just being p2p/crypto so far?
Seems you misdirect reasons.
Your rights do not matter. Laws do not matter.
If your technology is used by someone for bad, then someone trying to prevent that bad will some day come knocking. Law or not. Rights or not.
The only thing you can thus do is protect yourself. If you get taken out, that is you relying on your Rights and Laws. They dont exist and wont protect you.
* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
But I'm curious about your take on this. How would you argue the first amendment protects this?
Useless.
Why is providing people with the means to express themselves to an audience wrong? Please think for yourself; don't resort to labels.
Platforms can't be held liable for speech on their platforms for a reason. For full disclosure: I feel ambivalent about that.
I don't know of an equivalent legal protection for I2P-like infrastructure.
> no website could accept user content, ever, and you are effectively suggesting the end of public communication on the internet?
That does not follow. Just like financial services are forced to KYC, there would have to be some similar provision. For example, a site might choose not to have anonymization and then liability passes through a KYC chain. If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public. I think this probably already happens in large extent where images are scanned to avoid bad things appearing on public sites and there is already liability around that.
I know that isn't a popular position. It would change the entire character of the Internet. And it couldn't just be thrust upon people since the current contract is one of promised anonymity (even if that is probably not true wrt state actors).
To echo what you said to the other poster, that does not follow:
1. Simply repealing Section 230 would not create some kind any novel "know your poster" legal requirement that doesn't previously exist.
2. Most sites would not have any incentive to do it either, since knowing the original author's identity would not shield them from liability. In some cases it would increase their liability instead!
> If a site wanted anonymous then the burden would be on moderation before it became public.
No, for most sites the opposite would occur.
One of the big things Section 230 does is it declares that the act of moderating does not create involvement and liability for the message. It means you can block things without becoming a sorta-co-author of the things that pass the filter.
Repeal that, and sites will be forced into either (A) basically no moderation so no liability or (B) blocking 99% and letting through the safest 1% they're willing to be liable for.
_______________
Useful links:
* "Everything You Know About Section 230 Is Wrong (But Why?) " https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/29/everything-you-know-abou...
* "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act " - https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Not me, I said I was ambivalent about it; don't put words in my mouth. My words were: "there would have to be some similar provision [to KYC]". Similar, not the same. Not nothing.
Everything else sounds like you imagining/speculating about what some future provision would look like. And your imagined fears don't play into my ambivalence.
1. stillpointlab: "I'm ambivalent about Section 230. Also [other things not discussed further]."
2. applfanboysbgon: "Hey, you can't be ambivalent about Section 230, removing it would be disastrous, any website like HN would be in shambles."
3. stillpointlab: "Websites would be OK if that happened, there would just have to be some provisions around anonymity."
5. Terr_: "Where did this talk of anonymity come from? That's not what Section 230 does."
6. stillpointlab: "Who said anything about removing Section 230? I didn't say that and I wasn't talking about that happening."
7. [Error: Recursion detected]
In other words, the thread was was steered into "what if Section 230 went away" (at #2) and your reply looks as if you recognized that and proceeded to build on it.
You can't as an ISP prevent malicious actors from using your service, but you do can assist the government - in the case of the recent attacks on Berlins electricity that caused a fatality the German - to hand over the data to help assist law enforcement.
If US state-department's claims [1] are true, did noblogs.org do so – help German authorities track Terrorists or did it cover for them?
Because their statement does say nothing about the claims made by the state department.
[1] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Anyone setting up infrastructure has to consider, in the very least, how this will be used for CSAM in particular but sure, I guess terrorism too. Years ago we had The Office make a joke about this where the company website for selling paper was overtaken by child predators.
This is one reason why we have centralized infrastructure and not federated infrastructure. All the platforms we have have the capability to report content, automatically scan pictures, images and text and to respond to law enforcement. You need all of those processes.
Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada got 30 years in prison for moving a box of magazines related to the protest. He wasn't even at the actual protest.
Several people got decades in jail because the FBI successfully convinced a jury that setting off fireworks near a detention center on the 4th of july was actually detonating bombs. And that because one idiot brought a gun and shot it, they are all guilty.
It's very much not far fetched that you as an I2P node could get hit with a terrorism charge if some political enemy ends up using your node. That's on the same level of moving pamphlets for a protest.
The USG has a somewhat different description of events, and appears to have had video that they showed a jury.
> The defendants dressed in “black bloc”—dark clothing with head and face coverings that concealed their identities—designed to hide each individual’s identity but also to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts by making members indistinguishable from one another to law enforcement. Evidence introduced at trial revealed that the defendants brought eleven firearms, body armor, and eleven military-grade first aid kits with tourniquets and other items to treat gunshot wounds to the scene of the attack. [...] After ANTIFA Cell members arrived at the detention facility, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks (explosives) at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property. [...] Witnesses testified that an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song can be heard on police bodycam video yelling, “get to the rifles!” and then he opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...
Note you can see in the pictures they were definitely not just setting off fireworks "near" the detention facility, but from the camera stills its obviously intended as harassment. And "some idiot" didn't bring a gun, they were all part of a group, they brought lots of guns, and he actually shot a police officer during their "protest." Note also that the USG explicitly uses the word "fireworks", contrary to your framing.
Yeah, sorry, if you a) join a group that states it wants to overthrow the USG b) go with a bunch of members to a federal facility as part of a violent protest c) set off fireworks, vandalize everything in reach, and d) shoot a cop, you are all going to prison, and that makes perfect sense.
He did not, he shot at an officer and missed. He was also the only one of the protestors that shot.
If he was shot in the neck, why didn't the prosecution show a photo of the wound? Why are his neck and shoulder injuries a privacy concern?
What they proved is that shots were fired and that the officer involved was fine and walking around the scene after the shooting. When he said "I'm hit" another officer checked on video and said "your good your good your good".
https://prairielanddefendants.com/what-really-happened-at-pr...
I'm not going to just take the word of anybody in the US government without listening to the other side. The description on "Episode 10 Who Attacked" is the other side.
Much better than Signal, the platform of choice for politicians, feds, and security researchers for their personal and private communications.
But only NSA/CIA level access and local law enforcement or politicians. So unless you are a terrorist or high level threat it wouldn't be accessed.
Per the Treasury Department:
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
"Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism." https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
Per the State Department: "The A/I Collective provides encrypted tools and services to numerous violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and around the world. Many of these groups have relied on the A/I Collective’s digital infrastructure to plot or incite violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish official communiqués by U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure, along with instructions for building improvised explosive and incendiary devices – all routed through a network of foreign servers intended to conceal criminal activity from law enforcement." They then go on to list the specifics. (https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...)
How is Signal not providing material assistance if someone alerts them that “terrorists” are now using their platform?
Sanctioning providers who host political groups, even if it’s extreme politics, is something new. It’s reminiscent of the Bush admin going after Indymedia, which was a huge violation of free speech and was obviously politically targeted. It’s extra ridiculous because we fund and supply the PKK (via their YPG affiliates), which makes this look like a fig leaf for the real goal of disrupting left politics. I don’t like the radical left, but I don’t think this is constitutionally allowed.
I feel like we need some bold lines drawn around this to make sure this power doesn’t get misused.
It is not unprecedented though. The US military empire always was supported by the business empire and corruption empire. Trump and his BigBro Epstein party-goers just make it much more obvious. In reality the terrorists are in the US government primarily.
No moral ground to stand on? Would you say that about Amazon who supports the US regime, which is in the business of bombing Iranian schoolgirls? Is that less terrorist?
This collective of course has much more of a moral ground to stand on than indeed Amazon.
Strictly speaking, unintended collateral damage of civilians in a war does not fulfill the definition of terrorism. The attack on Iranian school was to the best of my knowledge a mistake stemming from old intel. Terrorism is deliberate attack on civilians to achieve a political goal.
Bloomberg piece on this topic:
>An Analyst’s Missed Remark Surfaced in Deadly Iran School Strike Probe
>An analyst's missed remarks and US intelligence systems that weren’t connected to one another are among the missteps that investigators have surfaced while probing the cause of a missile strike on an Iranian school that killed an estimated 120 children, people familiar with the matter said.
>Years before the US attacked Iran at the end of February, an intelligence analyst examining information about potential future strike targets in Iran noticed changes at a site the US had previously characterized as a naval facility belonging to the elite wing of the Iranian military in Minab city in the southeast of the country. It was, in fact, now an elementary school.
