Never has a year had us waiting so hard for a scorching August to end, following an equally scorching July and a June just like it.

But on August 26, with Rome baking at 35°C (95°F), some news came in that froze every drop of sweat: the US Treasury (specifically OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control) put A/I (short for Autistici/Inventati) on the SDN list, the “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.” They were added with the SDGT designation, “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.“
Oh my god, who could these terrifying people possibly be?

Let’s take a break and talk about this collective, starting with the name: Autistici Inventati ODV, registered in Italy. It’s the merger of two earlier associations, and therefore of their two names.

Yep, O-organizzazione D-di V-volontariato, meaning A/I is a nonprofit, a volunteer association (look up what an ODV is).
For 25 years they’ve provided internet services (email, blogs, hosting, mailing lists, chat, video conferencing, VPN) for free, without asking for your soul or your personal data in return, and while protecting your privacy from third parties. Basically, they did what Google does and more, without getting rich by selling their users’ data, reading their emails and using them to train AIs, or reselling profiling information. (Oh, you think Google doesn’t do that? Look up what “Smart Features” are.)
So, to sum up: an Italian nonprofit volunteer association, with volunteers who use their own time and skills so other people can have a free email account, a blog, or some space on the web, gets put on a US list that labels them terrorists.
We’re rational animals, right? So for something like this to happen, there must have been a court that convicted them, or at least a criminal complaint? Nope. Nothing.

The US government relied on the so-called Bush law, Executive Order 13224 from 2001, which lets it go after anyone providing financial, material, or technological support to terrorist entities. No proof needed, no convictions or complaints, and they can act on suspicion alone.

And A/I is guilty. This tiny collective, sitting on the other side of the ocean from the United States, has two offenses in their eyes.
First: they provide tools to anyone who asks, so their users could potentially be ANTIFASCISTS. In fact, they themselves openly declare that they’re antifascist. That’s a serious offense for the current administration, which issued the executive order of September 2025.
Second: they do something for others on a volunteer basis and cover their costs with donations, without getting rich. In the temple of capitalism, that sounds like blasphemy.

For a lot of their users, being on this list feels like a badge of honor, because they naively thought: “Sure, maybe they’re not welcome in the US, but here in Italy nothing changes for them, right?”
Wrong.

Wrong, because anyone put on this list becomes a kind of pariah, an outcast. US law says no individual or company can have commercial dealings or ties with anyone on the SDN list, at the risk of being treated like them.

The rule sets September 25 as the deadline by which these ties must be cut. So all the US companies start hacking away at them.

Who moved first? Public Interest Registry (PIR), a nonprofit (them too!) created by the Internet Society to run the .ORG TLD. PIR is part of the ICANN ecosystem, the organization that manages the domain names that let websites exist at all. PIR shut down the “autistici.org” domain, which was under its control, in the night between August 27 and 28, less than 48 hours after the listing. Talk about efficiency!
Internet Society Italy objected to the move, which caused quite a stir, and the apology? Nothing.

So what does that mean? That the autistici.org site basically no longer exists, and neither do all the services A/I provided to its users. Blogs, email, websites, all the resources of completely unsuspecting people got switched off. Why? Because someone on the other side of the ocean decided they were all potential terrorists, openly antifascist ones at that.

Everyone thinks this is absurd, so they all expect the decision to be reversed soon. Instead, things get worse. The collective starts warning its users about how to recover their emails and where to move to sort out the fallout. And while they’re dealing with that, they get hit with an attack on the Noblogs site, which has historically hosted its users’ blogs. The attack is suspected to come from someone on the American right, or even people working at the Pentagon, but since nobody claimed it, that’s pure speculation. The attacker (or attackers) claimed to have taken all the blog owners’ personal data, but the collective rules that out, since the owners’ data was on a different server.
And so, while the collective is still working to help its users save their blogs too, the escalation continues.

In the night between August 31 and September 1, PayPal blocks A/I’s account, keeping them from accessing the money in it. The payment gateway used the listing as its excuse and hid behind its legal obligation to act this way. Again, incredible efficiency.

So far, it’s American companies bowing to their own country’s law. You could even say we saw that coming. But then comes the big slap in the face.
The collective has a bank account at the bank used by almost all nonprofits in Italy: Banca Etica. That bank’s slogan: “We are a popular and cooperative bank, 100% devoted to ethical finance. Since 1999 we’ve been guided by one great principle: the highest interest is everyone’s interest.”

Maybe they forgot to add “omissis… everyone’s, except for the roughly 20,000 people who have an active resource with Autistici Inventati.”

So what does Banca Etica do, with until September 25 to act? It suspends the association’s account on September 1.
The question is: Banca Etica is an Italian bank, so why did it block (and then close) the account? The answer is legitimate and even understandable: there’s such a thing as “secondary sanctions,” and the bank fears them for the sake of all its other customers. Basically the reasoning is: if Banca Etica doesn’t act against A/I, players like VISA, MASTERCARD, etc. could face repercussions from the US and hit the bank, and the bank would cause trouble for its other customers.
Nobody questions that reasoning, and A/I themselves even justify it, but what’s being challenged is the timing and the speed of this beheading. I find it pretty Pontius Pilate, this decision that basically calls on the institutions to step in.
And then another question comes up: why does an Italian bank fold immediately and meekly to this decision without even asking for some kind of confirmation, a complaint, evidence of a crime in Italy or Europe? It certainly wouldn’t have fixed anything, but it would have had real symbolic value. Even Banca Etica’s former General Manager, Alessandro Messina, says the bank shouldn’t have given in without a fight.

At this point, with A/I’s services shut down for them and all their users, with their accounts frozen and no way to pay their suppliers, the question is: where is Italy? Where is Europe? How can an Italian and European company or association be shut down without any complaint or suspicion of a crime, without even a warning? And how can its users (several thousand of them) end up without their services because of the whim of a law that isn’t part of our legal system?
To be fair, both the Democratic Party and Brothers of Italy wrote to the European Parliament to support the collective, and now the ball is in President von der Leyen’s court, and we’re all waiting for this unbearable silence to end.
In Italy and Europe, to shut down a hosting provider you need complaints, and you have to be able to show that they were asked to step in and block any lawbreakers among their users. But in this case, they went ahead under the laws of a non-EU country. Europe actually has regulations it could bring to bear to save Autistici Inventati and to save its own dignity, but right now it doesn’t seem interested in applying them. After all, dignity is an overrated value.

The story has a tragic but majestic ending.
On September 6, Autistici Inventati published a farewell: they tried to hold out and keep the services running, but realized that continuing would put their own users at risk, so they decided to give up. Their statement includes some words of hope:
“It’s been 25 beautiful years. It’s been a ‘beautiful story.’ Now put down the computer, go outside, fight, hug each other, and don’t lose your smile. Because we’re stopping. But the resistance and the ideas aren’t. Let’s stay human.” (read the full statement).

On September 8, the association filed an urgent petition with the Court of Pisa asking that Banca Etica reopen the account, or at least transfer the money to another account so they can pay off their suppliers. Banca Etica said it was glad about this action against itself, saying it will raise awareness among the institutions. I find this behavior cowardly to a degree that’s hard to find anywhere else.
The Democratic Party and Brothers of Italy are waiting for news from the EU Parliament.
The institutions’ lack of dignity is embarrassing.
We ex-A/I users (yes, me too) feel robbed and angry, but above all worried. I’ve been writing about Digital Sovereignty for years, and an action like this basically opens the door to scenarios we never would have believed possible just a few months ago.

DISCLAIMER: in case it wasn’t clear, the author proudly stands with our sisters and brothers at A/I.