The internet’s brave new promise of anonymous protest has always come with a dark flip side: when secrecy shelters accountability, the rhetoric of resistance can metastasize into operational permission for violence.
That dynamic is on display now with the Autistici/Inventati (A/I) Collective — an Italy‑based group whose free digital tools have become a safe harbor for fringe, Antifa‑aligned outlets to publish communiqués, post doxxes, and boast about arson and attacks while leaving investigators with little to trace.
A/I sells its purity—refuse to cooperate with prosecutors, do not log identifying metadata, host blogs that strip IP trails—and attracts users who relish the ability to agitate without consequence.
The Daily Caller’s reporting catalogs a disturbing pattern: sites hosted on NoBlogs and other A/I platforms have been linked to calls for attacking aircraft in Portland, to publicizing ICE agents’ home addresses, and to celebratory post‑crime communiqués from arsonists and vandals. The FBI and DHS have taken notice; when violent acts follow these anonymous posts, the result is not just moral outrage but real danger to public safety.
There is a pragmatic problem at the core of this controversy. Democracies have long wrestled with how to balance free speech and public order in digital spaces. Anonymity can protect dissidents in authoritarian states, yet it also protects the perpetrators of violence in open societies. A service that advertises non‑cooperation with law enforcement and the scrubbing of identifying data is not an abstract libertarian experiment — it becomes, by design, a tool that lowers the cost of planning and claiming violent action.
That is not to say every user of these platforms advocates criminality. But the pattern is plain: groups such as Jane’s Revenge and various abolitionist networks used these anonymous hosting tools to revel in vandalism and arson after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs leak; other accounts bragged about torching police cars or distributing private addresses of conservative staffers.
When violent actors can post triumphant communiqués the same afternoon as their attacks, it creates an evidentiary and investigative nightmare.
Legally, the avenues for response are narrow. As experts note, services headquartered overseas are difficult to compel; absent a foreign terrorism designation that would make material support prosecutable, many of A/I’s activities sit in a gray zone—protected speech on one hand, practical enablers of violence on the other.
That political and legal impasse is precisely why domestic security officials are now pushing for broader tools, from designations to international cooperation, to choke off the tech provisions that facilitate harm.
