Why I am writing
I am writing this because I feel compelled to. For weeks my name has been used to attack the work I have done, the institutions in which I did it (and a political party to which I do not belong). Much of what has been written asserts nothing that can be verified: it juxtaposes, suggests, implies. I will not respond to that material. Here I intend to do something else: to set out the facts, in order of time, with dates and documents; to explain what Autistici/Inventati is and what happened to it; and to tell my own story, which has been intertwined with that project since long before it entered the political debate. In doing so, however, I will address, as far as I am concerned, the matters that some have chosen to present as "opaque", because they concern choices, experiences and activities that belong to my personal and professional history, and I think it is right to tell it. And in the end I hope to bring out the real point of this story, which goes well beyond what happened to Autistici/Inventati or my own involvement.
The facts, in chronological order
Autistici/Inventati was born in 2001. There were no platforms and no social networks yet; an email account or some web space had to be paid for, or accepted with advertising and on the terms of whoever offered them, and almost nobody asked who read what was written online or where the data entered into the network ended up. A group of experts and activists decided to build for themselves, with their own means and without profit, what the market did not offer: email, mailing lists, space for websites and blogs, free of charge and attentive to the confidentiality and privacy of those who used them, available to people who could not afford them or did not want to entrust their communications to someone who would exploit them for commercial ends. Twenty-five years later the project was still standing and serving tens of thousands of people; what happened to it led it, in three weeks, to announce its closure. In April 2018 the registered voluntary organisation AI ODV was constituted by notarial deed (an ODV, organizzazione di volontariato, is the Italian legal form for a registered voluntary organisation), continuing in a more structured form the purpose of the unincorporated association of 2001, with entry in the regional register of voluntary organisations, later merged into Italy's national register of third-sector organisations. I took part in the constitution and was appointed secretary on the first board. At the end of 2018, once the handover was complete, I ceased all activity in the association; the register would go on showing the office for years, but I will come back to that, and to the rest of my story, later.
The designation
On 26 August 2026 the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury, in coordination with the Department of State, designated Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, as amended by Executive Order 13886, in the part concerning material and/or technological support, and added it to the SDN list, which entails the blocking of assets subject to US jurisdiction and a prohibition for US persons and companies on dealing with the designated entity, and may in certain circumstances expose foreign financial intermediaries to the risk of secondary sanctions. The designation does not identify which specific act of terrorism underpins it; the public documents of the Department of State make circumstantial allegations about the use of the infrastructure by third-party groups, attributing the violent conduct to those groups, and name no individual. In the following days the effects of the designation reached the association through private actors: Autistici/Inventati reported that on 27 August PayPal suspended the association's account and that on 28 August the .org registry placed autistici.org in serverHold, a status in which the domain name is suspended by the registry and stops working while the servers stay on; on 1 September Banca Etica suspended the operation of the account because of the risk of secondary sanctions, on 4 September it gave notice of termination and of the unavailability of the funds; on 6 September the collective announced its closure, on 8 September it filed an urgent application before the court of Pisa against the bank, on 10 September it set the shutdown of its services for 18 September; I have learned that on that day the services were, in fact, all shut down.
29 August
At 06:30 on 29 August an online newspaper published my name, associated with this affair. It cited the association's tax code and the records of the national register of third-sector organisations: the seven members of the 2018 board and their offices, mine among them. That same morning a statement by MEP Carlo Fidanza asserted that the association's "secretary" "is still" me and that this was "learned from press sources"; during the day Augusta Montaruli, a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, announced parliamentary questions.
In the days that followed, part of the press built, one piece a day, an ambiguous and suspect figure out of my person: on 30 August the 2018 office (with functions clearly defined by the statute) became a top role worthy of very different organisations ("Secretary General"...) and membership of a political party was added to it; on 31 August the address of the house I had lived in was published and the association office became a "directing role"; on 1 September the headlines spoke of "jihadist networks", while the texts specified that the US document does not name them; on 3 September my photograph came out and a technical architecture from 2005, designed to keep the services running even if a server failed, became a "plan for the anarchists"; on 4 September my remuneration from my years of public service was disclosed; on 11 September a newspaper from the area where I had lived wrote that I head the association and am the target of the designation. The documents cited about me are always the same and say one thing only: that in 2018 I took part in the constitution of a voluntary organisation and was appointed its secretary, an office to which, moreover, the association's own statute, annexed to the deed of constitution those articles cite, assigns a precise and circumscribed function, as will be seen.
