I am a bit surprised to hear that the U.S. government can still order around Dutch police like a butler. Maybe the Dutch regime is struggling to actually effectively decouple themselves from the U.S.? Would love to hear an expert weigh in.
ASML weighs in on this, they get a key component from the US (a lens iirc). There is no real possibility of complete decoupling in the modern world. You would have to go back to a much less modern world for true decoupling.
The EUV lenses are made by Zeiss in Germany AFAIK.
But to even suggest that ASML is dictating US-Dutch diplomacy, two NATO members with similar values and goals, is hilariously off.
If they're willing to go to war for each other, I'd say they're willing to take down a server or two for each other too.
Obviously not a perfect analogy but it shows that US-Dutch relationships very much predate ASML and extend far beyond commercial interests.
I have a similar problem with the Taiwan "silicon shield" meme that's been going around, as if the US hasn't supported the republican Chinese forces since the 30's, including with troops on the ground.
> Why is it allowed to impose its force on the civilians it is protecting?
I don't think co-operation on this type of crime is part of the treaty itself but the treaty doesn't mean much if the two countries don't have a good diplomatic relationship.
> Is it because A/I are "terrorists" and "terrorists" are NATO responsibility?
This has nothing to do with NATO. This same kind of thing happens with the US and non-NATO countries as well. It often takes the coordinated effort of several countries to take down, in example, botnets.
Your comparison doesn't hold. ASML depends on components owned by the US, but US companies also depend on components created only by ASML. It is a mutual dependency. It doesn't imply that Dutch police should go around doing the bidding of a foreign government. This is much worse and should be protested.
Yes, it does. Dependence may be mutual, but the leverage is not equal. Trump could make a Truth Social post tomorrow and erase billions of ASML market cap, and they know he's irrational enough to do it. ASML and the Netherlands can't reciprocate such force without inflicting great harm on themselves.
I'm not arguing that's right or just. Only that it is. If you doubt it, go figure out why ASML shares dropped ~5% last April 7th. These people hang on the US government's every utterance.
The Dutch are with 17 million people and all our stuff runs on MS. Even a judge from the international criminal court had an Amazon Echo in her living room. We, on average, don't know and don't care.
All this sovereignty stuff is still quite contained in our nerd bubble I feel.
Replying to myself: my current theory is that the Dutch regime weighed the risk of political potential blowback from the U.S. (specifically executive office), and did not consider it worthwhile protecting the final servers of a group that is winding down anyways.
Again, would love to hear a domain expert weigh in! Also because I walk past this data center every day :)
The Netherlands is a pretty pragmatic place, at the end of the day. America is a massive trading, investment [1] and security partner to it. (Going back to our founding.)
And Dutch voters’ views on policing are currently tending right: “84 percent of Dutch adults believe police struggle to maintain authority. Ten percent disagreed, and 6 percent said they had no opinion” [2].
They can't and that's not what happened. The Dutch government believes Antifa to commit illegal acts. Enough for them to at least consider classifying them a terrorist organization about a year ago.
The thing is the moment antifa is mentioned it is most definitely politics. Antifa as a single cohesive organisation doesn't exist, the fact they even considered it might do is a political position. What does exist is radical left organisations some of which cross the legal line, and these can be targeted by mutual legal assistance requests. It'll be interesting to see if anything actually comes of this or it's a damp squib, these groups, esp the more militant anti-capitalist lot have learned to practicing opsec the hard way, e.g. getting nicked.
The same thing could be said about Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood or many other terrorist groups. It’s an excuse for plausible deniability. There is for example a real group called the Portland Rose Antifa who organized and plotted violent acts in a Signal chat.
> The Dutch government believes Antifa to commit illegal acts.
"antifa" does not exist. It is a handwavy word used by the far right as a placeholder for anything they don't like and want to destroy. But there is no such organization or group.
Calling themselves antifa is the same as calling themselves left wing. It's not an organization per se and it IS an hand wavy word used by american fascists to describe their enemies.
That being said the logo is a fair point. It's quite frequent. That being said, even if it's frequently used it's not a proof of an organized and coordinated movement. During the various House/Senate hearings, no one was able to bring any proof (or even tried for that matter) that there's coordination between those groups for nefarious purposes or otherwise.
And the explanation is simple, there isn't. It's all in the title. They're just anti fascist groups. In France at least you just see them when there are white supremacists attacking minority groups for fun (yes it happens, saw it a few time in my engineering school). Friends of mine used to call them when white guys came to punch blacks and arabs at their parties. Outside of this, they're basically not doing anything except maybe doing tattoos on each others and writing slogans on their backpacks.
In an ideal world, the cops would do that. But they aren't doing it in any effective capacity.