>The analyst remarked on changes at the site in a digital intelligence tool, but that tool wasn’t linked up to the official intelligence database that the US uses to develop strike targets and the information was never conveyed to military commanders, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named discussing sensitive matters.
https://archive.is/LNMMf
If you're going to go down the semantics route, every word needs proper inspection. You're focusing on only one of them, "terrorism".
Luckily though, we don't need to; the US does more than enough intentional extrajudicial executions of civilians on its own. Even just considering one particular area where it does them, and then only the ones we know about, we're at about 227 civilian executions in just the last few years [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/29/us/us-caribbe...
I love how governments (in the west) are absolutely incapable of campaigns of terror.
I think that when you’re bombing thousands of targets, a 0.1-1% targeting error rate leads to dozens of unintended collateral hits (and thousands of civilians dead) — and is among the many reasons wars are horrific.
That’s exactly the sort of bureaucratic mistake which gets exposed via wartime mishaps.
A mistake in a completely unjust war.
And what about the fishing boats we are bombing in the Caribbean and the Pacific? Not even the pretense of a legitimate war in that situation.
careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go. i guarantee more terrorism-related content is discussed via those providers than a/i.
we should probably also go after internet service providers, too. maybe the companies that make the fiber optics?
(has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)
>careful, if you start going after neutral infrastructure providers, that means google, amazon, microsoft, meta, and more will also need to go.
No, because they actively respond to removal request. Open by default, supporting request for removal.
The difference comes in when you are open by default and tell the US to fuck off when they ask you to stop supporting terror groups.
i am replying specifically to your comments about neutral providers (that's why i quoted the part of your comment that i did)
>No, because they actively respond to removal request.
there is still orders of magnitude more conversations going through the providers i mentioned, related to terrorism/csam/etc., which is simply not reported or not known. right now, meta is facilitating significantly more terrorism than a/i.
in any case, this isn't really about terrorism. they've just overused the child-safety angle lately, and needed to drum up some anti-privacy/anti-encryption using the terrorism card.
sure. whatsapp is used by literal billions of people. add in a few more billion people through facebook, instagram, gmail, outlook, amazon.
would you like me to walk through the statistics calculations? or can you extrapolate from the billions of users? now make a guess how many people a/i has facilitated. a few thousand? a hundred thousand?
>Even if that were true how would that change anything? They still comply with the US government and their mission statement isn't to empower, protect, support political extremists.
because it demonstrates that the goal is not to curtail terrorism.
yes
lets start with this: how many terrorists do you think a/i has helped?
emphasis mine. my assertion is that whatsapp, a neutral provider, facilitates more terrorists than a/i. i.e., the US should consider sanctioning them, if we are to follow nonethewiser's recommendation.
(to be clear, i'm on the pro-privacy, pro-encryption side, and don't actually think the US should be sanctioning whatsapp)
But the analysis isn't based on "which service enables more terrorists". By that logic, forget WhatsApp, forget Signal; Google Mail probably runs the table in absolute numbers. But all three of those services assist terrorists without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
The claim is that A/I can't say the same thing.
>without any deliberation or really even actual knowledge on the part of the providers.
i think we agree that this is an implicit requirement of being considered a neutral provider.
so, to claim neutral providers should be subject to sanctions implies that a provider who does not know or purposefully facilitate terrorists should still be subject to sanctions (gmail, whatsapp, signal, amazon, etc.)
then we got sidetracked by me being asked how can i possibly know that meta/google/etc. facilitate more terrorists than a/i. which i, and seemingly you, agree is a pretty obvious answer given the scale of the organizations. and i was asked to "walk them through that".
Do you think providers should be allowed to refuse service because they don't like certain customers views?
Or for that matter, where they get their air?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…
I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.
Gotta reign this insanity in.
the double-negative might be confusing, so we can reword it to: "And even if they were neutral, the US should sanction them for supporting terrorism"
that's the part i quoted and my comment is about.
Or since ONU has declared illegal the occupation of territory in West Bank, will US sanction Israel?
Or will the United States only sanction those who simply see things differently from them?
Did they? There's a lot of implication with that "if", and I saw someone else point out (albeit rudely) that anything that may have supported them was taken down.
you might ask who is right; the groups like google providing services to the us military, or the groups providing services to those opposing the us military.
We'll see if the Bush- and Obama-style thoughtcrime back in action will lull USA citizens and make them forget the gas price.
[0] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/4a3850cc-9186...
Woah, with radical statements like that, we might have to go after mutual aid groups, PACs, and churches.
But they are not choosing to support the PKK.
They accuse it of being “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”
The far left is a terrorist group? Where are all these violent "antifa cells"?
They labeled this groups as a terrorist organization so they could claim that anyone protesting the fascist Trump regime will easily be labeled terrorists and thrown in jail without a trial.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Email, chat, websites, blogs - these are all speech! A/I's overt political statement (that you are indicting them for) points to their primary interest being to facilitate political speech - a type of speech with some of the strongest protections (that whole "assemble ... and petition the Government" thing)
Beyond that, they're presumably a neutral conduit like every other service provider. If some users of their services are communicating to coordinate crimes, then unless A/I is getting directly involved in those conversations (with the government producing hard evidence of this), it's the exact same dynamic as every other email/hosting provider.
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
That's why the US Constitution Americans know is a few pages long, while the one actual US judges, lawyers etc. use is a massive 3,000 pages long volume. That's what it takes to rhetorically weasel oneself away from most of what those few initial pages do say.
From a normative what ought perspective, a rationalization from an institution that has been slowly chipping away at our Constitutional rights is not particularly compelling. "Bad facts make bad law" is a saying for a reason. You're certainly not the first to casually disregard the freedom of speech!
So make no mistake, this action here is still fundamentally about speech - regardless of the routine legal hack of focusing on the concrete embodiment of said speech to sidestep a restriction on policing the speech itself. A/I is providing a platform for speech to these other groups, which seems eminently reasonable to me. Accepting the government's arguments here would imply accepting that it's also illegal to read what a terrorist group has written, as you would be giving them "material support" by helping their writings reach you by transiting your network and processing them with your computing device.
Which is why I said "weak men create hard times". It is difficult work to look at people you disagree with and acknowledge they too have rights, especially in the face of the powerful pushing rationalizations otherwise. But it's necessary work, lest the next time political winds shift you find yourself staring down the business ends of same exact pointy sticks that you had been cheering on.
https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10083/2
Very curious. My latest submission is the video of Larry Ellison with the "The police will be on their best behavior[,] Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on". (It was triggered by a piece on TheOnion.)
Turns out, other people had been recording events, so that a covering narrative may not prevail over the truth.
What is this?
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.
It also says their manifesto was written in 2002.
You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
they are a group of people providing services to activists. services include email, web hosting, chat, and other anonymity services. (see https://www.inventati.org/services/)
If you knew people who actually did actions, they'd be right in not telling you about their actions until they really really trusted you to defend them with your life. Loose lips sink ships when you're going against a government.
> The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.
I don't see anything wrong with that. They make 0 money from this. It's 100% run by volunteers. They don't support any orgs that could afford to do it themselves.
It's like if a group of you and your friends got together and gave tech support to any orgs that care about something you're passionate about (e.g. ending FPTP voting)
Did I say there was something wrong with that? No. Let me repeat what I said: "In this case the US State Department is accurately reciting what this organization says about itself openly". Do you disagree with this statement?
The State Department's words are not A/I's.
If opposition to fascism isn't centrism then what is?
Okay, so the chamber of commerce is a radical organisation, got it.
How could you possibly equate those?
Declaring that the State Department's language is "accurately reciting" is equating.
From it:
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
I suspect they have some "not mainstream" political views; although I think understanding what these views are requires more in-depth reading of the blogs that they host.
How much more specific can you get?
I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.
Good?
That will depend on what the bearers will want to mean with it, as usual.
Yeah we should ban any non-mainstream political views and designate them as terrorist
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
It follows that those hosting them are chased
I oppose fascism.
That does not magically infuse into my brain mysterious connections to groups of people, nor instantaneous knowledge and mastery of tactics from nazi groups...
That would be actually kind of cool, but no, sorry to disappoint you.
It provides email accounts, mailing lists, blogs, websites, chat and VPN access.
> We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism
They don't receive any money for this. It's 100% volunteer services.
That’s a very different situation compared to the standard “sign up with your email here”. The provider is responsible because they picked their clients, rather than their clients picking them.
If the bartender decides as a rule "first of all, if they seem uncertain on their legs it is already a no", again that is just a codification of the former.