What Autistici/Inventati is
Having summarised the essential facts, it is necessary to explain what Autistici/Inventati is in order to understand what happened to it and, above all, the real scope of what happened. As I said, Autistici/Inventati has been, for twenty-five years, a communication infrastructure run by volunteers and made available free of charge to anyone who asks for it and accepts its principles and terms of service: tools for communicating without the communications "becoming a commodity". As far as I know, the project never had sponsors or funding other than the voluntary contributions of those who thought its survival mattered, and nobody ever drew a salary from it; decisions were taken collectively, with no coordinator and no spokesperson, and the 2018 offices answer to the requirements of the law, not to the way decisions were taken.
Now, an infrastructure of this kind could have lived, technically, anywhere and under any flag. Those who built it made a precise choice, however, and renewed it over time: to give it an Italian legal form, identifiable, subject to Italian law and to the Italian authorities; in 2001 an unincorporated association, the simplest form; in 2018 a voluntary organisation with a notarial deed, a statute, governing bodies, a registered office, accounts and entry in a public register, one of the most transparent forms a non-profit activity can take.
That choice rested on the conviction that the Italian legal order offered some minimum guarantees to those who operate in the open: the right to know what one is accused of, to be heard, to answer before a judge.
And therefore, as far as the activities carried out by Autistici/Inventati are specifically concerned, the guarantee of being judged for what the project was and did, an infrastructure, the services it offered, the rules under which it offered them, the way it responded to requests from those entitled to make them; not for what tens of thousands of people wrote or did through those services, whose content is the responsibility of those who produce it.
European law distinguishes the liability of those who use a service from that of the intermediary who makes it available: users' conduct cannot be automatically attributed to the provider merely because it offered them an infrastructure. This is the distinction recalled in recent days by Oreste Pollicino in La Stampa, who warns against "the automatic equation of the provider with its users". Pierluigi Paganini, in Il Sole 24 Ore, sums up the point: "it makes no sense to treat an email account as evidence of complicity".
In the 2018 statute that choice was translated, in particular, into a rule. The office of secretary is not that of the person who keeps the minutes: the statute gives it a specific mandate, namely "to maintain relations with the authorities responsible for the protection of public order, with the investigating judiciary and with any other authority to which official information on the facts in the association's possession must be provided". A communication infrastructure receives requests from the authorities: that is the normal course of things. The office presented as a sign of opacity is, in the statute, the function created so that the association would have an identifiable interlocutor for the Italian State. Those who cite it as evidence of hidden membership cite, without realising it, evidence of the opposite.
In twenty-five years of activity Autistici/Inventati has had dealings with the Italian justice system, and what emerged from them is public; cooperation was always provided without difficulty. In the cases where the Italian judiciary intervened there was always a formal act and a forum in which to discuss it, even after the fact; and in each of them the question was the same, what can be asked of a host for what its guests do.
As far as is publicly known, in none of those cases was any liability of the association established.
What the United States did
The US measure against Autistici/Inventati did not come out of nowhere. On 6 May 2026 the United States adopted a new counter-terrorism strategy; on 16 July, at a ministerial meeting with sixty-six countries, the Treasury undertook to pursue those who provide support to terrorist networks "however distant their jurisdictions", and the same day visa restrictions were announced for foreigners deemed members or supporters of "far-left" groups; on 26 August came the designation of the association. Marco Perugini, in an analysis on Verfassungsblog of 14 September, reads Autistici/Inventati as the first operational result of that sequence and calls the method "governance by friction": nothing is banned, carrying on is made impossible. I cite it as his reading.
The act designates the entity and names no individual, and does not identify which specific act of terrorism underpins it. On the merits of that decision I say nothing, because it is not for me to say. What matters here is how an administrative act of a third country, adopted outside any judicial proceedings and without a prior hearing of the party concerned, produced its punitive effects in Italy: through a digital payments provider, a top-level domain registry (Public Interest Registry) and a bank, without any authority of the country where the association has its seat having decided anything. And, more dispiriting still, without any decisive reaction being in sight, for now, from those authorities and from the politicians who represent them.
The reactions came from those who work on digital rights and infrastructure, and from those who use them: the main European digital rights organisations as early as 3 September; an international organisation for freedom of expression, which asked the Member States, the Union's institutions and the registries to intervene; the Italian chapter of the Internet Society; eighty academics and researchers; the Italian chapter of Wikimedia, which recalled that the limits on intermediary liability apply to non-profits too; several questions in the European Parliament, parliamentary acts in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate and speeches on the floor of the Chamber; the Spanish, Dutch and international press.