It's a bit horrendous that countries which went to war against fascism now treat anti fascism as suspicious or even dangerous, especially when the number of physical attacks against minorities are rising back up.
It's not antifa groups baiting gay people on grindr to beam them up. Yes, it's a thing, and yes it's "alt-right" people. But who cares, the orange president said they were fine people...
This is a neo-nazi maxim. It sounds reasonable until you realize that the people who say this are hoping you'll arrive at an antisemitic answer. Yes, criticizing "jews" broadly is going to get you a negative reaction. No, that does not mean that "jews rule over you". You're not going to get a great response saying the n-word either, but that doesn't mean Black people are your oppressors.
Same kind of drivel as "there's nothing wrong with defending your own people", until you realize that "your own people" = "the racial majority" and "defending" = "defending against other races". Take a moment to think about what you're saying and why people say it. These aren't universal truths; it only takes a moment to find a counterexample that should prove to you that these aren't worthy of being guiding beliefs.
Anyone living by these kinds of figures of speech isn't a critical thinker, which is pretty much why they exist. Authoritarians benefit when you don't think too hard about how things work.
That would be like when Google refused to take on military contracts with the US, but then they bent over backwards to do them with Israel. This is also when they changed a ton of internal policies to control employee expression, which started even before those interns broke into TK's office.
But honestly, the A/I situation doesn't look like that. Trump administration has been going after regular Antifa orgs for a long time.
> The Dutch police imaged the drive, gave it to the Americans and gave the server back to XS4ALL which itself appears to have shutdown too I think
Xs4all was owned by KPN, but was an independent daughter company. They got merged fully merged with KPN a little less than ten years ago. The article mentions DC1 is a successor of Xs4all's DC.
If this server is Freeteam (and it probably is) then this server has been used for various left-wing activism collectives, and got confiscated by Dutch police various times throughout the years. For example, a death threat to Geert Wilders by some troll (server didn't log, as it intentionally never logged). The data was encrypted at rest, but you know how that goes. Everyone and their mother had shell access to Freeteam. (I'm someone's mother.)
A/I volunteers shutdown all their servers themselves because running an org which is sanctioned by USA as a terrorist organization isn't doable. This was one of the few servers which wasn't yet dissolved.
How much more on the nose can you be than being anti-antifascist? It is obvious the double negative cancels out.
To all the Americans who think authoritarianism is something that happens elsewhere and that they would've stood up and stopped it: What are you waiting for?
Anti fascist means anti fascist, it means people who oppose and fight against fascism. There is no other meaning to that name. In this case, the name actually describes the movement (note movement; not a group) because they oppose and fight against fascists.
Anti Anti-fascists may not be fascist, however they oppose the people who oppose and fight against fascism for one reason or another.
“Having read your comment, the given examples do not apply to me only to them. I have provided zero evidence to support my own position or refute the comment I am replying to”
They want to do what they do, which is use violence to force their will on the populace. Claims that they are against “fascism” is excuse to do that. Obviously antifa is linked with violence research Rose City Antifa in Portland for a good example if you are not aware of Antifa.
Antifa is not a group, there is no membership, and nobody is “in” Antifa. It is a movement, which some groups and individuals identify with. That is all.
Everyone who is a part of antifa believes they are actually fighting fascist. And thus they call them selves Antifa, if they believed otherwise they wouldn’t call them selves Antifa. This is literally true by definition. A pleonasm if you will.
it's funny to look at people who are outraged by us interference in dutch politics, but at the same time, no one cares that the united states imposes sanctions on countries that pursue their policies towards iran and russia, interfering in their foreign policy. Double standards and damn BBC bots
A/I was filled with calls for violence and direct threats. This is a good thing.
Besides, Parler had the same fate and was forced to change their infrastructure. Instead of the government, it was big tech colluding with the Biden administration.
I thought this was a good thing, according to all of the articles and comments I saw shortly after on HN.
65 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 5.2 ms ] threadThe EUV lenses are made by Zeiss in Germany AFAIK. But to even suggest that ASML is dictating US-Dutch diplomacy, two NATO members with similar values and goals, is hilariously off.
Obviously not a perfect analogy but it shows that US-Dutch relationships very much predate ASML and extend far beyond commercial interests. I have a similar problem with the Taiwan "silicon shield" meme that's been going around, as if the US hasn't supported the republican Chinese forces since the 30's, including with troops on the ground.
Why is it allowed to impose its force on the civilians it is protecting?
Is it because A/I are "terrorists" and "terrorists" are NATO responsibility?
I don't think co-operation on this type of crime is part of the treaty itself but the treaty doesn't mean much if the two countries don't have a good diplomatic relationship.
> Is it because A/I are "terrorists" and "terrorists" are NATO responsibility?
