Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction on order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
"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."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays!
jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not sanctioned by a foreign government.
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
If that's what you characterize the US government as, I can only imagine what you characterize some of the other governments around the world. Particularly, from the millions of us who migrated to the US legally and willfully and who are very VERY grateful to this country for providing the opportunities people like myself could only dream-of in our former countries.
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is an anarchyist group using banks for??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone.
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
>Historical BTC:ETH:XMR:ZEC donations via donate page addresses are around 40:20:20:1. However, we currently receive more donations via Monero than Bitcoin and nearly all of the ETH came from a single donation. Monero is the only reliable trickle of many small crypto donations.
>The day we discovered we had been designated a global terrorist organization, we promised that we would try to resist as long as this was possible
Eleven days?
-
As a sidenote, I'm rather confused why most sources referred to A/I as simply offering services for "left wing activists"; while this is true, they also offered services to actual, inarguable terrorists. Their services were used to announce firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers.
Now, I don't think they should have been labelled an outright terrorist organisation by many means, but I am astonished by the level of whitewashing.
I’d like to have more information about what “offered” means here. I’m sure that regular email and hosting providers have been used by terrorists without being designated a terrorist organization themselves.
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
If you knowingly provide services to violent/terrorist groups you deserve to be shut down. The only reason anyone is upset by this is because they were left aligned and had they been providing services to the far right, neo-nazis, etc everyone would be rightfully cheering.
IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah and maybe others are far right organizations, so I don't think this is purely left/right.
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
It's in my opinion insane that the US can get away with this without serious backlash from other countries, and it confirms the disappointing reality that the US has become the biggest force for fascism and the biggest motor for the suppression of freedom of speech in the world.
> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
Fuck you Trump and fuck you US (and the government of a small country in the Mediterranean who's behind all this). Thank you Autistici/Inventati with whom I had my first email account in the dialup era.
I can't wait to see the American hegemony slowly crumble over the next few decades.
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
They happened to host some people who "vandalized" (a couple of graffiti ...) Trump's golf course in Scotland. That action was called "terrorism".
Their site noblogs.org also hosted some PKK friendly articles. like 10 in total. Now that is bound to happen if you host left wing bloggers in the EU. But that was also called terrorism support.
Their problem is that they actively selected the customers and demanded that they abide by their CoC and rules. You should not do that as an ISP.
That’s at best a simplistic framing. Something was going on long before Trump was elected. The hubbub in Norway happened back in 2010, before Trump was elected. And the Child Exploitation and Internet Pornography Act was used for the very first time to take down their NoBlogs site in 2007 (according to Wikipedia).
You go from "I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information..." to "That’s at best a simplistic framing."?
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
Here is the State Department's rationale: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
Like trying to scrutinize the motives of a complete lunatic.
Really sad, and also a testament of the fact that as much as we think we try to be indipendent, eventually once somebody starts putting enough pressure on the people around you (and you turn from "a neutral customer" to "a liability") the path to isolation is very short.
This. When the US government decides to label you “terrorist organization”, it means that you are now targeted by the most potent state actor on earth, which will go as far as blowing up weddings in your neighborhood to stop you.
So unless you're willing to become a literal terrorist organization and die with a bunch of your friends in an uphill battle (not technically unwinnable, but at least lopsided and the casualties will be tremendous), the only option is to cave.
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction on order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
also for context this is a shorter version and represents well the situation 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."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays! jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati#United_Sta...
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
And yes, they could relocate to TOR, I2P, use P2P websites, torrents, and only accept cryptos for donations. But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
>But eventually you'll need to put down a credit card on file to buy a domain, and that domain needs to be owned by somebody.
You don't need to pay to host onion websites (.onion domains are free and have no central registry). Though that of course really limits the possible outreach, because most people are not used to browsing onionsites.
njal.la (no affiliate) exists for that purpose. It is a privacy focused domain service that is run by the people behind the pirate bay.
