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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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"
> 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.
> 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)
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?
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.
Hey, I'm sorry about my other message. I tried to tell another user in this thread to go f* themselves, and I seem to have accidentally clicked the wrong "reply" link in the tree and so my message went to you instead. What you write here is reasonable.
Just call your group "the anti-bad guy good guy club", and then by definition everything you do is good and centrist. Therefore the following is centrism:
An Oregon leftist and antifa ideologue seeking to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement was arrested on Feb. 4 over a manifesto and weapons procurement plan detailing his desire to stalk federal agents at the Portland ICE facility to their homes and kill them. - https://www.ngocomment.com/p/leftist-extremist-arrested-over...
On the night of July 4, 2025, 11 members of a North Texas Antifa cell carried out a coordinated attack on the Prairieland Detention Center. Earlier that day, they had conducted reconnaissance (including reporting on security of the facility), and had assembled a cache of dozens of firearms. The group planned the attack ahead of time, including a “gear check” where the leader discussed bringing rifles and ominously “not getting arrested.” They dressed in black uniforms and brought 11 firearms, body armor, and military-grade first aid kits (including tourniquets for gunshot wounds). They disabled CCTV cameras at the facility, and threw fireworks and explosives to flush the officers out for a planned massacre. When officers called 911, Lt. Thomas Gross responded. Bodycam footage shows one of the attackers yelling “get to the rifles!” as the group opened fire. Gross was shot once in the neck, with the bullet exiting through his back, but survived and continued to fight back. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...
Beating leftists with clubs for the crime of carrying the US flag on US soil - https://www.newsweek.com/antifa-violence-portland-bernie-san... (the article comes with a nice photo! Can you spot any antifa i that photo, or will you continue to play dumb?)
Good question. Let's see - they're [1] dressed uniformly, organize under the antifa banner, have the antifa flag spray-painted on their shields, and claim to be anti-fascists.
I guess there's just no way to tell! They could belong to any group! Except antifa, of course, because antifa is not a group. It's just an idea. With adherents. That form groups and execute actions based on that idea.
I would suggest prompting your favorite LLM about Antifa, anti-fascism and anti-capitalism, rather than advertising your naivety here.
Opposition to fascism isn't centrism when fascism is broadly defined to include centrist ideas and the opposition is expressed as firebombing Tesla dealerships.
Antifa is the prototypical example of what people mean when they say "radical left". Go back to gaslighting people on Reddit, you won't succeed here, fucking asshole.
This is a completely unacceptable style of commenting on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Please take a moment to read them again and make an effort to observe them, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you can't make your point without being abusive, you probably don't have a good point. We have to ban accounts that continue commenting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
> Declaring that the State Department's language is "accurately reciting" is equating.
Now you are just imagining the word "terrorism" into a sentence that does not include the word "terrorism". As a reminder, here is the sentence we are discussing: "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."
> "radical left" is not an accurate recitation of "anti-racist, anti-sexist"
Gaslighting again. The quote was "anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism". See how you "accidentally" forgot to mention "anti-fascism" in there? This organization is actively supporting Antifa. Antifa is a prototypical example of what people mean when they talk about "radical left".
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.
Antifa is a decentralized organization: shared branding, shared tactics (borrowed from neo-nazis), chapters/affinity groups, mutual aid and coordination across cities.
Anarchism is a philosophy. Antifa is an actual terrorist network.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot of talking around this in the comment section for some reason: they allegedly provide infrastructure for recognized terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestine Action (the group that attacked UK air force bases).
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.
The manifesto quote is important. Elsewhere I'm seeing them labeled as providing services "to anyone" but they explicitly say they select who they serve on political grounds. So if they are supporting groups like the PKK as alleged, which the EU, UK, and US have all deemed a terrorist organization for over 20 years, then this seems entirely reasonable and good.
Even if they were fully neutral the sanctions would be reasonable if they are supporting terrorists, but at least they'd have some sort of narrow libertarian defense of their morals. As it turns out, they do appear to be true left wing extremist group, and not some "everything-I-dont-like-is-Socialism" boogeyman.
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.
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).
