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After 25 years, Italian email provider Autistici/Inventati shuts down due to US government pressure
Strongly related to US government sanctions Autistici Inventati, Italian pro-privacy email provider.
https://keepitfree.ai/announcements/a/i-shuts-down-stay-human/
Not much to say about this, but it's sad. 25 years as a non-profit email provider is a long time, all ended because of pressure from a country on the other side of the world. Not many email providers get that old.
Comments
First
It's possible they are continuing under a different name, only shrugging off the organisation name and its terrorist designation. If they were doing this, nobody would know.
They're a small group and all the donation money they've collected has been seized by their Italian bank (because the bank is afraid of secondary sanctions), and it costs them over 13k EUR annually to run everything. Now they have nothing. It also takes a lot of time to build up a good reputation and user base.
I think they really are shutting down.
Should have gone to RU
I'm pretty sure an anti-authoritarian collective would rather not be under the jurisdiction of yet another authoritarian government.
with AI vibe coding, I think we will see many self-host email server ???
The problem is deliverability, not figuring out how to set up a mail server. Plus, A/I was free. Slop tokens, domains, a server, and time to troubleshoot are not.
That must be a joke. LOL
If we all self-host, then it becomes irrelevant whether or not Google accepts our mails to each other.
yeah, I guess it's more related to "whether my mail will be received" than "how can I send it out"...
Faster than I anticipated, but not unexpected as eluded to in the other post
I suspected they'd lose all their domains but still continue in some form, slowly recovering. I didn't expect they'd throw in the towel. I guess losing 100% of their saved up donation funds really hurt them.
Hmm, I guess you're right
We don't know that they have lost all their money, only that they can't have a bank account. Since they are legally just fine in Italy, there is probably no grounds for their bank to take their money away, or the government would ban the bank, but they will have to collect it in cash as their bank feels they cannot safely make any bank transfers.
If they are continuing under a different name, they would want us to think they have ceased all operations.
They stated that they lost it: https://keepitfree.ai/announcements/banca-etica-shuts-down-a/i-funds/
You'd think, but the US government threatened secondary sanctions, which means the bank, its employees, and even the families of the employees would be sanctioned and unable to, for example, pay for Windows licenses, Google services, Amazon, etc. So while the bank could legally continue providing A/I services (as in the Italian courts would not have a problem with it), the bank's employees and their families would effectively be cut off from any and all services that the US controls: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.
This is reality, sadly. US is an interesting jurisdiction with many funky examples. They have not signed most (if not all) UN conventions but managed to impose them on other countries, just another example. Well, RIP autisticiti.
If I recall, one of the International Criminal Court justices (who was sanctioned for investigating you-know-who) actually lost the ability to unlock their car because the app they used was American and so was blocked.
So yeah, the bank A/I uses was bullied into stopping services and (probably illegally) seizing funds.
That actually says it's "not at their disposal" which means it is frozen until someone figures out what to do with it, which will either be refunding it to the senders or giving it to A/I, because believe it or not, with all the shitty things banks do, it is actually still not legal for them to just randomly steal your money.
If they randomly steal it, A/I can sue the bank and win a bazillion dollars and gets their banking license revoked, because there is no valid reason under Italian law to do that.
But, they can facilitate the stealing of interests on behalf of the sovereign e.g Russian foreign assets
I really hope that's true.
step 1. hire some lawyers
oh wait...
Even if they had money, what lawyer would want to get sanctioned by the US due to secondary sanctions?
A small nonprofit running email for 25 years can basically get kneecapped because a bank doesnt want to deal with US secondary sanctions. You don't even need to be in the US for US policy to become your problem.
How did we get to a point where a decision made in the US can make an Italian bank afraid to provide basic banking to an Italian organization because of US secondary sanctions?
The US isnt the government of the world ?
You're questioning world order
Yes, the US government can steal stuff that's in the US. However, all of A/I's stuff is in Italy. While the US has secretly invaded Italy in the past to kidnap people who were inconvenient to the narrative, it was for something much more important to them than some online blogs. They also got caught, and all of those US operatives are sitting in Italian jail for committing Italian crimes.
Next step: OFAC sanctions my homelab for running Postfix.
Yes, if you let certain people use your service. Or @William lol
Do William's sanctions include the threat of secondary sanctions though? Not all sanctions invoke the risk of secondary sanctions.
Let @forest build the next A/L
Maids? I love them, but with a tail… nice.