Leave it to the United States government to look at a decentralized, volunteer-run tech collective that has been scraping by on pocket change since 2001 and declare it an existential threat to national security.
If you missed the latest bureaucratic theater, the feds just slapped formal sanctions against the Autistici/Inventati collective—better known to veteran privacy nerds as the A/I Collective. Yes, that A/I. The Italian activist sysadmins hosting secure mailboxes, mailing lists, and encrypted chat servers for labor organizers, antifascists, and human rights defenders on servers probably held together with zip ties and sheer stubbornness.
When the Treasury Department announced measures targeting the infrastructure of the A/I Collective, the press release read like a bad techno-thriller. They tossed around terms like “illicit digital safe havens” and “unregulated infrastructure.” But let’s cut through the Beltway doublespeak: Washington isn’t terrified of some imaginary cyber-terror syndicate. They’re terrified of digital infrastructure they don’t own, can’t subpoena, and can’t coerce with a secret FISA court order over morning coffee.
For decades, the standard playbook of Silicon Valley has been simple: surrender user data to the highest bidder in the private sector, and keep a VIP pipeline open for the feds. If Google or Microsoft holds your keys, the state doesn’t need to break down your door; they just email a PDF to compliance, and your digital life gets packaged into a neat little zip file.
The A/I Collective broke that entire business model simply by refusing to play. No advertising trackers. No data monetization. No identity verification. No logs that can be handed over to overzealous prosecutors targeting environmental activists or union organizers. When a platform literally does not collect your metadata, a government subpoena is just an expensive piece of toilet paper.
That fundamental refusal to build a surveillance machine is what actually triggered this tantrum. When the state talks about “responsible technology,” they mean technology with an administrative backdoor for the police. The moment you build a system where the architecture itself respects human privacy by default, you become an outlaw.
Look at the timing. We live in an era where generative ai hype is used to justify vacuuming up every crumb of human expression on the open web. Trillion-dollar monopolies are weaponizing ai algorithms to predict user behavior, feed predictive policing models, and turn the internet into an inescapable panopticon. Those corporations get multi-billion-dollar defense contracts and state dinners at the White House.
Meanwhile, a collective of volunteer sysadmins maintaining free, non-commercial communication channels gets designated as an economic pariah.
The hypocrisy would be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerous. The U.S. loves to lecture authoritarian regimes about internet freedom, funding proxy tools abroad under the banner of “promoting democracy.” But the second those exact same privacy tools are used to shield domestic dissidents, anti-war organizers, or grassroots activists from American domestic surveillance, the narrative flips overnight. Suddenly, end-to-end encryption and zero-knowledge servers aren’t “digital freedom”—they’re “national security vulnerabilities.”
Sanctioning the A/I Collective won’t kill decentralized tech, but it sends a chilling message to anyone hosting independent infrastructure: conform to the surveillance economy or get treated like an enemy combatant. The feds want us to believe our only choices are the commercial panopticon of Big Tech or the state-monitored ghetto of approved platforms.
They want you to forget that another internet is possible—one built on mutual aid, voluntary labor, and genuine anonymity.
The A/I Collective proved that a free digital commons could survive for a quarter of a century without selling out to venture capital or bending the knee to intelligence agencies. That’s their real crime. Washington didn’t sanction them because they failed; Washington sanctioned them because they proved privacy works, and that is a precedent no empire can afford to tolerate.
Hot Take: If your privacy setup doesn’t eventually piss off a Department of Justice bureaucrat, you aren’t actually using privacy tools—you’re just using a digital filing cabinet that the feds haven’t bothered to open yet. Long live the rogue sysadmins.