Well, you picked up one term they throw around. Anti-capitalist is another - they oppose the very system they are trying to use and exist within. Maybe not violently, but hardly can one expect sympathies, especially from system itself.
They also support ie PPK. There is this general sentence in law:
> Providing financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism.
Any state, EU including, treats such entities with utmost hostility. I have no stance on Israel vs Palestine topic (as in, both sides are abhorable to the core and none is better for different reasons) but to expect any form of kindness to such entity in the very system they are against is... out of touch with reality.
An action very much expected and in line regardless of who is currently in power - if not please explain to me / others why I see things incorrectly.
> 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.
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
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.
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!
I’d feel comfortable categorizing the j6 rioters and the antifa people smashing shops and smashing people over the head with bike lock both as terrorist. Their entire mission is brute force and fear.
The were nonviolent people milling about or protesting in both groups. Leave them alone. But those smashing and threatening and being violent…
they (from both sides) both deserve to be separated from normal society
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?
The terrorist attacks by your comrades, for example?
The arson and bomb attacks against infrastructure causing a senior to freeze to death? The leftist thugs that smash dissidents' heads in with hammers? The kind that assassinated Charlie Kirk?
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.
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?
You have been played. One might be thinking that anti-fascist means you are against fascism. But in reality the tactics and goals these people have are exactly the same as German and Italian fascist used
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
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?
yeah those "unbusted" ones, like the Hammerbande, that have been caught, caught on camera trying to murder civillians they deemed being Hitler, and thus rightfully jailed.
This is prob a russian operation to manipulate right wingers by presenting yet another fabricated left wing enemy. Attacks on transportation and electricity grids (and cars and graffiti) are not the same ball park as planed kidnappings and killings. You are just repeating propaganda.
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.
>[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]
IMO violence is a spectrum. Peaceful protesting with signs is 0 violence. Attacking self-driving cars or department stores without hurting any people is a bit higher up the scale. Attacking food supplies or critical infrastructure is higher still, as it will have downstream effects on everyone that might lead to death and suffering. Attacking actual human bodies is even higher up the scale of course.
I get your point though. There's a strong push to characterize destruction of property as violence, as part of a push to delegitimize protest. To some people, the police can use physical violence against people to stop a protest and that's okay, whereas if the protestors so much as throw a brick through a window, they're violent extremists.
> what does it say ... that they are designating "anti-fascist" groups as terrorists?
it says that these so-called 'anti-fascist' groups are good at branding themselves?
Anyone can start a group and call it "Anti-Fascist" but it's silly to suggest that opposing that group means you're a fascist. Maybe you don't like their methods. Maybe you think they're full of shit in who they choose to oppose. Or maybe they do commit crimes and you call them criminals.
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.
The one who keeps trying to push the idea that anti-fascism is terrorism, or the one that called that one a bootlicker and hasn't posted anything remotely similar recently?
The whole discussion is a hellscape, and you (should, by now) know that it's not our role to adjudicate on the correctness of anyone's arguments. But “bootlicker” is, by design, one of the most demeaning terms of abuse that ever gets used here, it's not asking much, at all, to expect people to avoid using it. That account has contributed little of substance, so it's not as if there was a track record of quality to indicate this was a momentary lapse.
> 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
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"
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Israelis and others who support this have shown that the lesson they took from the Holocaust is that they believe it's morally fine as long as they're the ones doing the killing.
> 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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Source that you wouldn’t be allowed to kill unarmed enemy soldiers? Imagine a scouting team doing reconnaissance, surely you’re allowed to attack and kill them?
"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.
Bad argument. If you sabotage military equipment in Europe, obviously you also indirectly lower the military potential of that army somewhere else. The planes in Europe aren’t there to be paperweights, they are either being maintained there for service or are there as a deterrent and need to be reinforced by other planes when damaged.
Bad argument. You're saying the French were wrong to sabotage Hitler's airplanes because they might've been used after the war to defend Germany from the USSR.
If you think European defense is analogous to hitler defending Germany in WWII, we should have started the discussion at a very different point. Do you really think that?
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.
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.
> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.
This is an utterly idiotic take and 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.
> 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.