EDIT: a better simile would be if guns were giving away for free. You can see how that could be construed as increasing the responsibility of the provider if a receiver then does something illegal with it
No, with these limited elements. The filter may just be "of course I will not provide my (free) service to people that may use it in what I call a repugnant way".
When you know Harry is a rogue CEO, say a misinformation spreader or the issuer of unethical products, and you refuse to work for it, to provide it your services: does that make you an "activist"? Many people will call it "just the normal right thing to do". This is similar to people here calling certain positions "centrist" or "extremist" - and that entirely depends on how those positions are interpreted beyond their dumb (not telling) label, and on the dumb labels over said labels.
It’s absolutely not a normal thing to do for entities that want to use the “we are just infrastructure, our users are responsible for their actions” excuse.
In fact, such entities (e.g. power grid, telecom) are often legally prohibited from choosing their clients, and in exchange aren’t held responsible for what their clients do with their services.
So if you had a hammer in your yard, and somebody took it and misused it, you would not be responsible, but if you gave it to your neighbour and he used it to crush a skull, you the owner of the hammer would be responsible? It is clearly at least the opposite. Abstract from the "paid service", but see that.
The rule you propose (filtering would create responsibility) makes no sense. Try to show why it would be so, maybe.
And the platform hasn't done any killing. They merely provide email etc. Are we going to sanction road builders too because a murderer has driven on their road since 1984?
Meanwhile the SDF, the armed wing of the PYD, follows the same ideology as the PKK and was trained in military tactics by the PKK, and was among our chief allies against ISIS. They fought alongside US soldiers and we even supplied them with small arms.
The history of the PKK is complicated and the state they struggle against has a long history of genocide and (more recently) outright dictatorship. The relation of these countries to the PKK isn't ultimately determined by the PKK's history, morality, ideology, or even the use of terrorist tactics per se.
If you're curious about the bigger picture, there's actually an organized movement whose aim is to "de-list the PKK" as a terrorist organization, and that's probably a good place to start: https://www.peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/activities/delist-t...
There are also some books and some academic papers on the history of the PKK and their ideology. Those written by independent academics are generally neither fully condemnatory nor exculpatory towards the PKK, but give a clear sense of how the term "terrorism" and its use is at least contestable, geopolitical, etc. And any familiarity at all with the history of the conflict makes it clear that the Turkish government is likewise guilty of state terror conducted against Kurdish civilian populations in Turkey for generations now.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/11/12/donald-trump-ahmed-al...
"Al-Sharaa, who until recently was known by his alias "al-Julani," was a longtime jihadist who was part of the ranks of organizations associated with al-Qaida and ISIS, and even orchestrated an attack against Israel – milestones that led to his designation as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" by the US, with a reward of approximately $10 million for information leading to his capture. President Trump decided to lift the sanctions on al-Sharaa, who has transformed into a political leader following the collapse of the Assad regime in December, when he assumed Syria's presidency as the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham."
You should never take the "terrorist" label at face value.
The US funded the Mujaheddin in the 80s in Afghanistan. Their first moves upon receiving the weapons was to throw grenades through the windows if Girls' schools.
They began as the "useful lackey", and the US lost control of the Wahabist movement that was amplified to fight Communism. Then they were "freedom fighters" to the religious extremists, and "terrorists" to fight a war against.
In your own example, Al-Sharaa(a product of weaponizing Wahhabism) did actual terrorism, and then was able to squeeze back into the "useful lackey" position, like many "terrorist"s have before him.
I see people posting links to x.com which he uses to promote those views as well as platform other hate groups calling for violence and genocide against immigrants, trans people, etc.
Do acts gain moral validity under color of law alone?
You see it everywhere.
[1] https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...
a) According to that article, what it seems they are about:
> Its manifesto describes the project in explicitly political terms. A/I is antifascist, anti-capitalist and antimilitarist. It promotes free software, encryption, pseudonymity and the independent circulation of knowledge and cultural work. It reserves its limited, volunteer-run resources for people and projects broadly compatible with those principles rather than businesses, political parties, organized religions or institutions already possessing the means to make themselves heard.
b) And the issue U.S. has with them:
> The United States alleges that A/I supplies specialized digital architecture, encrypted communications and hosting to antifascist groups and other radical movements, including organizations already designated by the United States.
Claiming to be anti-fascist doesn't actually make them anti-fascist nor excuse them from breaking laws.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
Is there a way to not exist within capitalism and fascism while opposing it? You speak about it like this is some hypocrisy on their part. Is it not the rhetorical equivalent of "oh, you're drowning?? but you're IN WATER.."?
> Maybe not violently, but hardly can one expect sympathies, especially from system itself.
I would never expect the law to be sympathetic to anyone. I want the law to be fairly written, and equally applied. But unfortunately we're living in a time when you can get a life sentence for photocopying an anti-ice zine.
I laughed so hard at that. Best argument is good argument but funny.
I don’t think antifa is an kind of organized anything
But I can say with certainty that people claiming that title smashes the shit out of property and people for a few years post Floyd where I’ve been in various areas of the west coast
Some are probably genuine do-gooders who oppose fascism. Others appear to be fascists themselves in that they demand you agree with them or carry out property destruction and physical violence if you dont
Here is one of many examples:
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3...
Now since "potential" is not a crime, list the acts that merit the label.
And surely those swastika carriers are getting similar sentences... right?
Storm the capital to overthrow an election, get a pardon. Photocopy an anti-ice zine, get life in prison. Makes sense.
Uh… then WTF are they against?
Also—terrorism is a vague term and defined by the authorities. I’m curious what terrorist acts poster thinks Antifa will commit or has committed.
Could have been a false flag to discredit antifa. What happened to safe harbor?
At least one of these things is not like the others. Why are peaceful protests against "Cop City" (Atlanta's proposed police-training center) lumped in with violent attacks on infrastructure? This isn't the first time either - Samuel Tunick, the man who was charged with destruction of evidence for giving his duress pin to the CBP agents, was being investigated for his connection to the Cop City protests.[1]
And as others have said, what does it say about the current US admin that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists? I will say, at least unlike Cop City protests afaik, Rose City Antifa seems willing to use violence to accomplish their goals.[2]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/23/cop-city-pro...
[2]: https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/statment-on-strategy-and...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> on energy infrastructure
that's not violence
Second best thing is give them money ASAP since they're going to be unable to receive it in two weeks.
Google Search yields a very small amount of third party support for the PKK, all unreachable now.
I cannot find any evidence at all and neither can LLMs that this organization has ever directly supported the PKK or hosted a PKK website.
https://archive.fo/e8Gss
> The State Department on Wednesday designated three groups based in Europe, including two that advocate Palestinian rights, as transnational terrorist organizations.
> The move is part of the Trump administration’s fight against what it calls a “resurgence of far-left political terrorism” worldwide, a focus that many security experts say is disproportionate.
> In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.
a/I collective in the OP is the third on this list.
> based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world
Designating A/I Collective a terrorist group is different as it is not directly supporting violence, but it is providing free services to people who do, and it says it provides services to groups its aim is to "provide support exclusively to individuals or groups we feel we have an affinity with.". On the other hand their terms forbid "military use" which is broadly defined enough to rule out terrorism.
I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups, n the other hand, unless they have been going out of their way to support violence in some way I do not see reasonable grounds for banning them. Lots of commercial services have dodgy users. My fear is that is is heading in the direction of "if you do not hand info to the US authorities on demand you will be deemed a terrorist"
https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/palestine-group-attacks-raf-...
Its definitely not OK to vandalise things, and if is not terrorism what is it? War? In which case expect the military to shoot back.
What about their attack that disabled a police officer mentioned in this thread. That is an attack on her body.
You might disagree: the fact that you mention the military "shooting back" when we're discussing a jet-engine being sabbotaged suggests that you believe a state is allowed to be / ought to be disproportionate in its violence towards its citizens.
That is in no way a good faith interpretation of what I said.
During a 2024 raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, Samuel Corner—a Palestine Action activist—struck police sergeant Kate Evans in the back with a sledgehammer while she was on her knees arresting another activist. She suffered a fractured lumbar spine, was off work for three months, and later had to give up her rank. Corner was convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm and sentenced to seven years and eight months.
Also groups protesting Islamic violence rarely drive their cars through St John’s Wood screaming “kill the Jews rape their daughters” but that’s just my own personal experience.
The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.