[1] https://njal.la/domains/
You’re still subject to ICANN, an American org. There is no escaping the US government if you’re using the public web for your infra
I've been following the collextive for 10 years. They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity.
Parler was ripped off the Internet for 1% of this.
You reap what you sow. If you don't support the freedom of people you disagree with politically, I don't support your freedom either.
Covid has forced me to take a hard stance on this.
Parler was "ripped off the Internet" because it was delisted from app stores and AWS for violating their ToS due to having (If I remember correctly) approximately zero content moderation, which is not really compatible with the mainstream distribution model they wanted. The owners were not sanctioned by a foreign government.
"They promoted and hosted violent/terrorist activity."
What kind exactly?
You can't follow anything, you're a computer program inside an Azure datacenter.
I hereby designate the US government an international terrorist organization.
Yeah, but do you control international banking the way they do? That's ultimately how they're able to do this.
Which is why efforts by China to stand up independent cross border payment rails are important. You have to cut the US out of any ability to control activities outside of their boundaries.
China, Egypt to do away with the use of the US dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49555056 - September 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
and Europe. Europe should also decouple itself from the U.S. as much as it is possible, and not repeat the mistake of overreliance with China. not because China is somehow worse, but because you always should be able to say "no", no matter how good your partners are
Europe is decoupling itself all ready also. Using SEPA-Inst and wero.
Unfortunately decoupling payments within the EU is insufficient if the US can just threaten to sanction your bank, and in doing so force the bank to drop you as a customer. Even in the presence of an internal European payments network, those banks still need to transact with the US and other US-sphere countries...
They are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112
They already know what they are. There are good reasons the term "terrorist" has yet to be formally agreed upon among members of the United Nations.
But meaning what
If that's what you characterize the US government as, I can only imagine what you characterize some of the other governments around the world. Particularly, from the millions of us who migrated to the US legally and willfully and who are very VERY grateful to this country for providing the opportunities people like myself could only dream-of in our former countries.
As Stephen Miller loves to remind us, we had the first net emigration in decades this year. They're rounding up legal immigrants and putting them in concentration camps where they're dying because they're being denied medical care.
A/I shuts down
Some of y'all are from countries that are in great turmoil.
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
It really is not the fault of the US that Mexico has drug gangs that kill people at random. It's not the fault that Pakistan and India are nearly at war forever. It's not the US fault that many countries support and require female genital mutilation. The US is not as evil as you think.
This reminds me how fragile the internet is and how we need other channels of communication.
I wasn't aware of this group; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistici/Inventati is their wiki article, but it is a little light on details.
Some of the claims are interesting - "Decision making in the group takes places collectively instead of through majority voting." - isn't explained by the sourced article.
>Sorry, but we don’t accept Bitcoin.
https://www.inventati.org/donate
Should have focused on Monero donations from the get-go. Banks are a plague. Like what is an anarchyist group using banks for??
It's like choosing not to use E2EE.
It's not even left political groups that get debanked or screwed—it's everyone.
>Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
>Historical BTC:ETH:XMR:ZEC donations via donate page addresses are around 40:20:20:1. However, we currently receive more donations via Monero than Bitcoin and nearly all of the ETH came from a single donation. Monero is the only reliable trickle of many small crypto donations.
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/status/1684663777273233408
GrapheneOS is the right model:
https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Pay+monero...
A DNS alt-root and something like x402 would fix this
>The day we discovered we had been designated a global terrorist organization, we promised that we would try to resist as long as this was possible
Eleven days?
-
As a sidenote, I'm rather confused why most sources referred to A/I as simply offering services for "left wing activists"; while this is true, they also offered services to actual, inarguable terrorists. Their services were used to announce firebombs on anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers.
Now, I don't think they should have been labelled an outright terrorist organisation by many means, but I am astonished by the level of whitewashing.
> Eleven days?
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
I’d like to have more information about what “offered” means here. I’m sure that regular email and hosting providers have been used by terrorists without being designated a terrorist organization themselves.
I can't imagine continuing to run something designated by the US as a terrorist organization for for even ONE day
What did they do??