The point of this story
I have spent part of my life building communication infrastructure for those who could not afford it, and another part building public digital infrastructure for the Italian State and for the European Union. For years I have been writing that technical architectures are institutional arrangements, and that Europe's digital sovereignty is not decided in declarations but in very concrete places: the registries that assign domain names and decide whether an address exists; the payment circuits and the banks that decide whether an activity can receive and spend money; the networks and the providers that keep servers reachable. Whoever controls these points can switch off anything without needing to ban it. The case of Autistici/Inventati is that thesis demonstrated on a living body. An Italian association, active for twenty-five years, with its seat and its records in Italy, which in the known cases answered before Italian courts, was brought to closure by an administrative act of another country, implemented in practice through the compliance choices of three private intermediaries (one of which, Banca Etica, Italian itself), without any Italian or Union authority having ordered those blocks. The question this case leaves behind does not concern a collective of volunteers and digital rights activists. It concerns anyone interested in understanding who, today, in Europe, decides what stays "switched on" online and who will instead be wiped off the network.
How my story was used
Set against the question just formulated, the doubts raised about my person and about my suitability for the functions I perform today for the European Commission, and performed in the past for the Presidency of the Italian Council of Ministers, appear, in my view, flimsier still, if that were possible.
Since I was young two things have interested me: technology, understanding how it works and what effects it has on people, and institutions, how to make them work better so that they are truly at the service of citizens. Autistici/Inventati was a first practical translation of that interest: I was part of a group of experts who built, with their own means and without profit, secure communication infrastructure attentive to privacy and confidentiality, before the platforms, when almost nobody asked who would control everyone's data, identities and conversations. It was pioneering work, and I stand by the contribution I personally made to it.
Like every provider of communication services, Autistici/Inventati received over the years requests and orders from the authorities, and it is normal that it did; as far as I can recall and as far as directly concerned me, it complied with the orders and answered the requests, and I have no knowledge that it was ever otherwise. For some years I handled that function myself, every time a request came in. When I started working for the Italian Government I thought it appropriate to pass it on to others, and I did so immediately after the transition to a registered association was complete. In 2018 that function was written into the statute and entrusted to the secretary, and the office fell to me because I was the one performing it: accepting it meant guaranteeing continuity while the handover to others was completed. I held it for the time needed to hand over and left all activity at the end of that year, even if in the records that change was registered much later: a formal delay, for which I am certainly not responsible, that changes nothing about what I have and have not done since. Those who today call all this "concealed participation" are describing the most identifiable person the project has ever had.
In 2017 I joined the Team for Digital Transformation of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers as an expert, and I stayed there, in the Team and then in the Department that took its place, in different roles, until the end of 2022, across five governments of different political colours. I worked on the Italian State's cloud infrastructure, on the strategy that redesigned its architecture and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the public tools that tens of millions of people used to protect themselves and to move again freely and safely, dealing with cybersecurity as well. Since 2023 I have been working at the European Commission on digital identity policy.
From my point of view it is the same "trade" as twenty-five years ago, with different means and on a different scale: the person who then built independent servers for the confidentiality of a few now offers his contribution to building public infrastructure for the confidentiality of all, and to drafting the rules so that it stays that way. I leave it to those whose job it is to assess whether there is a problem in this continuity.
Nonetheless, on 1 September a question in the European Parliament, with Carlo Fidanza as first signatory, took its premises from the articles of the preceding days and asked the Commission whether I was suitable for my function; on 8 September the joint statement by Fidanza and Montaruli described me as the "animator of the collective of extremist hackers", in the present tense, inside a "disturbing network of relations linking violent and para-terrorist antagonism with the Community institutions by way of the PD".
There is no need for me to say what the target was, because they wrote it themselves: the Community institutions and the Democratic Party too, "by way of" my person. I am not a member of that party and have never held any position in it, and the party itself said so publicly on 3 September. In September 2023 the party named me, with others, among the "independent experts" of a working group on digital policy, an unpaid contribution of the same kind I have given in the past to other political forces; on 12 September, on invitation, I spoke for ten minutes about the PNRR, Italy's national recovery and resilience plan, at the presentation of that group, on a plan I had worked on for a previous government. My actual participation ended with that speech. This is the relationship that was turned into a "mixing of roles", to the point of my being called a "party official" in an article...
On 8 October the European Commission answered that question. Here is the answer, for anyone who wants to read it: it says that I was recruited in the ordinary way, for my experience and expertise in public digital infrastructure, and that there was nothing I should have declared and did not. I add nothing.
Everything else was available to anyone who wanted to read it. As at 12 October I had been notified of no charge by any Italian, European or US authority. And for weeks I did not respond to these insinuations because I chose to speak with the facts in hand and in keeping with the commitments I had made to the European Commission: my silence confirms nothing but respect for the institution I serve.
The information and views set out in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European institutions.
