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The official website of Autistici/Inventati (A/I) today displays a notice that reads: “U.S. Sanctions Against the A/I Collective.” It’s the first thing anyone sees when visiting inventati.org, the portal of an Italian collective that has offered free email, hosting, and privacy tools to activists worldwide since 2001.
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A/I sustains its infrastructure solely through voluntary donations and unpaid labor. That’s why any restriction on transactions with the United States directly hits its ability to keep operating and to receive financial contributions.
TL;DR
- Autistici/Inventati (A/I) was founded in 2001 within Italy’s autonomous anti-capitalist movement.
- The collective offers free email, hosting, mailing lists, and blogs to activists around the world.
- All funding depends on voluntary donations; no one is paid a salary to keep the servers running.
- Every account request is reviewed by hand, through dialogue, before being approved or rejected.
- Applicants must read the manifesto, usage policy, and privacy policy before requesting an account.
- The inventati.org site now displays a notice titled “U.S. Sanctions Against the A/I Collective.”
- The service is only for non-commercial use, for people or groups aligned with the collective’s ideals.
What happened
The banner that greets anyone visiting inventati.org today is titled “U.S. Sanctions Against the A/I Collective” and sits at the top of the homepage, ahead of any other content. The site doesn’t detail the exact legal mechanism behind the notice, but it places it above the collective’s own introduction, something A/I apparently considers serious enough to highlight.
Below the notice, the site continues with its usual content: who A/I is, how to request an account, and what’s expected of applicants. The collective asks that each person read its manifesto, usage policy, and privacy policy before filling out the request form.
That form is processed by hand. A volunteer reviews each request through dialogue, rather than approving it automatically. A/I anonymizes all requests and destroys the data once the review ends, according to its own homepage. It’s a process designed to filter by political affinity, not by ability to pay: A/I says it only supports people or groups it feels aligned with, and it verifies that condition before enabling any service.
From Italy’s Autonomous Movement to Infrastructure for Global Activism
A/I was born in 2001 out of a meeting between people and collectives from Italy’s autonomous anti-capitalist movement who were interested in technology and the fight for digital rights, according to the collective’s own about page. The original idea was simple: if the world as it stands isn’t the best possible one, a group of technologists can at least offer digital self-defense tools to those trying to change it.
That origin shaped its way of working: no rigid hierarchies, no institutional funding, and no charging for technical work. All resources come from donations, and no member of the collective receives a salary for keeping the servers running.
A/I’s history hasn’t been free of friction with the Italian state. In 2004, police seized shared servers hosting, among other projects, sites linked to Italian hacktivist collectives, as part of a judicial investigation that drew strong condemnation from the international digital rights community. The episode remains a reference point for how much physical infrastructure can weigh on projects that depend on their own servers.
Almost 25 years after its founding, A/I still follows the same logic: zero commodification of personal data, zero advertising, and zero selling of information to third parties. That principle, upheld for two decades, is exactly what’s now under scrutiny with the sanctions notice.
How the Collective Works Internally
A/I isn’t a single tool: it’s a suite of services designed so that a collective or an activist can communicate without depending on Gmail, WordPress.com, or Mailchimp. The lineup includes email, web hosting, mailing lists, and the blogging platform Noblogs.org, maintained by the same team.
| Service | What it’s for | Requirement | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email account with no advertising or profiling | Account approved after manual review | No enterprise-style support; everything is volunteer-run | |
| Web hosting | Hosting sites for collectives and affiliated projects | Strictly non-commercial use | Limited capacity compared to a commercial cloud provider |
| Mailing lists | Coordinating groups and campaigns via email | Request describing the group’s purpose | Designed for collectives, not mass newsletters |
| Noblogs.org | Public blog for statements and analysis | A/I account or direct registration on the platform | Focused on political content, not general-purpose |
To request any of these services, applicants must first pass through the manual filter mentioned above. A/I recommends encrypting communication from the very first contact. A minimal example: encrypting a text file with the collective’s public key before sending it by email.
gpg --encrypt --armor --recipient [email protected] solicitud.txtThis command encrypts solicitud.txt with GPG using the public key associated with [email protected] and generates an .asc file in ASCII-armored format, ready to paste into the body of an email. Only whoever holds the corresponding private key can read the content.
Once the account is approved, setting up an email client is as straightforward as with any standard SMTP provider. This template uses msmtp, a lightweight client widely used in Linux environments:
# ~/.msmtprc
account autistici
host mail.autistici.org
port 587
tls on
tls_starttls on
auth on
user [email protected]
passwordeval "gpg --decrypt ~/.msmtp-pass.gpg"
from [email protected]
account default : autisticiReplace usuario with the actual account name A/I assigns, and generate the password file encrypted with GPG instead of storing it in plain text. Port 587 with STARTTLS is the de facto standard for authenticated sending, and it avoids unencrypted port 25.