Sounds like providing encrypted communications?
I think we can all see the potential problems with this, even if a specific group is awful.
“The specific claim: a far-left media group that describes itself as a “tool” for militants to share information “to be acted upon” used A/I’s services to publish communiqués and calls to action for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including FAI/FRI, the IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah, ELN, NPA, PFLP, and PIJ. That same media group was cited in a federal complaint against a domestic terrorist sentenced to 19 years for attacking a federal building and a police car with IEDs.”
If you knowingly provide services to violent/terrorist groups you deserve to be shut down. The only reason anyone is upset by this is because they were left aligned and had they been providing services to the far right, neo-nazis, etc everyone would be rightfully cheering.
IRGC, Hamas, Hizballah and maybe others are far right organizations, so I don't think this is purely left/right.
And what about signal? I am pretty sure many violent/terrorist groups use it too.
I don't have an opinion about this group, because I didn't even know it existed. But, like often with things related to the free speech, I think this topic is more complex than you make it out to be.
I don’t disagree. I just don’t know if they actually were courting bad guys or bad guys used an encrypted services provider. Both? Neither?
And I don’t see anyone hand wringing about that list of bad guys. Calling some of them “left” is pretty ridiculous in the first place.
That part sounds a little like telling on oneself.
Can just rename themselves into I/A. “A/I? That’s shut down. We are not affiliated with them…”
Possibly. The content can be saved and posted on a variety of other platforms.
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
What does it means?
The US government designated a long-running web/email hosting services collective that served political dissidents as a terrorist organization.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
It means the government won.
Love these people and what a powerful message
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
It's in my opinion insane that the US can get away with this without serious backlash from other countries, and it confirms the disappointing reality that the US has become the biggest force for fascism and the biggest motor for the suppression of freedom of speech in the world.
I mean, this sort of pales in comparison to sanctioning the International Criminal Court, no? They got away with that...
Thank you American people! This couldn't have happened without you!
> We are stopping, but the Resistance and ideas do not stop. Stay human.
How will that be if the resistance is not visible to the public. What are all the people using their services supposed to do? I’m guessing there are plans to reform in a few years. Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
Resistance and revolution happened before the internet. People have become lazy and complacent, and want their resistance served up over the wire. Thats not how real resistance happens, but it does make people feel like they are doing something, sucking up their energy while the biggest impact is TikTok memes, the modern version of the sternly worded letter.
This is exactly where the power structures want the struggle to be , online, with no real consequences that matter.
The best thing that could happen to the internet and society would be that it would be absolutely illegal to post anything inciting resistance or change of any kind on the internet.
Then, the resistance would go back to being real people in real rooms, secrets and whispers and actual plots to effect change in society for a more equitable and prosperous human future.
Because that’s how real change takes place. The powerful don’t try to make change by posting on instagram. (Advertisement and PR of course, but it’s not the organizational nexus) they gather in conference rooms, talk in person, and have social gatherings where they decide your future.
When they do use the internet to coordinate, it’s not in public forums, it’s encrypted communications, targeted and limited in scope.
The internet is useful, of course, and encrypted communication in private groups, even darkweb resources. But thinking you can use the official structure of the internet (public domain infrastructure, dns, walled gardens) as a primary means of subverting the dominant paradigm is foolish at best, suicidally counterproductive on the normative.
The internet was once subversive in and of itself. It no longer is. Now you’re just wearing signs at the mall.
The revolution thrives underground, not out in the open.
It should be noted that this is a very sensible thing to say even if you are not stopping; the only case where you cannot say this is if you are carrying on with the same branding, which is typically necessary if you are carrying forwards funds (which have been seized) or brand recognition (which may not be important for a group who focuses on interpersonal relationships).
I take it as, talk to people in real life and don’t rely on systems that can be shut down.
>Why is the Italian government not protecting them?
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
You go offline. Paper flyers and meetings are much more effective anyway.