Seriously, sit down, make a list of incidents, including weighing the outcome of those incidents. If it's a case where an officer or a soldier did something wrong, list what happened after (court, punishment, cleared of wrongdoing, etc)
Then do the same for your favorite alternate country that you think is superior. If you want to pick team Iran or Russia, then lay it out for them. Make the same list.
Eight of the shooters were charged with depriving the students of their civil rights, but were acquitted in a bench trial.
I'm not going to make an exhaustive list of all the terrible shit perpetrated by the US government and its agents. It would be too detrimental to my health. But you choosing to bury your head doesn't prove anything either, so I guess I have one up on you.
you would do well to note that this page links directly to an entire wikipedia entry for 'US War Crimes': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
The logic seems to be that Hamas has committed terrorist attacks against Israel, and is also the government of Palestine, so anyone fighting for the human rights of Palestinian people is actually materially supporting Hamas terrorism against Israelis. That does not really track if you know anything at all about what's going on in Palestine right now, or what people's actual criticisms of Israel are.
There's no actual requirement for violence for it to be terrorism.
It's in the name. Terrifying people into compliance. Well that isn't the case here.
It even comes in the effect at the very probability of genocide occuring. Preventing new armaments being sold to Israel is thus the rational and responsible thing to do, for example what Spain has been doing by refusing the transportation of arms through their country. This off course earns you some powerful, heavily moneyed enemies.
Edit: This was an attempt to explain why civilians are spray painting Elbit's military planes.
This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.
> This is simply armed conflict.
Armed conflict by residents and citizens against the state is usually a serious criminal offense everywhere.
Does that include property in Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon? Because if the people who spray painted something are "terrorists", I want to know what the people who wiped Rafah off the face of the earth are called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah
Terrorism is widely understood to be the deployment of military force against civilian populations. Of course states do this all the time, but 'state terrorism' is basically dependent on whether politicians in country A align with country B or not; if they don't, they'll call out state abuses in country B as state terrorism, if not they'll say it's law and order.
Regardless of these nuances, extending the definition to include any kind of property damage is just laughably opportunist.
"Any kind" is quite the load bearing argument there. Let me remind you Europe is under an ongoing land invasion, which is why fucking with its defensive capabilities is unlikely to solicit much sympathies.
I think it’s worth considering that you’re much more likely to be a resident or a citizen than a state when you’re deciding how you feel about these kinds of things.
Damaging military equipment is a military end, not a political one. If it were otherwise, then a military attacking a military would definitionally be terrorism. At that point, you've removed the utility of the word "terrorism" from English and made it synonymous with "armed conflict."
Terrorism being done chiefly to change policies by terrorizing people through symbolic acts is a constrained, generally-accepted definition of terrorism.
Contrast with 9/11, where symbols of American capitalism, filled with civilians, were attacked in order to terrify people who have nothing to do with those buildings into supporting changes in policy that hurt the US.
Which is typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens…
> you are not allowed to murder unarmed soldiers,
That's also false, you can absolutely kill unarmed combatants so long as they remain combatants. Eg you can bomb an artillery crew even if they don't have sidearms.
To be eligible for capture, a combatant must generally surrender.
> typically called „arresting“ when a government does it to their own citizens
I encourage you to read up on POW camps. There are no attorneys or rights. You may work POWs. There are cases in which food and medical aid can be severely limited depending on how it is sourced. You may hold POWs functionally forever.
POWs don’t have attorneys, but they do have rights. Limiting food and medical aid is a war crime.
Of course, everybody routinely violates the rights of POWs, and only the losers ever get prosecuted.
Is it not "legitimate" in the same way to kill terrorists?
Corrections welcome if I am wrong.
I hope no one takes this seriously.
If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.
Attacking military targets is somewhere between an insurgency, partisanism, or an armed conflict.
If we let terrorism mean “any act against the state”, then people who burn police cars are the same as people who plant bombs in shopping malls.
Not consistently, and its not a clear definition.
The same groups that attacked civilians in places I have lived in also attacked military targets as part of the same strategy. Terrorism is used to threaten, divert resources from front lines, cause economic damage, etc. Civilian targets are attacked in most wars. Is a car bomb outside a military barracks that different from one in a civilian area? What about a suicide bomb aimed at a sentry on a civilian road? I was about to drive past that one. Are the civilians who were killed collateral damage from an attack on a military target or victims of terrorism?
> people who burn police cars
So people who attack a civilian target. By your own definition they are terrorists if they are doing it for political motives.
If the same group attacks civilian and military targets then the civilian targets are terrorism and the military targets are not.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".
This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.
There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.
Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".
The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.
Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.
That's the definition every undemocratic occupying power uses.
British people attacking British forces are not sabotaging an occupying or invading military.
[1]: https://tucowsdomains.com/provider-result/
Everyone's a terrorist nowadays.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
"The A/I Collective exclusively offers its tools and services to radical left-wing actors and manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure. The group has become a key node in a transnational campaign by violent and criminal far-left networks to destabilize the United States and its partners across Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond...."
"The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.
The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.
The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide."
With such strong proof as "A far-left extremist media group ... relies on A/I ... to publish official communiqués and calls to action for [various organizations]" This is what we in the business call a direct proof A/I materially supports Hezbollah terrorist actions. Clear direct link, simply because all alternate explanations are impossible. Everyone is happy that americans saved the day, again!
State Dept so in the clear that in this "This same group was recently cited in a federal criminal complaint against a domestic terrorist who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for targeting a federal building and police car with improvised explosive devices." they don't name the group nor the "terrorist" because if one would check, improvised explosive device would turn out to be a molotov.
So Casey Goonan throws molotov at a police car -> Abolition Media (the unnamed group) publishes some claims about the attack -> A/I, a comm platform provider on another continent now suddenly provides "material support for violent extremism" in the US, just because Abolition Media used its blog infra. Cool story. Despite both links being tenous at best.
And such it will be with lot of other claims in there, given that US is led by absolute clauns and psychos currently.
E le genti che passeranno Ti diranno «Che bel fior!
[...]
È questo il fiore del partigiano morto per la libertà!
Title: A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
"a: any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition. b: any tendency towards or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control (as over others within an organization)"
"rigid censorship, and forcible suppression of opposition" is what this is. As specifically and publicly declared actions against a group defining itself as "anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism".
if this isn't matching fascism oppression against anti-fa then what is it?
additionally as context the short history link with more facts is even clearer:
https://www.inventati.org/who/collective
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them.
> A/I (Autistici/Inventati, pronounced [au’tistiʧi]-[iŋ’vɛntati], or [iŋvɛn’tati]) was born in 2001 from an encounter of individuals and collectives of the autonomous anticapitalist movement interested in technology and active in the digital rights struggle. We believe that this world is far from being the best world possible. We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals.
> All of our services are provided for free, without any form of control or commoditization of the personal user data. We don’t receive any form of compensation for our work. We are volunteers exploiting the experiences we accumulated over years of technological, political and legal research while doing radical activism, and we are motivated and inspired by the principles of solidarity and self organization.
From their about page:
> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements. Our principles are fairly straightforward: the world should not be run on money, should be rooted in solidarity, community, mutual help, equal rights and freedom, and social justice. Easy, isn’t it? We support individuals, collectives, communities and groups whose political and social activities fit within this worldview and who share with us some fundamental principles: anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-militarism. On top of that, one has to share our basic attitude towards money and the capitalistic world: a deep feeling of uneasyness and unrest.
This is like straight out of every evil villains mouth.
The slippery slope continues.
Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
(If you're opposed to antifascists what does that make you?)
You cant judge a group by its name. Otherwise, Make America Great Again is great, the National Socialist German Workers' party seems fine, etc.
Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...
Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.
Anti fascist => anti dictatorship.
Anti fascist means that you don't like fascism and that you are not going to let it happen passively.
(Tired of explaining the obvious. But I guess that somebody has to.)
A dictatorship mechanically leads to a situation where the governing group is working for their own wealth, thus in this case the "group" is the governing class. The extent and definition of that class is voluntarily limited so that wealth and power converges to them.
Now you see it? Yes that is a fascism, meaning that:
dictatorship => fascism
And the reverse stems from the "groupism" (i.e. tribalism) of fascism, which entails that you need exclude large portions of the population from the political system.
As this "group" definition becomes narrower and narrower (in order to make more wealth converge to the alleged "true humans" of its center), it becomes a harsher and harsher dictatorship, and finally a strongman regime.
fascism => dictatorship
"Antifa" factions in the Spanish Civil War ultimately did not win and accidentally enable a Spanish DPRK, but they still were perfectly capable of being and doing evil, such as committing mass rape and shooting of nuns.