To confirm that the connection actually negotiates TLS, any client can test it with openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect mail.autistici.org:587 and check that the certificate appears before authenticating.
How to Request an Account Today
The process for requesting an A/I account hasn’t changed with the sanctions notice. Here are the steps:
- Read the collective’s manifesto, published on inventati.org.
- Read the usage policy and privacy policy before filling out any form.
- Submit a request describing who you are and what you need the service for.
- Wait for manual review: a volunteer from the collective evaluates the request through dialogue.
- Receive a response; if the request doesn’t fit the collective’s criteria, the request data is destroyed.
flowchart TD
A["Read manifesto and policies"] --> B["Submit account request"]
B --> C["Manual review by a volunteer"]
C --> D{"Meets affinity criteria?"}
D -->|"Yes"| E["Account created and access to services"]
D -->|"No"| F["Request rejected and data destroyed"]This flow explains why A/I doesn’t scale like a commercial provider: every account involves a human conversation, not an automatic sign-up button.
Impact and Analysis
A/I isn’t alone in this model. Riseup.net, based in the United States, offers an almost identical setup: free email and encrypted tools for social movements, funded by donations. The tradition of self-managed infrastructure both projects share is documented, in general terms, in Wikipedia’s article on hacktivism.
For a developer in Latin America, A/I’s case matters for two reasons. First, it shows that keeping critical infrastructure (email, hosting, mailing lists) outside the clouds of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft is still possible with minimal resources, though it requires sacrificing onboarding speed and ongoing support. Second, it exposes the weak point of that model: a small collective, without corporate legal status or a legal department, has far less capacity to absorb a sanction or a lawsuit than a large company.
The honest trade-off needs to be said: the manual, dialogue-based review that protects A/I from infiltration also makes it slow and inaccessible to anyone who just wants a free email account with no political commitment. It’s not a replacement for Gmail for the average user, and the collective itself makes that clear: its services are strictly for non-commercial use, for people or groups aligned with its ideals.
⚠️ Heads up: if you’re in the United States or a company subject to U.S. jurisdiction, any financial interaction with a sanctioned entity can carry legal consequences. Check the situation with legal counsel before donating or using the services.
What’s Next
The notice on inventati.org doesn’t include an extensive statement about the collective’s next legal steps, so much of what comes next depends on how the regulatory situation in the United States evolves.
In general terms, a U.S. economic sanctions regime blocks people and companies under U.S. jurisdiction from maintaining transactions with the designated entity: that can include processing dollar payments or offering hosting or cloud services. For a collective that already operates outside the traditional financial system and hosts its own infrastructure, the direct impact tends to be smaller than for a company that depends on payment gateways or commercial cloud providers.
💭 Key point: the more self-hosted an infrastructure is, the less surface area a sanction has to cut it off at the root. It’s the same logic that leads encrypted communication projects to diversify where their servers run.
Judging by A/I’s historical behavior after the 2004 episode, the collective will most likely keep the service running as long as it can cover hosting costs with donations that don’t pass through U.S. banks, and will publish updates as the situation becomes clearer.
📖 Summary on Telegram: View summary
Try it yourself: go to inventati.org, read the manifesto, and fill out the account request form to see the collective’s manual review process firsthand.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Autistici/Inventati?
It’s an Italian collective founded in 2001 that offers free email, hosting, mailing lists, and blogs to activists, funded solely by voluntary donations.
How much does it cost to request an account?
Nothing. A/I doesn’t charge for its services or demand any compensation for its volunteers’ technical work.
Can anyone request an account?
No. A/I reviews every request by hand and only approves it if the person or group is aligned with its political ideals and the use is strictly non-commercial.
What happens if my request is rejected?
According to the collective itself, the data from all requests is anonymized and destroyed once the review ends, whether it’s approved or not.
What does the U.S. sanctions notice on its site mean?
It’s a banner A/I displays on the inventati.org homepage. The site doesn’t detail the exact legal mechanism, but it prioritizes the notice above any other content on the page.
Are there alternatives similar to A/I?
Yes. Riseup.net, based in the United States, offers an almost identical model of email and encrypted tools for social movements, funded by donations.
References
- Autistici/Inventati: the collective’s official site, with its manifesto, policies, and account request form.
- Noblogs.org: a blogging platform for activists maintained by the same A/I team.
- Riseup.net: a U.S. collective with a privacy services model very similar to A/I’s.
- Hacktivism, Wikipedia: historical context on technical collectives linked to social movements.
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Imagen destacada: Foto de Christian Wiediger en Unsplash
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