It is also not like Palestinian activism is blocked on X, despite people here saying that only Nazis are on X and everything is censored:
https://x.com/intifada
The Italian government is also a far-right government like the US, so is aligned in wanting to suppress left-wing views.
Fuck you Trump and fuck you US (and the government of a small country in the Mediterranean who's behind all this). Thank you Autistici/Inventati with whom I had my first email account in the dialup era.
I can't wait to see the American hegemony slowly crumble over the next few decades.
I also oppose fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, like what A/I do... And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society. So what did they do to trigger so many? I remember the Norwegian stuff (since I’m Norwegian), and I remember thinking it sounded like bullshit to copy their entire server drive when they wanted access to the blog of two people.
From what I could gather, it seems various governments accused them of deliberately providing infrastructure to groups whose violent activities they supported, such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with communications associated with railway sabotage, attacks on energy infrastructure and the “Jane’s Revenge” arson campaign (whatever the hell that is).
Here’s a snippet I found on the net: "Italian police installed a server backdoor in 2004 during an investigation into the anarchist collective Crocenera. It was discovered in 2005. According to contemporary EDRi reporting, the access potentially exposed communications belonging to thousands of unrelated users; EDRi explicitly noted that actual collection of unrelated data had not been proven. EDRi’s contemporary report"
Huge disclaimer on this, since it’s just my musings: This might be one of the situations where both sides are in the wrong. It’s possible that A/I willfully turned a blind eye to actual illegal activity by its users, and refused to cooperate with legal investigations. At the same time, various governments, including mine, overreacted and behaved unethically and maybe even illegally because A/I “didn’t want to play ball.”
Just speculation. But the fact that I can’t easily find concrete examples of what A/I supposedly did wrong makes me inclined to feel sympathy for them. I hate unspecific allegations like “facilitation of problematic and terroristic-adjacent activities.” That’s some 1984-ish bullshit.
I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information...
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20... This designation offers some specific examples of violence being coordinated using their systems. Some are indeed extreme, if true. That doesn’t invalidate their mission or overall contribution to the world at large; it just was sufficient ammo for extinguishing another threat to power.
This does not show what they (A/I) did. The only concrete examples are of bad behavior by some users. Then there’s a bunch of generic claims against A/I, with NO specifics.
So, yeah, it might be true. But I find no concrete examples of what bad stuff A/I themselves did, just their users. Personally, I would like for there to be at least SOME concrete examples. Like, “This convicted terrorist had a blog on their infrastructure, and A/I refused to hand over data they had, even when presented with a valid court order.” Or something like that. Is it too much to ask that the government provide some concrete evidence, not just abstract vage accusations, when doing something as drastic as designating someone a terrorist organization? It would seem so...
This is a knock on the state.gov item, not your comment. Your comment was good.
> And none of that is illegal... At least not in any civilised society
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
Yeah, but there are degrees. I’d rather have a conversation about trans rights here in Oslo than in Afghanistan.
How do you think LGBTQI+ rights came exist? It was not a pretty, blood-free, submissive process. And we're still far from LGBTQI+ rights being normalized.
They happened to host some people who "vandalized" (a couple of graffiti ...) Trump's golf course in Scotland. That action was called "terrorism".
Their site noblogs.org also hosted some PKK friendly articles. like 10 in total. Now that is bound to happen if you host left wing bloggers in the EU. But that was also called terrorism support.
Their problem is that they actively selected the customers and demanded that they abide by their CoC and rules. You should not do that as an ISP.
That’s at best a simplistic framing. Something was going on long before Trump was elected. The hubbub in Norway happened back in 2010, before Trump was elected. And the Child Exploitation and Internet Pornography Act was used for the very first time to take down their NoBlogs site in 2007 (according to Wikipedia).
You go from "I have no clue what I’m talking about here, though. Strange situation and too little information..." to "That’s at best a simplistic framing."?
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
Hopefully riseup can pick up some of the slack here, but more decentralized services are needed.
Yet another example of the troubling amount of power the United States holds over the internet and global finance.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.