If somebody says something nice and does nothing, that's good.
If at the same time somebody does something bad, that's bad.
That does not remove the evaluation (nice or bad) of the speech alone.
Saying "I am against this thing that is objectively despicable" is GOOD.
So, saying to be anti fascist is good.
Saying to be anti fascist and doing fascist things is bad.
I don't know how much more obvious things I am supposed to explain...
I guess there is no limit to it.
Anti-fascists are not concerned with the magical weight of this in-group designation. They are concerned with all things non-fascist.
You are probably thinking about the Communist factions among the Republican forces opposed to Franco.
ALL of the Republican factions were opposed to Franco and to fascism, not only the Communists.
And, besides, nobody was calling themselves "antifa" at that time, because that was damn obvious that if you were in the Resistance, you were opposed to that despicable tyrant. But they were absolutely anti fascists, all of them and not only the Communists.
And seeing slop where there is not, you are being rude to me without purpose.
Not everybody is born in an English-speaking country.
I laid down the ideas logically, maybe that is what sounded foreign to you.
By the way you are the person writing nonsensical stuff such as "Antifa is a terrorist organization", while everybody is repeating tirelessly that it is just an adjective meaning to be opposed to fascism:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483072
No any such organization exists. It is a movement, and a description one can describe one's self or actions: "anti-fascist".
But of course, their logic for sanctioning-by-association would mean that they all - Trump, Bessent, Rubio etc. - with their innumerable contacts with "violent terrorist groups and regimes" everywhere around the world, and just themselves really - should have been sanctioned, arrested, tried, or just disposed of like the US does with so many it dislikes.
However if I say all blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot blue on sight. Then I'm anti-blue. If I say all anti-blue are terrorists and it's legal to shoot anti-blue on sight, then I'm very pro-blue. It doesn't matter if there's a bunch of green over there calling itself blue. If I meant the green calling itself blue was terrorists, then I would have said that.
Oddly the US is very cozy with some modern Communists!
Were the Allied powers antifascist?
US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In general I think the free lunch of centrally hosted services and persistent doxxable identities is nearing a close. It was inevitable that governments would meddle more, and more, and more - implicitly treating communications are something other than speech due to how encompassing the digital world has become - and now here we are.
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1
There is a law (18 U.S.C. § 2339B) that says you cant knowingly provide material support for designated foreign terrorist organizations. A law firm wanted to provide financial support and legal services to some, including the PKK (the same group A/I was accused of helping). They argued the federal law violated their first amendment rights.
The court concludes that the first amendment doesn't protect your ability to provide material support including services and communication equipment and the law still stands today.
Im curious. How would you argue the first amendment protects knowingly providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480377
This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.
Adjusting for Purchasing Parity, an imperfect measure, that still only like 600 billion, significantly lower than the United States.
brother we're not discreet about it, the US is a stain on the world and the world would be more stable and better off if it disappeared, it is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world. It's not a deep, hidden conspiracy.
It also turns out that only one side of these two has the means to wage war and is also the biggest arms dealer in the world. Bully gets called mean names, boo hoo :(
We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO. We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East so it isn't constantly at war, often caused by Iran proxies.
What country is it that you're defending? Iraq? That country that invaded its neighbors, lit all the oil fields on fire, committed genocide and buried all the bodies in countless mass graves, attempted to kill the US president, attempted to blow up the World Trade Center and abducted women then raped them while recording it to show the recordings to their family to shame them? Is that what you're defending? Please tell me, I want to know.
Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
The world is not a very nice place. Make sure you know what you're defending. We have free speech in the US and people can do their own journalistic research and reporting even if it goes against our own government. These other countries don't have free speech, so they can spread all kinds of lies about the US and ban any other opinions inside their countries. That means people become indoctrinated and find it more difficult to think for themselves to get closer to what the truth is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
Maybe read how de Gaulle viewed the US "promoting peace in Europe" or how the British did after the US stole the Suez canal and kicked the British out of the Middle East.
It was an opportunity to weaken Iran which is a far worse problem in the Middle East than Iraq was. Iran had fired most of its airforce pilots for not being Islamic radical enough and with their airforce in shambles, Saddam saw an opportunity. Then Iran had to rush to rehire their old airforce pilots regardless of their dedication to the revolutionary cause or regime just to fight back.
Russia was trying to turn Iran communist, so it spread the message that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil and stealing the country blind in order to help overthrow the government.
The Islamic revolutionaries and the communists helped overthrow the government.
Then the Islamic revolutionaries executed the communists after they complained that they weren't being given an opportunity to help administer the country.
The Islamic revolutionaries were basically chanting "neither east, nor west". No capitalism taking advantage of Iran's resources, no Russian communists taking control of their government.
From there, the revolution now had a state and it could leverage the state's resources to export and fund its revolution to other countries which it has done extensively.
The spark that caused the whole thing as far as I understand, is that Britain was taking advantage of Iran's oil which kept upsetting the population until they wanted something to be done. This probably gave communists an opportunity to come in, nationalize the oil and be the saviors, before then simply becoming the new oppressors of the population.
I don't think anybody was a hero, just Brits, Russians and the US strategizing around a country that seemed lost.
> it [the US] is the biggest organizer of violence, arms dealing, murder, corruption and every single one of your leaders has been a scourge inflicted on the world
These aren't independent events. Every time we impose our imperial will on other countries, the echoes winds up being worse, with a very, very limited number of exceptions.
> but can't win'em all.
We barely win any of them, but if your attention span is only a single generation, then I can see how you might fail to notice.
The US isn't an empire. Is Germany a US territory? Is Japan a US territory? Is Iraq? No. Is Panama? No. Puerto Rico and Hawaii are happily part of the US. We don't have to use military force or economic leverage to keep them part of the US. If the US government was destroyed, we would recreate it, because it is good.
The US also championed natural rights globally, which recognizes that people have rights that are not derived from any government, but are inherent. Guess which countries reject this? China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and others.
> We barely win any of them
Winning depends on what you wanted to achieve. We don't need to win, we just need to get what we want. Our military won in Vietnam, but when conflict started again the government voted not to get involved. The Vietnamese love the US and hate China. South Koreans love the US. North Korea's leader loves the US and hates China. Japan loves the US and hates China. Saddam Hussein was killed in Iraq and we established forward bases to use against Iran. Afghanistan hates Iran. Osama bin Laden was killed. European countries and most Middle Eastern and most Asian countries are friendly with the US.
Everyone seems to recognize how Russia, Iran and China align. Our allies are getting stronger, because we're giving them tough love, while Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Iran are all getting weaker.
You can interpret all of that however you'd like, but it doesn't sound like losing. People can delude themselves all they want and the media can yell from the top of the trees how everything is awful and we're losing and so on, but reality gets a vote. Don't let other people tell you what is real. Figure it out yourself and come to your own conclusions.
Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
>Vietnam war
Lmao you've literally went in there because of your blind anti-communist behaviour after coup-ing your own "allies" of South Vietnam
>Korean War
True, not your fault, you just bombed an entire country into non existence.
>Iraq attack Iran
Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
>Iran
You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
>We have promoted peace in Europe through NATO
Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
> We're trying to achieve a similar Europe-like stability in the Middle East
By spending hundreds of billions on a country that, since its inception, has continuously been at war, an aggressor, colonizing, genocidal theocracy? Working out GREAT.
>What country is it that you're defending
Watch out, your paranoia is seeping through. The US is a net negative to world peace is the only thing that was said.
>Oh no, it couldn't be Iraq. Maybe it's Iran! Do you want to go down the list of the kind of country Iran is? How about Afghanistan? North Korea?
While none of those countries are angels, and a lot of them are also victims of political power plays outside of their own control (hint: it involves the US being so violently anti-communist that it would rather raze a country to the ground rather than see its hegemony ever so slightly threatened), I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice. It's really hard to catch up to the US on the scale of atrocities committed.
I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
>[free speech word vomit]
I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
Anti-communism was and still is highly important and critical. Comintern was aiming to conquer the Earth with global communism. It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2. The Soviet Union has caused more death on this planet as a result of its communist expansion threat than any other country in history. So yes, we are anti-communist. And you should be too.
> Do I need to remind you you _nuked_ a soon to be surrendering country for the lulz?
