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Discussion (90 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
"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.
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.
[1] https://njal.la/domains/
The issue is, now they are the legal owners and liable for the content of the website, and they also support PayPal, which will absolutely drop them the moment they get sanctioned.
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.
What kind exactly?
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
Which is partly or mostly our fault.
Maybe we could concentrate on doing less of that.
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.
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...
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.”
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.
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.
While this is very heavy handed censorship, there are plenty of ways around it.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
It means the government won.
If anyone from A/I is reading this know you always have a place to stay/eat if you need it
Eleven days?
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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'm sure they're aware who they are hosting, at least blog wise. We're not talking about a massive company with no ideological affiliation. Not that I think it was worth labelling the org themselves terrorists, but it still isn't a good look.
How long do you think you could resist a tier-1 nation state coming after you on terrorism charges?
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?
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.
The Italian police wiretapped them for one year without them knowing.
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
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...
All that demonstrates is that they operated a public email/messaging server. One could have coordinated the exact same things using ProtonMail or Signal.
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.
Give me a break. Ends to not justify all means. This is a completely appropriate response by the state department.
I mean, the capitalist system is a barbaric system with defenders that do make opposition illegal...
How about workers rights? Slavery? Any progress that you'd think of as civilizing was not achieved without blood.
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.
And allude to specific incidents without links? WTF?
I can't wait to see the American hegemony slowly crumble over the next few decades.
I really worry about the future of free and open expression over the next few years.