Are you implying that PA is a military organization that is at war with the UK? I don't think you actually have thought through the implications of that. If this were the case, they would be considered legitimate military targets who can be killed.
That would be a lot worse for them than sanctions.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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."
> 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).
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?
> 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?
It may be (it also depends on the details that had the evaluator label the excluded) - but I think that "my property, my guests - my selected guests". With exclusions which are in fact legally mandated in some territories - but in general, especially when the service is more informal, those I could lend a toothbrush to will be part of a selected number.
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..."
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?
From the NYT
> based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world
So I don't think this is as innocent as they seem. They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups. I think their mock innocence here is hiding that they are being very intentional with their actions. If I make guns and make a point to only give them to groups which agree with my manifesto, and they are terrorists, I can't act innocent there. Providing communication services are the same. The probability they are hosting or providing support to a terrorist group is approaching 1.
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.
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).
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
"Brazilian banks" were never classified as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. It is a specific designation and law that comes with 20 year prison sentences.
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)
Meta and TikTokUSDS let anyone in but they will actively remove stuff like this by request:
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.
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?
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.
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.
Their own manifesto says they use their limited resources to support groups they align with. 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.
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.
>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?)
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.
> (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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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].
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I don't understand what you mean by all this. Obviously your phone number is tied to your Signal account. Signal does not provide anonymity beyond what a phone number provides, and isn't designed to. Its design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil." If you actually want Session or SimpleX, then you know where to find those services.
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 (even if ideologically aligned) 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.
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. Opsec won't protect your software stack's US finance attacks. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public funding.
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.
> 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. 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 that it's a case-by-case question.
> 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.
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.
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.
No, of course there isn't a visible receiver address.
You have a list of peers, P1,...,PN, every send you send a message to each of them. If you don't put one in, it's a dummy message chosen at random and encrypted. But if you have a message, you send that at the appointed time.
Consequently, from the outside of the system, from the PoV of someone who does not have the keys, its behaviour is indistinguishable from a system where no one is sending any messagess at all.
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.
Traffic analysis isn’t just to identify the peers but also to find patterns in communication (they are telling each other good morning and good night every day, they communicated before a terrorist attack, …)
Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.
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.
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 accounts, because of weak association through legal defense support. Mind you, the GLS bank who cancelled their account proactively, would be considered a communist project by US standards, and Rote Hilfe is a traditional German political institution being only cancelled once before: 1933. 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.
>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.
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.
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""".
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.
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
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...
There is a difference between actively condemning something and gloating/supporting the destruction of liberty simply because one's favored political team is doing it.
> 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.
Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:
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.
I do not agree. I think that Fox news is much farther right than MSNBC is left. Again, MSNBC is generally a cente left publication, in comparison to the entirety of the political spectrum. There might be outright Nazi Groypers farther to the left than Fox, bit they aren't far off nor do they disagree on much. Whereas a center left rag like MSNBC is outwardly hostile to actual socialist or communist ideologies, of which are essentially nonexistent inside the US, hence it being a right wing nation.
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.
/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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
That's not what that Antifa terrorist did. All evidence was laid out in the court. You can read the official documents. Or you can keep reading pro-Antifa sites that whitewash what happened.
Oh. What was the charge against Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada and what exactly did he do to justify that charge and the 30 year sentence? Please link to what he did that was above and beyond what I described.
You claim it was more than just moving a box of magazines. I see no court documents or reporting saying it was anything more than that.
Transporting a box containing numerous Antifa (a designated domestic terrorist organization) materials, such as *insurrection planning*, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents and propaganda from Sanchez Estrada’s residence to a location in Denton, Texas, *intending to conceal the box’s contents and impair its availability for use in a federal grand jury and federal criminal proceeding*.
You trying to make the contents of the magazines scary by quoting the DOJ doesn't change the nature of the crime that got him 30 years.
And, to be clear, this box could have contained a signed confession and 30 years would have still been an extremely excessive punishment. People get shorter sentences for rape, manslaughter, and maming. Heck, some murder charges are shorter than 30 years.
To the original point, the crime was moving boxes. Hosting an exit node that transports a request deemed bad by the government is exactly the same thing. After all, it may be "insurrection plans".