It was largely symbolic and demonstrative. Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using. There wasn't any guarantee Japan was going to surrender and you have the benefit of being in the future, which they did not. You should also try understanding what Japan was doing to other countries. It was horrific in every sense. They had to be stopped by any means. You could argue part of the strategy of using the nukes to end the war early was to pre-empt the Russians gaining ground in Japan and getting stuck with a second communist split like in Germany. That concern was certainly validated by Russia's push for Korea decades later. Korea would have been fine without Russia trying to gain communist control there.
> Lmao you gave Iraq billions of dollars in hardware through back channels to go around your own inclusion of Iraq as a backer of terrorism and encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran
Countries do all kinds of things to achieve their strategic aims, the US isn't remotely unique in that regard. Still, we didn't encourage him to invade Iran and we only supported him when he started losing to prevent Iran expanding into Iraq.
> You installed your own dictator and supported him in a coup because the prime minister of Iran wanted to have control over their own reserves. The fact that there's been an islamic revolution is direct blowback caused by your involvement.
It was more complicated than that. Britain was taking advantage of Iran and Russia was trying to establish communism in Iran. The new leader was essentially getting rid of elected members of government and becoming a dictator. It wasn't a good situation to start with and the US didn't want Russia to establish communism there. Even decades later when the revolutionaries took over, the communists helped them overthrow the government and then the revolutionaries executed the communists. If everyone had left Iran alone, we probably wouldn't have gotten involved.
> Peace in Europe exists because of the European union and because we've finally accepted to stop shooting at eachother. It was also the American government that pushed back against UN intervention during the Srebrenica genocide.
Peace in Europe does not exist because of the EU. The US formed NATO with the European countries. That established a mutual defense agreement so if anyone attacked anyone else, everyone would join in and defend.
> I would like you to remind you that none of these ever nuked a country twice.
I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes. Far more people died from other weapons than nukes and the US has done more to prevent the proliferation of nukes than any other country. Nuking Japan also wasn't a single country decision. Multiple countries had to agree to it, because of what Japan was doing. Nobody is going to use nukes today unless they want to end their country.
> I could also remind you of the dozens of dictatorships you've funded and supported in South America, the weapons selling to Iran, the ongoing involvement in the drug trade or the illegitimate embargoes.
You can't change the whole world at once and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. That's a communist thing. There are monarchies and dictatorships that are largely tolerable, like Singapore. Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something. I can't know every strategic plan we've ever had or why we had it.
> I don't particularly give a shit about American free speech when the US is, once again, the biggest source of political instability anywhere in the world. But I'm glad you can freely and openly support Nazis because freeze peach, it's made the world a lot better.
The US dollar, defense agreements, preserving international waterway navigation and aggressively pushing back against communism has done far more to improve the stability of countries than any time in history. The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
I think you have your feelings way too invested into your opinions. If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind, but I don't think the same could be said about you. If you don't have the freedom to change your mind, then you'll stagnate.
McCarthyism was the pinnacle of the anti-communism movement. How did that turn out, again?
> It was an open objective and part of what caused World War 2
I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
> Nukes aren't as deadly as other weapons we were already using.
How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal. Rockets weren't even in use, yet, because the V2 only came out during WWII. So, no ICBMs. At best, there was the rail gun that Germany was developing but that was a "their" weapon and not an "our" weapon.
> The US formed NATO with the European countries.
Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
> I don't know why you're so caught up on nukes.
Ok, Agent Orange? People are still dying from cancer, to this day, from that.
> Usually whenever we help some country, especially a country we don't particularly like, it'll be conditioned on something.
You're so close to getting it... "it'll be conditioned on something" is the pivotal point: As long you get what you want(ed), consequences be damned. Iran-Contra comes to mind, here.
> The USD being almost ubiquitous helps to stabilize it against many kinds of major shocks that no other country can absorb.
Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
> If you can prove anything I've said is incorrect, I'll change my mind
Everything in your statements seems to be bathed in American Exceptionalism and I'm doubting that anyone could change your mind.
It worked out fine?
> I'm pretty sure Germany invading other countries was the cause of World War 2. I don't see how you can lump "dang commies were spreading, so we had to go fight 'em" in as a justification, when there was only a non-aggression pact between Germany and the former-USSR. "Those dang commies were spreading without shooting a single bullet, so we had to stop 'em! Yeehaw!"
Many communists were armed and had guns, aiming to take over every country on Earth. The US, Japan and Germany were fighting back against them in China, Spain and Germany.
> How do you figure? If they weren't/aren't as deadly, why did the US waste the billions to research and produce them? The technology of the time had no qualitative equal.
I figure objectively. Far more Japanese were killed by fire bombings, which could be done extensively, at scale, with impunity. Nukes were important and consequential, but if the goal was simply to kill Japanese or destroy strategic targets then we already had that problem well solved.
Japan had thoroughly spread propaganda of racial superiority and being divinely chosen. One of the benefits of dropping a nuke compared to fire bombing, is that it immediately leaves a humbling impression.
> Where are you getting this revision of history from? The Western Union was created, first, by European countries and it became NATO a few years later. The US didn't form anything, it came to an already existing table.
The US created the League of Nations, which was the first known collective security organization like that to prevent a repeat of World War 1. Ironically, the idea came from a German. World War 2 demonstrated that Europeans weren't prepared to defend each other.
The Western Union was mostly an attempt to demonstrate to the US that European countries were now ready to defend each other, rather than failing. This is relevant right now, because there are concerns that Putin wants to test NATO to see if their resolve collapses the same way it did during World War 2 under the League of Nations. In order for NATO to be formed, the US had to be convinced that European countries could be active participants rather than passive consumers of defense guarantees, which is also again relevant since we've been pushing harder for European countries to meet their defense spending commitments.
> Isn't actually the inverse? It's preventing all of it's former close allies from just dumping the bonds because Dorito wants to antagonise all of your allies? Didn't the 2008 crash demonstrate it can destabilise in a major shock, just as well?
People actually traded in other currencies for USD rather than ditching it after 2008.
>It worked out fine?
Please stop giving people ammo to take the piss out of you, it really shows how ignorant you are. Although it's very fun to find a blind exceptionalist in the wild and to make fun of it: every single one of your answers has been a demonstration of how the US likes to act with impunity and pretend you have a mission of divine importance. From saying you have a "duty" to stall communism, to willingly destroying other countries for your own benefit, you remain a perfect example of why the world is better off with the US gone.
PS: if you want to count deaths from famines as "caused by the communists", whether it was the USSR or the great leap forward, at least have the decency of admitting that these countries were suffering from famines for centuries beforehand, and that they were the last famines they ever lived through at this point. Communism stopped those famines. The US is perfectly happy to let a few dozen million die every year of famines, lack of access to medication, clean water, all things it has in large amounts and refuses to give because "it's not profitable". War profiteers, murderers and dangers to the world.
So I should change my mind, because other people are wrong and it's easier to simply be wrong with them and avoid insults and attacks? What kind of weak minded nonsense would that be? Oh right, it would be communism, because that is exactly how it works. Conformance through oppression.
> From saying you have a "duty" to stall communism, Everyone has the duty to stall communism. I never said it was only ours.
> to willingly destroying other countries for your own benefit
Cuba was destroying itself fine without our help. It had help from Russia, China, Venezuela and Spain yet despite that insisted on keeping its people poor and failed to maintain basic infrastructure. It has had increasing blackouts for years before the US intervened. This is not simply the result of sanctions, it's the result of extreme neglect. Even when it had steady oil imports from other countries, their energy grid was beginning to fail.
Venezuela had openly stated it was going to attack its neighbors and had moved its military into position. It had been breaking many international laws before that and there was widespread understanding that Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries. That's on top of keeping its people poor. Terrible Chinese communist construction collapsing during the recent earthquake killing thousands of people didn't help an already suffering and poor population. Venezuela was destroying itself and couldn't even maintain its energy infrastructure either despite help from Russia, China and so on. They spend their money on military hardware that didn't do them any good.
If you are worried about Iran being destroyed, you need to get educated on Iran. Iran is so bad even people from Iran generally want this. They are evil in the most pure sense of the word and nobody likes them. To Russia and China, Iran is just a useful idiot for a strategic purpose.
