By Cody Bloomfield
This article was originally published by Truthout
Trump’s war on the left is coming for anti-surveillance technology providers.
When the government puts a target on your back, every corner of online organizing becomes a puzzle. How do you ensure that your emails are private, when Google will hand over the contents of your emails to prosecutors, sometimes without ever notifying you? How do you keep your comrades informed, when maintaining an email list poses a security risk? How do you share information online without compromising the security of your web visitors?
UntilSeptember 6, the Autistici/Inventati (A/I) Collective provided privacy-focused digital infrastructure that allowed aligned groups around the world to evade government surveillance. Under siege, groups from Hamas to the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair sought refuge from the prying eyes of three-letter agencies through the use of A/I Collective email addresses, websites, mailing lists, and blogs. The users of A/I Collective technology were no strangers to the United States counterterrorism apparatus, but on August 26, 2026, the Trump administration took the unusual escalatory step of listing the technology provider itself as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization.
Legal uncertainty and disruption ensued immediately after the designation. The sanctions framework maps far more cleanly onto groups directly engaged in violence than it does onto a group providing anti-surveillance technology. Under the post-9/11 executive order establishing the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list, fundraising for ISIS or holding joint press conferences with al-Qaeda is verboten. But could posting on blogs hosted by the A/I Collective trigger a $1 million fine and 20 years of imprisonment? Official communications provide little assistance; the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control FAQ unhelpfully states that the exchange of information may be either blocked or exempt.
In a press release, the State Department pointed to the A/I Collective’s vetting of users for “ideological affinity,” folding the targeting of the organization into the enforcement of Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which has initiated a crackdown on the global left. Civil society groups immediately noted the escalation into targeting not only those accused of violence, but their purported backers. “The designation of A/I Collective is significant because Treasury is applying counterterrorism sanctions not only to organizations it alleges engage directly in violence, but also to entities it characterizes as providing enabling infrastructure to designated or terrorist-linked groups…[G]roups and individuals that rely on the A/I Collective’s infrastructure may now need to assess whether continued use creates sanctions exposure,” wrote the Charity & Security Network, a coalition that has helped nonprofits navigate sanctions risk since 2009.
While users of A/I Collective services struggled to interpret the sanctions, the hammer came down immediately on the volunteer collective. Within 48 hours of the designation, the United States-based holder of the autistici.org domain shuttered the website, leaving A/I Collective to flee to an alternate domain. The Italian Banca Etica suspended the bank account the volunteer collective used to collect donations, citing sanctions risk. Backed into a corner, with no way to protect users and collect the donations needed to fund its €13,000 annual budget, the A/I Collective announced the shutdown of all of its services on September 6, 2026. In a statement, the A/I Collective wrote: “The possibility that our work may cause legal and financial consequences to those who are close to us — or even only have something to do with us — leaves us no choice.” On September 20, an estimated 10,000 NoBlogs sites went dark, stranding the radical activists who used the A/I Collective-hosted blogging platform to share everything from zines to direct-action tactical communiques.
With prosecutors on the hunt for novel methods to weave together conspiracy charges against anarchists and other left movements, the A/I Collective’s assessment may unfortunately prove correct. In the Prairieland trial, in which federal prosecutors asserted that anti-ICE protesters comprised a North Texas antifa cell, the prosecution’s own expert witness acknowledged on cross-examination that antifa has no national leadership, nor membership rolls, nor dues, nor hierarchy — in short, no hallmarks of a typical terrorist organization, the Trump administration’s designation aside. Absent typical indications of group membership, prosecutors have argued that the use of digital privacy tools is evidence of criminal intent that links together anarchist conspiracies. The June 2026 indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota cited the use of an “encrypted messaging application” (Signal) as “manner and means of the conspiracy.” In 2024, during the first RICO trial targeting members of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, the judge presiding ruled that possession of a burner phone represented inherent criminal intent. The same RICO indictment implicated A/I Collective tech directly, alleging that three members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund posted threats and incitements to property damage on the A/I Collective-hosted site scenes.noblogs.org. (The question of how these assertions would have played out in court was never resolved due to a pause pending the resolution of interlocutory appeal during the first trial, followed by a mistrial. In 2025, all of the RICO charges, including those against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, were dismissed.) While these prosecutions have either faltered or remain in inchoate stages, the threat remains that further association of privacy-protective technology with terrorism could smooth prosecutors’ path toward establishing the existence of anarchist conspiracies.
