Benjamin Sonntag: “I stand in solidarity with Autistici/Inventati”
Commenti“I am concerned that the people behind Autistici/Inventati could be harassed, or their life made difficult on an individual level, by the Trump administration. The absence of any reply from Italy or the European Union, who should fight against unlawful restriction of their citizens’ freedom, is baffling. I stand in solidarity with Autistici/inventati”. Speaking to Il Fatto Quotidiano is one of the leading international figures in the field of digital rights. His name is Benjamin Sonntag-King, a French computer engineer who has been working for over twenty years to promote the internet as a tool for liberation. Our newspaper has interviewed him.
Autistici/Inventati (A/I) relied on the ‘.org’ domain which is controlled by PIR, i.e. the Public Interest Registry organisation based in Virginia, in the United States. Not even 48 hours after the Trump administration designated A/I as a terrorist organisation, PIR shut down A/I’s domain. Is this a confirmation that collectives which do not agree with Trump’s policies on wars, migrants and civil rights should stay away from the .org domain, as they are within the reach of the U.S. authorities?
The domain name of Austici/Inventati is only one face of the problem: if you step back a bit, any kind of US-controlled Internet service is politically dangerous to use nowadays, not only the ‘.org’ domains. Any domain name root like ‘.com’ or ‘.info’ could have the same issue, since they are managed by US organisations too. And not only domain names: using Google ads, buying service from Microsoft or Adobe, put you at great risk of losing all your data and services if one morning Trump gets up on the wrong side of the bed and then heard about your organisation…That’s a risk that any company or organisation should think about, and fast. I’m quite worried that the EU is not taking a stance on forcing EU companies to not comply with US sanctions if there is no EU equivalent sanction decided. The EU should understand that the instability of US policy is a big issue.
Let’s imagine that autistici.org had not relied on a .org domain managed by a U.S. organisation like PIR, but rather on a domain in France: would France have complied with the US designation promptly as PIR did in less than 48 hours?
You can’t really know, since domain name providers are mostly big companies, and the US sanctions have a very broad reach: many companies, even not incorporated in the US, would not take the risk of continuing to do business with organisations under US sanctions. The chilling effect is massive. This includes banks of course, but also insurance providers, domain name providers, or anyone, really. That said, there is nothing in the French rules for the ‘.fr’ domain name that would force the domain provider to suspend a name in case of US sanction. So if your local provider does that, you should be able to ask the French AFNIC (who manages ‘.fr’) or even go to trial, to get your name back.
A/I did nothing different from Signal: it offered digital services which are pro-privacy and for free. Why did the Trump administration target A/I whereas it did NOT target Signal and, quite the opposite, uses Signal to discuss top-secret military plans?
The first idea would be to understand that this [decision to sanction A/I] is stupidity speaking, not deep geopolitical thinking… Trump could also have threatened Signal, or other privacy-preserving services, or anyone else helping antifascist movements anywhere on earth. Them choosing to sanction A/I is unexpected. Maybe [it was] because one of the people hosted by A/I was mean to Trump or his policies recently, you can’t really know. Signal is a great service for secure communications, that’s why even people like Trump and his allies are using it. Since they use it, we could hope they understand that Signal is somehow neutral infrastructure. Also, Signal mostly handles private communications, A/I offers [both private and public communications] blogs, like a media. That’s a big difference.
This weekend Autistici/Inventati shut down its digital services. Had they kept them online, would users have risked being targeted by US intelligence and law enforcement, which could have used data to identify activists and use A/I services as a honey-pot?
That’s a risk, and I guess that could be a good reason for A/I to not take that risk. Again, the reach of US intelligence and law enforcement is large. Burning your bridge before you get invaded was, in my opinion, a good move from A/I to prevent risks against their engineers and their users.
Autistici/Inventati was one of the very few free and pro-privacy digital services out there, given that even Protonmail is no longer free. What is left after A/I ?
I’m not too worried right now, since we still have the ability to organise to build our own infrastructure providers. There is still riseup.net which is another well-known privacy-preserving public service, and in many countries you have people doing web, email and communication hosting by themselves, for their friends, organisations and collectives, like the Chatons in France, a collective of autonomous hosting providers. The most important thing is to not do it alone when you build your own infrastructure, to keep it more resilient, and to build your ‘threat model’ if you can, to know what your adversaries and their means are, and to ensure you protect your collective and their individuals against those threats.
Finally, is the Autistici/Inventati case a wake-up call that the US authorities will go after anyone providing free community services online so that they can strengthen the already all-powerful hyper-centralised US companies which have taken over internet infrastructure and which are now part of the US military-industrial-digital complex?
I have been involved in privacy-preserving services since 1998, and believe me, since Trump 2 came into office, I have never heard so many people worried about their dependency on US services, from small collectives to big corporations. That’s good news. Now let’s hope they walk the talk and start going more independent of Microsoft / Google / X / Meta and others. Since the artificial intelligence bubble started, most of those companies have totally thrown out their ecological promises and collaborated openly with military industries. If you don’t think they are a threat to your organisation or to your company, you’re wrong.