> if you want to count deaths from famines as "caused by the communists", whether it was the USSR or the great leap forward, at least have the decency of admitting that these countries were suffering from famines for centuries beforehand
Isn't that true of many countries? The difference is that the communists caused it directly in multiple countries as a result of horrifically bad policies which could have been avoided by simply asking other people their opinion. Different kinds of famines in the past with different causes are no excuse for extreme negligence and ignorance. If you are excusing that, you are lost. Cubans, Venezuelans and North Koreans have been starving for decades in extreme poverty, so even if you try to excuse past famines, keeping their people poor and hungry is a choice. At least Russia, China and Vietnam all made free market reforms.
> The US is perfectly happy to let a few dozen million die every year of famines, lack of access to medication, clean water, all things it has in large amounts and refuses to give because "it's not profitable".
The US has provided aid to countless countries, but the problem in many places is that the aid then gets stolen by the dictators and redirected for profit or whatever and the aid doesn't reach the population. If you think the US hasn't done a lot of things to help other countries despite it not being profitable, that is insane.
> War profiteers, murderers and dangers to the world.
We don't generally profit from wars. World War 1 and World War 2 were extremely expensive. We didn't come out of it richer, because we stole everyone's money and resources like grinches. Do you think we made a profit on Iraq? Afghanistan? Are we making a profit from Iran? Sure the defense industry and private contractors make money, but they don't decide what the country does.
The politics of billionaires as a group is not leftism, nor is it rightism. The politics of billionaires is self-serving authoritarianism. From each camp, they pick the sides of issues that stand to increase their own power, taking stakes in them as if they are horses. They will gladly support woke groupthink as long as it's getting results, and then readily switch to supporting anti-woke groupthink when society has had enough and the winds shift.
The net effects from both phases are losses from our individual liberty, which have been accumulating for decades, and are presumably the source of your rightful anger. But please come to your senses!
There have been some television networks that also had public licensing to broadcast over the air, but that requires a broadcast license which has stipulations of serving the public interest. To maintain this license, you require locally relevant content, a variety of viewpoints expressed and they cannot distort the news.
Increasingly, shows like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and The View which are all broadcast over the air with public licenses, became more than simply interview shows with interesting guests. They became actual political hit jobs that masquerade as news while day in day out insulting politicians and spreading provably false out of context lies which people could debunk themselves with their own research. Yet, these networks used this entertainment loophole as if it was a blank check to go against the public interest broadcast license.
No doubt, people can argue the same about politicians themselves, but politicians aren't restricted to this legal standard, because they need the flexibility to achieve whatever they think the country needs at the moment. Public broadcasting is its own thing and does allow for a significant range of content, so long as you adhere to the standards.
If PBS ran a decent journalistic report investigating some problem in an administration that is in the public interest and is an entirely different thing than these political hate shows that all seem to echo the exact same thought with different words. They can exist just fine, but I fundamentally agree that it stretches the definition of what is acceptable public interest programming for over the air broadcasting.
Putting pressure on them to change up their programming is probably a good thing for the country. What ever happened to the old high quality high integrity debate shows and intellectual interviews? It's all insults or propaganda now and "I don't know, they're crazy!", so nobody understands what's going on in the world or why it's happening. It's like they make it obvious that they have no interest in informing you, because if you understand it, you can't hate it as much as they need you to.
It would be fine for those networks to continue running those shows, but they would have to move it off to some other channel that isn't broadcast using an over the air license.
As for the constitution, they are surrounded by lawyers and if they overstep something, they back off. They are applying unitary executive theory as a solution to a slow congress to address the many critical issues facing the US in our time, one of which is demonstrating to China that we can act, which is one more element of deterrence to prevent them from starting World War 3.
Companies are largely pro-American and if they feel like woke helps resolve some kinds of political tensions that have been dividing America, then they will feel like that is the patriotic thing to do. When it turns out that is actually Marxism in disguise aimed at destroying the country, they push back. These things just happen slowly and it takes time to adjust.
The solution to save the country is to write off the Constitution in favor of "unitary executive theory" aka autocracy? Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China? I'm sorry, these are nothing more than partisan rationalizations.
FWIW I was right there with you regarding the woke groupthink of the past decade, but as I said the real issue is that the political winds have shifted, and unless you shift with them you go from speaking truth to power to simply speaking for power's new buntings. I completely understood a vote for Trump 2016, I was the weirdo telling my friends he was likely to win. But by 2020 it was clear that he had no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I don't take responsibility at all".
As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
Unitary Executive Theory is not autocracy. You seem to have capacity to reason and maybe don't understand how the US works, so I'll explain. In the US, we have many states. All of the states can check the federal government, because it is the states that created the federal government to start with, as an expression of the people.
The federal government has multiple branches, which each have different responsibilities. The president doesn't control the legislative or judicial branches, only the executive branch. If the president did some kind of truly insane dictator thing, there would be bipartisan support to impeach him and it would be upheld at the supreme court. If he simply went into a restaurant and started shooting people, he would be detained, impeached and imprisoned. The illusion the media spreads that somehow the president has gained control of both legislative and judicial branches is not reality.
China does not have a military. The Chinese Communist Party has a military. In the US, the military serves the constitution, which serves the people. If the president started tearing up the constitution and somehow the legislative or judicial branches were destroyed, the military would step in. Yes, the president is the commander of the military, technically, but nobody is above the constitution.
The best way to defend the US constitution is to be an originalist which uses well established understandings of the spirit, original intention and demonstrated early application of the language of the constitution. Trump's administrations interpret it using originalist arguments.
I know that it is difficult to hold a view that media seems to hate or not support, because surely media has merit and smart people who know the truth and they will speak the truth, right? Unfortunately, we cannot give up our capacity to make up our own minds. The fact people can make hand gestures and emotional facial expressions on video now does not give them any more authority than a quote from a newspaper 100 years ago.
> Falling flat on our face in Iran creates a deterrent for China?
Rolling up on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran weakens China's proxies. It has also caused China to start to draw down on their huge oil reserves which reduces their sanction proofing which mitigates some of the risk of World War 3. Helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure is another component of that, because that is another source of oil for China that they are coming to understand cannot be relied on.
Tons of oil is moving through the strait now and none of it is Iran's, because we're blockading them. This is fine by us, because it's more oil China has to take from its reserves. Our #1 priority is stopping World War 3. Preventing Iran from getting nukes, shutting down their space program (keep in mind, Russia's space program was just hit too), limiting their ability to harass their neighbors, shutting down their drone supply chain so they can no longer support Russia's war in Ukraine and more are all side goals by comparison.
What the media says, what China says, what Iran says, what Europe says about all this... it's usually ignorant oblivious garbage. We aren't overly motivated to tell everyone what we're doing or why we're doing it. We're doing what we think we need to do. People can heckle from the sidelines, but it is the norm throughout history that most people don't know what the hell they're talking about. It's very common especially for things like war, where the media will be 6 months 5 years or even 50 years behind what the reality is.
> As I said, please come to your senses. You don't have to listen to my arguments (in fact you shouldn't, because what I said above aren't actually arguments - rather they're short blurbs to measure how far from centrist non-partisan reality you've gotten). But please listen to criticism from somewhere. Standing up for individual liberty in the face of tyranny is plain old-fashioned American, not woke.
I've spent thousands of hours researching these things, watching substantive intellectual debates and interviews, legal interpretations, geopolitical analysis and so on. I don't go in with a preconceived notion, only digging for anything that supports it. I'm not an idiot. Just because some fancy highly respected person says something, doesn't mean it is true. Smart people are wrong plenty, which is a fact that means we cannot delegate our ability to reason.
If you can formulate strong counter-arguments, I'll listen. Just don't make lazy arguments.
>I support PKK because I run an IPFS node and I'm sure at least one person connected to PKK has uploaded at least one thing to IPFS at least one time.
That does not break the law. Knowingly providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization does.
If you can show specific details of you knowingly providing material support of a labeled terrorist organization please share.
Providing material support to perpetrators of these actions would go above "speech".
By the argument laid out by the government here, merely reading writings by terrorists would be illegal. You'd be providing "material support" by helping them spread their message to yourself - regardless of whether you're processing their writings with your network and computing device, or trafficking in their printed books.
* https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
* https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
And - the list of people that were originally put in this category when G.W. Bush issued this executive order has 29 people/organizations: Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaida, and various affiliated/related organizations.
So, yesterday it was Bin-Laden, today it is some Italian left-wing tech guys, and tomorrow it might well be you or me. Get ready to be branded a terrorist at some point.
And The current US administration was like "we don't care that running a webserver for activists is legal in Italy, we will just declare them terrorists".
Which is precisely why it's important that criminals and even terrorists have rights and due process. Else they can just declare YOU a terrorist and suddenly you have no rights.