The terrorist designation is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to merge domestic and international terrorism investigatory apparatuses. Last November, the Trump administration designated four European anarchist groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, raising the specter of material support for terrorism prosecutions of U.S.-based anarchists perceived to be engaged in coordinated advocacy. Days later, the same four organizations were added to the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, allowing the U.S. government to invoke additional surveillance authorities against individuals and organizations within the United States with ties abroad.
In July, the State Department convened representatives of 67 countries for a summit on global left-wing terrorism. Speaking to ministers and representatives hailing from around the world, White House adviser Stephen Miller characterized left-wing violence as the “fatal cancer of civilization.” In his speech, Secretary of State Marco Rubio obliquely presaged the coming crackdown against international left-aligned technology providers, commenting that, “[t]oday’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country.” Both Rubio and Miller explicitly linked international counterterrorism efforts to the NSPM-7 directive to suppress anarchist organizing and other left movements at home. Reminiscent of the COINTELPRO directive to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black liberation movements and progressive activists, NSPM-7 seeks to, in Miller’s words, “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute … political terrorists.”
Indeed, the shutdown of A/I Collective services is disruptive to domestic organizing. Anarchist groups across the United States use the A/I Collective’s services for a variety of purposes, from disseminating press releases about First Amendment-protected protests to claiming credit for illegal activity. While some groups use NoBlogs solely to share communiques about illegal conduct — Jane’s Revenge, one of the groups named in the State Department press release, nearly exclusively catalogs the group’s vandalism of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers — other groups rely on the security features of the platform to engage in protected advocacy.
Targeted by both law enforcement and right-wing militias, including Patriot Front and the Proud Boys, members of self-described Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists found refuge in the security measures A/I Collective technology provided, explained a member of the group who requested anonymity given the current crackdown. The group primarily used NoBlogs to distribute information about the white supremacists they investigated, which included a middle school teacher, church leader, and now-former Air Force master sergeant. NoBlogs’ data minimization protocols afforded safety to audiences interested in sleuthing out members of white supremacist groups.
Non-privacy protective websites can capture sprawling amounts of data, explained Glencora Borradaile, a professor of computer science at Oregon State University. “If you are not blocking cookies in your browser, then visiting a website can lead to scraping your web traffic from other websites,” they said, noting that, for many computer users, almost all of their online life takes place in browsers. That information can then be shared across websites through the use of third-party cookies, allowing unscrupulous websites to collect a mosaic of information about a user.
“We want our readers to trust that we are not collecting identifiable information on them, and we don’t want that information stored so it can be used by hackers or government officials,” explained the Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists representative.
While some groups relied on NoBlogs for conduct that could incur criminal penalties, such as doxxing people involved in the building of data centers, others used the platform to engage in constitutionally protected speech. The Seattle Anarchist Book Fair posted event announcements on its NoBlogs site. Given the Minnesota indictment’s reference to an activist speaking engagement at the Chicago anarchist speaking tour, security precautions are merited, even for First Amendment-protected speech and association.
Rather than pursuing individual investigations into solely illegal conduct, the Trump administration instead painted with a broad brush, collapsing conduct ranging from public relations to targeted threats into the counterterrorism framework. The net effect is chasing activists toward platforms more likely to surveil them. Activists are left to seek other digital infrastructure that will defend privacy and refuse to surrender to de facto censorship. Asked why the group used NoBlogs, the Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists member commented, “Most of the other publishing platforms don’t offer the same speech protections as NoBlogs. Most of these webhosts will fold quickly when asked.”
Following the shutdown, activists will have to seek platforms that reduce the amount of information collected about users and fight to narrow legally compelled data disclosures. Borradaile raised the example of DreamHost, a web provider that successfully fought to narrow the scope of a Department of Justice warrant seeking the information of all 1.3 million people who visited the DisruptJ20 website ahead of 2017 Trump inauguration protests. The U.S.-based technology collective Riseup does not retain browser fingerprint information or IP addresses. In contrast, common providers, such as Google, do not encrypt information, leading to “a massive, massive amount of data that persists over time,” Borradaile warned.
“We don’t want to create a database of anti-fascists to target,” the representative of Colorado Springs Anti-Fascists warned.
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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