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
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> did they help authorities to track Terrorists or did they cover up?
Nice framing. Binary "either you are with authorities or you are against them", no consideration that "terrorist" is up for courts to decide, not govs or ISPs and that complying-or-not with a legal-or-not order can have many reasons and outcomes. Would you call apple, refusing to decrypt a terror org too? Framing those subjects as terrorists is true darkage backwards reasoning. A/I calls it radical activism, the US gov calls it marxist terrorism. To me, its clear who is more credible.
there's no framing. just the law. if you are not handing over terrorist's data you are abating them. what that data is (encrypted or not), is an entirely different thing.
oh, and if you believe apple doesn't cooperate with the us govt., good luck!
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.
Maybe. But if A/I is knowingly supporting PKK then these sanctions arent an example of that.
Keep in mind that the PKK is a designated terrorist organization in the EU, UK, and US. For over 20 years. The US designation even predates 9/11 (when terrorism hysteria ramped up).
It's true there are "terrorism" and "left wing extremism" boogeymen, but this doesnt seem to be that.
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.
It was only true all the other times over the past 100 years, but not this time! Trust me, I'm an expert of all world secrets, but somehow no government has hired me to get my opinion! This is nothing like back in the 70s when leftists were causing 5 bombings every single day inside the US. Gosh, we're in the future now compared to then!
China might execute more people than the rest of the world combined, be interfering in the world at historic levels, building out its military with unprecedented speed and cooperating with cartels to gain control in South America while flooding the US with lethal drugs, but they don't count, because I make the rules!
Iran and communist billionaires might be funding leftist violence inside the US, but who cares, violence is legal protest, right?
The numerous successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts against conservatives don't count either, because assassination for political reasons isn't terrorism... probably? That's like, some other kind of thing!
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!
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.
> 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 - as I said, please come to your senses.
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. 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 there was no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I take no responsibility at all".
> 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...
I was hoping to hear from CMay who sends very knowledgeable about billionaire communists, but ok. Is it just the one or are there other communist billionaires?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 ...
> 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.
> 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.
>>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.
> 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.
There is already a law that you cant knowingly provide material support (including services) to designated terrorist organizations that has been upheld by the Supreme Court https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1. Im curious, what argument would you make in favor of the first amendment protecting someone who knowingly provides material support to designated terrorist organizations?
Interestingly enough, the designated terrorist organizations the plaintiff wanted to support included the PKK as well.
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.
I fully elaborated in the other comment, which you didn't respond to. There is a sibling reply that is on point as well. And sorry no, "Obama did it too" has no purchase with me.
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".
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're providing "material support" by helping them spread their messages, as you've made their writings transit your network in order for them to reach you.
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.
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?
I don't know, but they did say a month or two ago that they discovered Iran pivoted from funding their normal terrorist groups in the west since the US and EU cracked down on it so hard domestically, to funding more radical leftist groups since politicians were turning a blind eye to them.
Given the timing around putting economic pressure on Iran, I'm assuming that they had some financial connection to Iran.
> In the White House’s deranged logic, this qualifies them to be officially designated as domestic terrorists.
The US claims they were providing services to the PKK which has been a designated terrorist organization in the EU, UK, and US for 20+ years (predating 9/11 even in the US).
>Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
No. There is already a law that you cant knowingly provide material support (including services) to designated terrorist organizations that has been upheld by the Supreme Court https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1. Im curious, what argument would you make in favor of being able to knowingly provide material support to designated terrorist organizations?
Interestingly enough, the designated terrorist organizations the plaintiff wanted to support included the PKK as well.
> Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.
Curious why these groups always seem to omit anti-communism, when communism lends itself just as readily to authoritarianism and has caused at least as much death and suffering historically.
If the principle is opposition to oppression, why not frame it more broadly as anti-authoritarianism?
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.
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?
661 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadWhat is this?
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.
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.
We'd need to dig much deeper to understand what their views are.
FWIW: I consider extreme leftists just as dangerous as the extreme right.
How much more specific can you get?
Yeah we should ban any non-mainstream political views and designate them as terrorist
> 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.
Okay, so the chamber of commerce is a radical organisation, got it.