Well, a proto-fascist government would consider hosting anti-fascist websites as being "far left".
What was that...
muummuummmmemmmeuuuu...
BANG
The actual Treasury Announce here - https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0616/
"The Autistici Inventati is an Italy-based far-left organization that provides a range of technological tools and services to violent left-wing extremist groups, including website hosting on foreign servers, encrypted email accounts, chat and video conferencing, and digital architecture associated with its “Noblogs” platform. Autistici Inventati identifies itself as an “anti-fascist” and “anti-militarist” organization opposed to capitalism and exclusively provides its services to vetted individuals, collectives, and groups it perceives to be aligned with its ideology, including to sanctioned terrorist organizations such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union for its use of terrorist tactics leading to thousands of deaths in Türkiye, Iraq, and Syria since its establishment in 1984.
Autistici Inventati is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism."
The US would also like to use the equivalent of the PKK in the large Kurdish part of Iran against Khamenei.
Nothing to say of using the PKK rebranding of SDF in Syria as well as receiving "global terrorist" Al Jolani in the White House.
MEK is probably just 300 really old guys now, they have strict rules against marrying outside the org.
They are sanctioned, okay, and? What happens practically.
In the USA - the consequences should be only related to USA pertinent actors. The newspapers in Italy say, "there is no judgement against them in Italy".
SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium. Only 2 banks out of the total 24 on the board of directors is US banks. Unless there's a hostile takeover of the SWIFT organisation by the US, I think this is a bit of a stretch. (Plot-twist: Italy is on the board of directors.)
A US sanction is neither a local (to all of SWIFT) or international law. The question still stands.
Because of a decision from the USA administration? ?!
Marxism came first. Mussolini was a Marxist, then developed Fascism as a reaction to it.
When Marxist talk about "reactionary forces", what do you think it means?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism
Furthermore, these organisations operate in what they perceive to be Fascist and/or Capitalist societies, so why state opposition to something that is not "there" and has been pretty much gone from the global scene for nearly forty years?
In conclusion, yes, you have a point. But given the reasons above I find it really hard to get worked up over it and Anarchists do not generally get along with Leninists, Stalinists, or Maoists anyway.
> We react by providing a platform and tools for digital self-defense addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals
Yes, they select the users. But clearly to exclude services to those they would judge as bad actors!
Should a blog platform be forced to help everyone express themselves or no one?
What paragraphs inclined you to think that?
Those stated beliefs are shockingly close to far-leftism. So I'm guessing the same radical exclusionary zeal is also being applied here.
Also, for clarity, I'm not taking those definitions literally, but rather as dog whistles for a very specific group of people (I'm from the Portland, OR area and I'm _very_ familiar with this group that has been terrorizing my poor city).
These are Italians. There are all possibilities the spirits are different - unless globalization (of information and communication, "of culture") had merged the two.
Given that fascism had quite the bloodied history in Italy (see: Mussolini), and we're talking about a group literally based in Italy, why wouldn't you? Is it because you were unaware of said history in Italy and never experienced fascism first-hand, yourself?
Pointing out the solipsism of your take with a single "thing" was enough to demonstrate your myopic world view, I thought, however we can expound upon that further by covering them all.
Would you care to address the first "thing", before we continue on?
A good friend of mine was charged with providing material support to terrorists for providing similar donations. And all his donations were prior to the US designating the recipients as terrorists. The government's arguments were "Yes yes, but you knew what you were supporting even though we hadn't designated them as such..."
Hope you're not in the US.
He likely would have beaten the terrorism charges, but for the lesser charges it wasn't clear that he'd get a better prison sentence than the one he was being offered.
He took the deal and pleaded guilty.
Also, lawyers cost money - perhaps he couldn't afford to keep fighting through a trial. I also have another friend who had the same charges leveled against him (not for donations, but volunteering services). He did fight the charges and got acquitted. I don't know if it's true, but I heard it cost him well over $1M for his legal defense.
[1] Trials like these take a long time to prepare for, by both parties.
Having values is expensive
Many people pay with their lives
But sure, if anyone wants to pay in this fashion, I won't stop them.
I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make, when their infrastructure (AWS) was shut off due to the government labeling them terrorists due to some users (who Parler had banned) using the service.
Can you see how it's different from an explicit sanction or an arrest?
"HN cheering", true or not, doesn't really matter in the end, either.
> Off topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
So you’re incorrect. HN isn’t off bounds for all political posts, but yes, they do have to have an “interesting new phenomenon”.
The U.S. sanctioning a decades old technology collective is clearly new. Whether it’s “interesting” I can’t speak to because that’s subjective to every individual, but that’s where the useful voting system comes in.
Have you ever opened the website of any B2B software/services provider? By your logic, they're all the most suspicious people on earth, because none of them seem to be able to explain what they actually do.
You're getting a negative response because ignoring that and implying that they're secretly doing sketchy things makes it look like you're doing bad faith criticism
They are very clearly providing IT support for free to anti fascist organizations.
Rather than a vague insinuation that this group has taken some action deserving of economic blackballing, perhaps you could point to some specific action this group has done?
You say provide tools for communication. Presumably that's every communication platform worldwide - almost undoubtably some sort of terrorist has used each of them.
As per a government who puts cycling and expressing distaste for inflation in the same camp.
Well, they are innocent until proven guilty.
> They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups.
By all means, present something that shows they are knowingly supporting terrorist groups so we might judge for ourselves.
I mean, we have organizations that supported the January 6th terrorists that haven't had anything done to them, so I'm looking for something more serious than murder, storming the capital, riots, attacking the police force, and attempted assassination of a Vice President.
In modern US law this is incorrect, it is now guilty until proven innocent, and then still guilty after that.
I think that second (speculative, of course) step would be the more worrying precedent: if the use of technical infrastructure also used by designated groups was formally made to be incriminating/right-waiving. Why wouldn’t that apply to Signal, for example? The OP suggests the dividing line should be between true infrastructure open to all, including unsavory actors, versus tools that advertise services to a particular faction. It’s not an entirely disagreeable distinction, but I think in practice it’s rather fuzzy (Moxie of signal is/was rather far left himself, if I recall).
EDIT: Re-reading the document, the state department emphasizes that a/I “manually vets all potential users.” OP’s distinction stands for now.
Signal doesn't knowingly and deliberately provide services to any organization, let alone one formally designated by the US and the EU. The whole point of Signal is to eliminate all pretenses of the service knowing who its users are or what they're doing. To the extent that's also true of Autistici Inventati, the OFAC designation is invalid.
[0] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
That is not a sustainable strategy in the long term. Sure after this news they will get lots of donations, but long term it is not something that is realistic.
Since they are now "sanctioned" by the US you cannot legally donate to them even if you wanted to...*[0]
[0] *Unless you now know why this collective needs crypto more than ever.
they've been around 25 years, which is nothing to sneeze at
There are many of us who do not live in the US, so many still can. Just not through paypal.
Given that SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium and Italy's major bank is one of the 24 banks on the SWIFT board, how does this "blockade" in SWIFT happen? Is the inference that all of the banks bow down to the US, even though the US only represents 2 out of the 24 banks on the board?
In this thread, on the other hand, people keep bringing up that the US has done worse but those comments are upvoted and there is no mention of "whataboutism" in the entire thread.
In the most popular streaming show atm (new season of Reacher), a main plot point is CIA and State Department and Green Berets involvement in a village massacre in Indonesia in the 90s (in the land of the tv show), this is of course a reference to the CIA and State Department indirectly murdering 1 million Indonesians 1965-1966.
They have not.
This is NOT a competition nor a championship about which dictatorship can inflict the most pain and destruction to the world.
Nobody is rooting for such a "winner".
Criticize all the despicable actions of such stinky regimes, regardless of if they are in Putin's Russia, in Trump's US, or wherever else.
We are NOT in a race to the bottom.
We shall never forget our values, as Humans and as Earth-dwellers.
They doxx people they don't like and pass around kids schools/addressess/home addresses/names of spouses, for the sole purpose of violence.
They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there, which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.
I've been following this 'collective' since 2016.
It's about time the US did something about it.
how does it encourage it? can you show an example?
>They had a flier for 'laser tag' hosted there
what does this mean?
>which was a group meet to flash laser pointers in the faces of ICE agents.
Which group? reference? link? examples?
>I've been following this 'collective' since 2016. It's about time the US did something about it.
well this explains a lot about your point of view, but can you expand or prove your above statements?