The goalposts moved, yet again

I’ve mentioned the US sanctions on the ICC (International Criminal Court) several times before. Unsurprisingly, the sanctions didn’t stop there, they’re metastasising.

On the 26th of August, the US Treasury designated Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an Italian volunteer collective that provides email, hosting, and encrypted communications to activist groups, as a specially designated global terrorist.

Two days later, their website, autistici.org vanished. The US-based .org domain registry put the domain into a status called “serverHold”, basically a bureaucratic kill-switch that made the site unreachable. As I’ve also said before, no need to kill the target if you control the plumbing.

Whatever your opinion of A/I’s politics or their users, this is a problem: a US decision affected a foreign organisation’s domain (and other services, like banking) based on the argument that providing infrastructure to people the US doesn’t like counts as support for terrorism.

It’s a new target, but the (now expanding) pattern is the same: using infrastructure providers as a means of sanction.

The goalposts are moving. Today it might be organisations you don’t care about, tomorrow it might be yours. Because the definition of “wrong” will change.

As far as your digital tools go, you’re only safe by accident.

Time to write that plan.

Colin