If opposition to fascism isn't centrism then what is?
An Oregon leftist and antifa ideologue seeking to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement was arrested on Feb. 4 over a manifesto and weapons procurement plan detailing his desire to stalk federal agents at the Portland ICE facility to their homes and kill them. - https://www.ngocomment.com/p/leftist-extremist-arrested-over...
33 anti-Israel protesters get slap on the wrist for causing $1M in damage to U. of Washington science building - https://nypost.com/2026/03/04/us-news/33-anti-israel-protest...
A German interior minister and author for "Das Antifa Magazin" said asylum seekers should have the right to vote after 6 months on German soil, and called for mass censorship - https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/auslaender...
Stabbing black conservatives - https://thepostmillennial.com/andy-ngo-reports-no-prison-tim...
Mobs physically attacking political candidates - https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/bordeaux-un-candidat-rn...
Making people who condemn arson unemployable - https://reason.com/2021/06/15/daniel-elder-cancel-culture-ch...
On the night of July 4, 2025, 11 members of a North Texas Antifa cell carried out a coordinated attack on the Prairieland Detention Center. Earlier that day, they had conducted reconnaissance (including reporting on security of the facility), and had assembled a cache of dozens of firearms. The group planned the attack ahead of time, including a “gear check” where the leader discussed bringing rifles and ominously “not getting arrested.” They dressed in black uniforms and brought 11 firearms, body armor, and military-grade first aid kits (including tourniquets for gunshot wounds). They disabled CCTV cameras at the facility, and threw fireworks and explosives to flush the officers out for a planned massacre. When officers called 911, Lt. Thomas Gross responded. Bodycam footage shows one of the attackers yelling “get to the rifles!” as the group opened fire. Gross was shot once in the neck, with the bullet exiting through his back, but survived and continued to fight back. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...
Beating leftists with clubs for the crime of carrying the US flag on US soil - https://www.newsweek.com/antifa-violence-portland-bernie-san... (the article comes with a nice photo! Can you spot any antifa i that photo, or will you continue to play dumb?)
I can keep...
I guess there's just no way to tell! They could belong to any group! Except antifa, of course, because antifa is not a group. It's just an idea. With adherents. That form groups and execute actions based on that idea.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/antifa-violence-portland-bernie-san...
Opposition to fascism isn't centrism when fascism is broadly defined to include centrist ideas and the opposition is expressed as firebombing Tesla dealerships.
> Go fuck yourself, gaslighting piece of shit.
This is a completely unacceptable style of commenting on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Please take a moment to read them again and make an effort to observe them, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you can't make your point without being abusive, you probably don't have a good point. We have to ban accounts that continue commenting like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
How could you possibly equate those?
Declaring that the State Department's language is "accurately reciting" is equating.
Now you are just imagining the word "terrorism" into a sentence that does not include the word "terrorism". As a reminder, here is the sentence we are discussing: "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."
Gaslighting again. The quote was "anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism". See how you "accidentally" forgot to mention "anti-fascism" in there? This organization is actively supporting Antifa. Antifa is a prototypical example of what people mean when they talk about "radical left".
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
It follows that those hosting them are chased
Anarchism is a philosophy. Antifa is an actual terrorist network.
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 also says their manifesto was written in 2002.
You can use the Wayback machine to see older versions.
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.
[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.
Even if they were fully neutral the sanctions would be reasonable if they are supporting terrorists, but at least they'd have some sort of narrow libertarian defense of their morals. As it turns out, they do appear to be true left wing extremist group, and not some "everything-I-dont-like-is-Socialism" boogeyman.
Could have been a false flag to discredit antifa. What happened to safe harbor?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
They also support ie PPK. There is this general sentence in law:
> Providing financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism.
Any state, EU including, treats such entities with utmost hostility. I have no stance on Israel vs Palestine topic (as in, both sides are abhorable to the core and none is better for different reasons) but to expect any form of kindness to such entity in the very system they are against is... out of touch with reality.
An action very much expected and in line regardless of who is currently in power - if not please explain to me / others why I see things incorrectly.