Wtf are you on about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091084
Yes, it does. Dependence may be mutual, but the leverage is not equal. Trump could make a Truth Social post tomorrow and erase billions of ASML market cap, and they know he's irrational enough to do it. ASML and the Netherlands can't reciprocate such force without inflicting great harm on themselves.
I'm not arguing that's right or just. Only that it is. If you doubt it, go figure out why ASML shares dropped ~5% last April 7th. These people hang on the US government's every utterance.
All this sovereignty stuff is still quite contained in our nerd bubble I feel.
We will see the impact of this in a few years..
Five years ago it became its own official federal IT architecture guideline: https://nationale-it-architekturrichtlinie.gov.de/2_Architek...
Again, would love to hear a domain expert weigh in! Also because I walk past this data center every day :)
And Dutch voters’ views on policing are currently tending right: “84 percent of Dutch adults believe police struggle to maintain authority. Ten percent disagreed, and 6 percent said they had no opinion” [2].
[1] https://www.government.nl/latest/weblogs/the-work-of-the-min...
[2] https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/12/80-dutch-think-police-authorit...
"antifa" does not exist. It is a handwavy word used by the far right as a placeholder for anything they don't like and want to destroy. But there is no such organization or group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(Germany)#Contemporary_...
Pulling the "does not exist" card might work with uninformed people, not here
That being said the logo is a fair point. It's quite frequent. That being said, even if it's frequently used it's not a proof of an organized and coordinated movement. During the various House/Senate hearings, no one was able to bring any proof (or even tried for that matter) that there's coordination between those groups for nefarious purposes or otherwise.
And the explanation is simple, there isn't. It's all in the title. They're just anti fascist groups. In France at least you just see them when there are white supremacists attacking minority groups for fun (yes it happens, saw it a few time in my engineering school). Friends of mine used to call them when white guys came to punch blacks and arabs at their parties. Outside of this, they're basically not doing anything except maybe doing tattoos on each others and writing slogans on their backpacks. In an ideal world, the cops would do that. But they aren't doing it in any effective capacity.
It's a bit horrendous that countries which went to war against fascism now treat anti fascism as suspicious or even dangerous, especially when the number of physical attacks against minorities are rising back up.
It's not antifa groups baiting gay people on grindr to beam them up. Yes, it's a thing, and yes it's "alt-right" people. But who cares, the orange president said they were fine people...
This is shameful and the Dutch should be also ashamed to act as lap dogs.
What are you talking about, antifa has been a Trump bugbear since his first term.
Same kind of drivel as "there's nothing wrong with defending your own people", until you realize that "your own people" = "the racial majority" and "defending" = "defending against other races". Take a moment to think about what you're saying and why people say it. These aren't universal truths; it only takes a moment to find a counterexample that should prove to you that these aren't worthy of being guiding beliefs.
Anyone living by these kinds of figures of speech isn't a critical thinker, which is pretty much why they exist. Authoritarians benefit when you don't think too hard about how things work.
But honestly, the A/I situation doesn't look like that. Trump administration has been going after regular Antifa orgs for a long time.
The Dutch police imaged the drive, gave it to the Americans and gave the server back to XS4ALL which itself appears to have shutdown too I think
Xs4all was owned by KPN, but was an independent daughter company. They got merged fully merged with KPN a little less than ten years ago. The article mentions DC1 is a successor of Xs4all's DC.
If this server is Freeteam (and it probably is) then this server has been used for various left-wing activism collectives, and got confiscated by Dutch police various times throughout the years. For example, a death threat to Geert Wilders by some troll (server didn't log, as it intentionally never logged). The data was encrypted at rest, but you know how that goes. Everyone and their mother had shell access to Freeteam. (I'm someone's mother.)
A/I volunteers shutdown all their servers themselves because running an org which is sanctioned by USA as a terrorist organization isn't doable. This was one of the few servers which wasn't yet dissolved.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/10/14/poli...
[0] https://keepitfree.ai/
To all the Americans who think authoritarianism is something that happens elsewhere and that they would've stood up and stopped it: What are you waiting for?
Antifascist simply means “anti fascist” in the same way “make america great again” simply means “make America great again”.
Sometimes the name a Group picks for itself doesn’t match it’s actual behaviour. Love, the democratic peoples Republic of Korea.
Anti Anti-fascists may not be fascist, however they oppose the people who oppose and fight against fascism for one reason or another.
Everyone who is a part of antifa believes they are actually fighting fascist. And thus they call them selves Antifa, if they believed otherwise they wouldn’t call them selves Antifa. This is literally true by definition. A pleonasm if you will.
Besides, Parler had the same fate and was forced to change their infrastructure. Instead of the government, it was big tech colluding with the Biden administration.
I thought this was a good thing, according to all of the articles and comments I saw shortly after on HN.