Antifa Networks Panic After Trump Admin Sanctioned Their Servers

In perhaps the most consequential move to date by the Trump administration to address the challenge of what it calls the “political terrorism” of the far-left, the U.S. State and U.S. Treasury Departments announced this week the designation of the Autistici/Inventati Collective, an Italy-based anonymous tech collective, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

As the State Department described in its official announcement, A/I Collective provides sophisticated tech tools for a variety of far-left extremist actors, including website hosting, a blogging suite known as “No.Blogs,” mail services, and similar tech services. Utilizing these anonymous tools, anarchist and autonomous groups issue communiques for designated terrorist groups, issue calls to commit criminal acts, and take credit for attacks against critical infrastructure and law enforcement both in the United States and abroad.

The State Department stressed in its release that the collective helps distribute not just opinions, but “target information, tactical manuals and techniques” for conducting criminal and terrorist acts.

While many on the online left have feigned indignation, for their part, the A/I Collective has long known that it was a legitimate target of law enforcement action. Following a series of Italian law enforcement actions in the early 2000s, the collective initiated what they called Plan R*, intended as a technical solution of decentralized servers meant to prevent physical intrusion and the collective’s clients from losing access in the event of law enforcement action. Following Plan R*, the collective published what it calls the “Orange Book,” a manual to allow individuals or groups to replicate their specific network methods.

This is in keeping with Anarchist/Autonomous methodology, which seeks to widely and deniably distribute responsibility. One can think of it as a kind of digital black bloc, where the more people participating and utilizing the techniques, the harder it is for law enforcement to address. While one site or group can be taken down, the material is quickly redistributed to other servers and other groups.

In a recent post (seen below) distributed via Antifa and anarchist Instagram accounts, the A/I Collective appears to admit that its Plan R* was never intended for the full legal force of the U.S. government’s sanctions regime.

It notes that the sanctions schema targets not the digital infrastructure but “The world around it” preventing the collective from banking, accepting donations, purchasing domains, or acquiring bandwidth. It goes on to warn U.S.-based supporters against attempting to circumvent sanctions without qualified legal advice, providing a list of “dos and don’ts” including “Do Not: Improvise donations, reroute funds, disguise payments, access private data, promise direct services, guess at sanctions law.”

Indeed, U.S. persons are prohibited from either receiving or providing any services to or from A/I Collective at all. That means hundreds of violent far-left actors in the United States may be scrambling to find new digital homes, or else face potential criminal investigation and liability.

There seems to be some surprise within the Antifa/Anarchist networks that the Trump administration has been successful in landing a genuine blow. After decades of hiding behind the legal fiction that “Antifa doesn’t exist,” the idea that the government might successfully target not just a handful of individual anarchists but elements of the network apparatus upon which they rely seems to have come as something of a shock.

“WTF” commented one account, apparently dumbfounded.

The Trump administration should expect, however, that these threat actors will not remain on their back heels for long. They should be preparing for the inevitable diaspora as groups flee A/I Collective for other similar entities, of which there is no shortage.

One possible outcome is that bad actors attempt to flee to U.S.-based tech collectives, such as RiseUp.Net, a Seattle-based tech collective closely aligned with A/I Collective, and which provides many of the same services to Antifa groups worldwide. As the A/I Collective members noted in their 2012 oral history of the collective, +Kaos. 10 anni di hacking e mediattivismo:

Among the various international contacts we have, few have followed our path. This depends in part on the fact that their user bases are smaller and the scale of the project is more limited. With the Americans from Riseup, on the other hand, we have closer relations precisely because their community is less small and the scale of the problems is similar to that of A/I.

Moving to a U.S.-based entity could create both risks and opportunities. While it would likely impact the ability of State or Treasury to apply sanctions tools, it would put the actors’ data within reach of the U.S. Justice Department and its enforcement mechanisms.

Likewise, the administration should expect legal action in an attempt to overturn the designation. Almost assuredly, the far-left’s legal support network is preparing their best test case, which will be carefully forum-shopped to provide the best chance for a sympathetic ruling.

Supporters should applaud U.S. State and Treasury for a job well done. The Trump administration’s efforts to see a whole-of-government effort to address the previously ignored threat of Antifa and other far-left terrorism are bearing real fruit. While plenty of work remains to be done, evidence suggests the U.S. government is beginning to understand how to address the unique challenge of far-left terrorism and treat it on par with other similar threats.

Kyle Shideler is senior analyst for Homeland Security at the Center for Security Policy.