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...
jan 6 were mostly peaceful protesters
The were nonviolent people milling about or protesting in both groups. Leave them alone. But those smashing and threatening and being violent… they (from both sides) both deserve to be separated from normal society
Neither side is free of fools
The arson and bomb attacks against infrastructure causing a senior to freeze to death? The leftist thugs that smash dissidents' heads in with hammers? The kind that assassinated Charlie Kirk?
But you are too far gone. Terrorist scum.
Claiming to be anti-fascist doesn't actually make them anti-fascist nor excuse them from breaking laws.
Is it:
1) Right wingers
2) People who hate Jews and glorify Hitler
3) Governments who make laws requiring corporations to cooperate with the state
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...
> on energy infrastructure
that's not violence
I get your point though. There's a strong push to characterize destruction of property as violence, as part of a push to delegitimize protest. To some people, the police can use physical violence against people to stop a protest and that's okay, whereas if the protestors so much as throw a brick through a window, they're violent extremists.
it says that these so-called 'anti-fascist' groups are good at branding themselves?
Anyone can start a group and call it "Anti-Fascist" but it's silly to suggest that opposing that group means you're a fascist. Maybe you don't like their methods. Maybe you think they're full of shit in who they choose to oppose. Or maybe they do commit crimes and you call them criminals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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"
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
Israelis and others who support this have shown that the lesson they took from the Holocaust is that they believe it's morally fine as long as they're the ones doing the killing.
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.
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.
Laying down your arms is generally considered an expression of surrender and renders protection.
Also, who sends scouts unarmed? They should at least have a sidearm.
And it was a hypothetical, there are a lot of situations where you can kill unarmed military personnel legally.
You can just bomb military barracks full of sleeping unarmed people legally for example.
And no, limiting food and medical is not a war crime if the source being limited is from the captor and matches the treatment of their own troops.
"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.
This is an utterly idiotic take and 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 would be a lot worse for them than sanctions.
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.
British people attacking British forces are not sabotaging an occupying or invading military.
That's the definition every undemocratic occupying power uses.
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 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.
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.
Streisand effect at work again
> 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!
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 has 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?
Should a blog platform be forced to help everyone express themselves or no one?
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.
So I don't think this is as innocent as they seem. They are making and providing tools that enable communication specifically for Far Left groups, some of which are terrorist groups. I think their mock innocence here is hiding that they are being very intentional with their actions. If I make guns and make a point to only give them to groups which agree with my manifesto, and they are terrorists, I can't act innocent there. Providing communication services are the same. The probability they are hosting or providing support to a terrorist group is approaching 1.
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).
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...
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.
You say provide tools for communication. Presumably that's every communication platform worldwide - almost undoubtably some sort of terrorist has used each of them.
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?
As per a government who puts cycling and expressing distaste for inflation in the same camp.
Everyone's a terrorist nowadays.
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?
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? ?!
US laws and sentences does not apply beyond US borders unless differently agreed.
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
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?
A/I was never a politically neutral host, not that that would save them from sanctions: https://www.wewillfreeus.org/the-server-called-paranoia-defe...
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.
* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.
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.
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.
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.
Weak men create hard times. The founding fathers are rolling in their graves.
Woah, with radical statements like that, we might have to go after mutual aid groups, PACs, and churches.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I love how governments (in the west) are absolutely incapable of campaigns of terror.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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. Opsec won't protect your software stack's US finance attacks. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public funding.
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. 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.
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.
It is impossible to make a secure system without the continuous transmission of dummy messages to large numbers of users.
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.
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 that it's a case-by-case question.
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.
You have a list of peers, P1,...,PN, every send you send a message to each of them. If you don't put one in, it's a dummy message chosen at random and encrypted. But if you have a message, you send that at the appointed time.
Consequently, from the outside of the system, from the PoV of someone who does not have the keys, its behaviour is indistinguishable from a system where no one is sending any messagess at all.
https://getsession.org
Ridiculous.
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 accounts, because of weak association through legal defense support. Mind you, the GLS bank who cancelled their account proactively, would be considered a communist project by US standards, and Rote Hilfe is a traditional German political institution being only cancelled once before: 1933. 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.
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.
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.
8chan didn't even do shit
That makes them, like, the bad guys, don't you think?!
