The Silence Is the Weapon: Autistici/Inventati and Europe's Hybrid War Blind Spot

But dynes haven't been passive!

Now, this is not a story about "America sanctioned an Italian website." It is a signal that an order we took for granted is being dismantled, and Europe's silence in the face of it is more disturbing than the sanctions themselves.

We write this in solidarity with Autistici/Inventati and with everyone who relied on its infrastructure. What was shut down was not just a service. It was a commons.

A Sovereignty Breach in Plain Sight

On August 26, 2026, the U.S. State Department designated Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224. This volunteer-run Italian collective, founded in 2001 to provide secure email, hosting, and anonymity tools to activists, journalists, and civil society, was accused of providing communications infrastructure to "violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants." No public evidence. No Italian or EU judicial investigation. No conviction. Just an administrative decision in Washington.

The chain reaction was super fast. The Public Interest Registry, which manages .org domains under U.S. jurisdiction, put autistici dot org on serverHold. PayPal froze the collective's account. Banca Etica, an Italian ethical bank, closed A/I's accounts citing "sanctions-related risk," even though the bank itself acknowledged this amounted to applying American sanctions for political purposes. On September 18, A/I announced it was permanently shutting down all services. Its statement was clear: continuing would only expose the people connected to it to legal and financial ruin. "We have no choice."

A 25-year-old piece of independent technical infrastructure, serving roughly 16,000 email accounts, thousands of blogs, and 5,500 mailing lists, simply ceased to exist.

Europe's Astonishingly Weak Response

What was the official European reaction? Almost nothing.

This is the part that should alarm anyone who cares about European sovereignty. The United States effectively enforced its domestic administrative decision on European soil. Not through courts. Not through treaties. Not through any bilateral legal mechanism. It did so through the compliance fear of private infrastructure providers. Domain registrars, payment processors, and banks outside the U.S. are structurally dependent on American-controlled systems. They cannot afford to ignore Washington's designations. So they don't. They cut ties preemptively, without a European court order, without due process, without any European institution having a say.

And the European Commission? The European Parliament? National governments? Silence, or nearly so. A handful of MEPs raised questions. Civil society organizations such as EDRi, the Chaos Computer Club, and thirty other groups spoke out. But the institutional response was a vacuum. We were evidently speechless, but we're not elected officials. People don't seek us out for counceling. That's the job of the commissioners who are quick to invoke "European values" and "digital sovereignty" in speeches. And they looked entirely oblivious to the fact that the rights of European citizens were being curtailed by a foreign power through private intermediaries.

This is not a failure of awareness. It is a failure of will. And it is a failure that has consequences.

The Internet Is a Public Space. Anonymity Is Not a Crime.

Here is the conceptual knot that Europe refuses to untie. The internet is a public space. We treat it as such in every meaningful sense. It is where political speech happens, where assembly happens, where journalism happens, where dissent happens. And in a physical public space, I have the right to move anonymously. I can walk down a street, sit in a square, attend a protest, enter a library, without being required to identify myself to a government agent or a corporation. That right is not a loophole. It is foundational to a free society. It protects whistleblowers, dissidents, journalists, minorities, and ordinary people who simply do not want their every movement logged and monetized.

It’s worth reminding that we have the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is a legally binding document that sets out fundamental rights and freedoms recognized in EU law.
The EU Charter does not expressly establish a right to anonymity, but Articles 7, 8 and 11 which are protecting private life and communications, personal data, and freedom of expression and information, together support the principle that people should be able to act anonymously online.

The A/I affair forces the question. If anonymity is a right, then shutting down an anonymity provider is a rights violation. The EU Charter though does not, by itself, create a general duty for the Commission to defend every European organisation against an abuse by a foreign country. If the EU has no automatic or clearly defined response, organisations may be left exposed and the abuse may continue on other organisations. The EU should at least examine how to prevent and investigate such intrusions, support affected organisations, reduce dependence on infrastructure vulnerable to foreign control, and establish clear, proportionate mechanisms for a coordinated response, while safeguarding privacy, freedom of expression and the rule of law.

The Weakness Is Structural

This cannot be happening in Europe. That is not a sentimental statement. It is a structural observation.

The A/I shutdown reveals that Europe's digital infrastructure is not sovereign. Our domains are managed under American jurisdiction. Our payment systems are American-controlled or American-dependent. Our cloud infrastructure is overwhelmingly American-owned. This means that any European entity, whether a hosting provider, a bank, or a domain registry, that wants to continue operating in the global economy must treat U.S. sanctions as binding, regardless of European law or European rights frameworks.

That is not a partnership. That is a hierarchy. And it is a hierarchy that can be weaponized against European civil society at any moment, for any political reason, without any European legal process.

This is what hybrid warfare looks like in the 21st century. It does not require tanks or missiles. It requires control over the chokepoints of the digital economy, namely domains, payments, and cloud infrastructure, and the willingness to use that control to shape what is possible for European citizens to say, build, and organize. The A/I affair is not an anomaly. It is a template. We will see more of this, not less, unless Europe changes course.

In fact: it has already begun. Now the Nederlands is directly involved: On October 13th, an Amsterdam police unit seized a server belonging to the Italian internet service provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I) at a data center in the Amsterdam Science Park. The seizure was carried out following a request for legal assistance from the US. A copy of the server's contents is now being sent to the United States.

The Third Way, and the Cost of Not Taking It

Europe has a choice, and it is running out of time to make it.

The first way of the internet is the wild one. No rules, no accountability, no protection for rights. The second way is the fully controlled one. Surveillance, identification, censorship, whether in the Chinese model or the creeping American corporate-government hybrid. Both are failures. The third way is the one that experts have been advocating for years: an internet that is neither lawless nor surveilled into submission, but one where rights are structurally protected. Where anonymity is a legal guarantee. Where infrastructure is democratically governed. Where European institutions have the technical and legal capacity to resist extraterritorial coercion.

This third way is not utopian. It exists and it's implementation is a matter of political will. It requires investment in European domain infrastructure, European payment alternatives, European hosting capacity. It requires a legal framework that clearly establishes anonymity as a right and protects European service providers from foreign sanctions overreach. It requires, above all, that European politicians start listening to the technologists, legal scholars, and civil society experts who have been warning about exactly this scenario for years.

Right now, they are not listening. They are looking away. And the silence is not neutral. It is an act of complicity.

Our rights are at stake. Not in some abstract future, but here, now, in the slow disappearance of the infrastructure that makes those rights exercisable. To the people of Autistici/Inventati and to everyone who used their services: we see what was taken from you, and we stand with you. Unless the EU wakes up, listens to its experts, and builds the third way, European sovereignty will not be a victim of the next hybrid attack. It will already have surrendered to the first one.

Would you like to know more?

• Read A/I book on Archive - Published by Institute of Network Cultures
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