US designates privacy collective behind noblogs.org a 'global terrorist'

On August 26, 2026, the US State Department named Autistici/Inventati — the volunteer-run Italian collective that operates noblogs.org — a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, alongside Britain’s Palestine Action and the Palestinian movement Masar Badil. Founded in 2001 and funded only by donations, Autistici/Inventati provides privacy-focused email, websites, mailing lists, and blogs to activists and cultural projects that want to avoid corporate platforms, hosting roughly 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 sites, 5,500 lists, and 10,000 blogs. The Treasury’s accompanying sanctions take effect September 25, 2026, blocking any US-person transactions with the group and exposing violators to civil or criminal penalties.

The designation rests on the claim that the collective supplies encrypted tools to violent far-left extremist groups, including Portland’s Rose City Antifa. The collective denies the allegations, and the source — an anarchist outlet, crimethinc — argues the government conflated Rose City Antifa with a separate project, Rose City Counterinfo, then used that error to assert a chain linking ‘Portland Antifa’ to Hamas and Iran’s IRGC via republished statements on a noblogs-hosted site. Some noblogs users are researchers who document far-right extremism, which sharpens the free-expression stakes.

Regardless of framing, the move is notable as infrastructure-level enforcement: rather than pressuring a commercial platform to deplatform accounts, Washington is using terrorism sanctions to cut off a non-commercial hosting provider entirely, with cross-border reach over anyone transacting with it. That sets a precedent for treating the operators of communications infrastructure as culpable for what users publish — a significant escalation for anyone running privacy or self-managed hosting services.