And it probably didnt start with them
Kinda odd to put those two in the same bucket.
Left wingers wingers were quiet when:
- Canada debanked right wing truckers
- UK arrests white girls for words black people are allowed to say: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
- multiple American platforms coordinated to silence Trump in 2021
Is it a surprise now that right wingers are doing the same?
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)
I can't find much left or right coverage of it, there's so much news coverage in the way.
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.
https://www.ms.now/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-4chan-chris-poole
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
You claim it was more than just moving a box of magazines. I see no court documents or reporting saying it was anything more than that.
For correct information, visit: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-antifa-cell-members-no...
You trying to make the contents of the magazines scary by quoting the DOJ doesn't change the nature of the crime that got him 30 years.
And, to be clear, this box could have contained a signed confession and 30 years would have still been an extremely excessive punishment. People get shorter sentences for rape, manslaughter, and maming. Heck, some murder charges are shorter than 30 years.
To the original point, the crime was moving boxes. Hosting an exit node that transports a request deemed bad by the government is exactly the same thing. After all, it may be "insurrection plans".
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
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.
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.
Much better than Signal, the platform of choice for politicians, feds, and security researchers for their personal and private communications.
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.
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...
Nice framing. Binary "either you are with authorities or you are against them", no consideration that "terrorist" is up for courts to decide, not govs or ISPs and that complying-or-not with a legal-or-not order can have many reasons and outcomes. Would you call apple, refusing to decrypt a terror org too? Framing those subjects as terrorists is true darkage backwards reasoning. A/I calls it radical activism, the US gov calls it marxist terrorism. To me, its clear who is more credible.
oh, and if you believe apple doesn't cooperate with the us govt., good luck!
Any sanctioned org for just being p2p/crypto so far?
Seems you misdirect reasons.
This is, to be clear, lying nonsense.
Keep in mind that the PKK is a designated terrorist organization in the EU, UK, and US. For over 20 years. The US designation even predates 9/11 (when terrorism hysteria ramped up).
It's true there are "terrorism" and "left wing extremism" boogeymen, but this doesnt seem to be that.
>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.
China might execute more people than the rest of the world combined, be interfering in the world at historic levels, building out its military with unprecedented speed and cooperating with cartels to gain control in South America while flooding the US with lethal drugs, but they don't count, because I make the rules!
Iran and communist billionaires might be funding leftist violence inside the US, but who cares, violence is legal protest, right?
The numerous successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts against conservatives don't count either, because assassination for political reasons isn't terrorism... probably? That's like, some other kind of thing!
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 - as I said, please come to your senses.
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. 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 there was no actual substantive policy or leadership, just more division and "I take no responsibility at all".
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...
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.
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 ...
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.
Interestingly enough, the designated terrorist organizations the plaintiff wanted to support included the PKK as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480377
Unless you're just saying the court disagrees, which is fair, but yuck
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're providing "material support" by helping them spread their messages, as you've made their writings transit your network in order for them to reach you.
[1]: https://tucowsdomains.com/provider-result/
Domains at Tucows or Njalla don't immediately land on blacklists either, that's just nonsense.
Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
Given the timing around putting economic pressure on Iran, I'm assuming that they had some financial connection to Iran.
Whether this specific post is about Iranian connections to these groups, I don't know, but that's why I said assume for that aspect of it.
The US claims they were providing services to the PKK which has been a designated terrorist organization in the EU, UK, and US for 20+ years (predating 9/11 even in the US).
>Can we all agree that this is an assault on the First Amendment?
No. There is already a law that you cant knowingly provide material support (including services) to designated terrorist organizations that has been upheld by the Supreme Court https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/561/1. Im curious, what argument would you make in favor of being able to knowingly provide material support to designated terrorist organizations?
Interestingly enough, the designated terrorist organizations the plaintiff wanted to support included the PKK as well.
Curious why these groups always seem to omit anti-communism, when communism lends itself just as readily to authoritarianism and has caused at least as much death and suffering historically.
If the principle is opposition to oppression, why not frame it more broadly as anti-authoritarianism?
Fascism is reaction - Benito Mussolini.
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?