The designator

The adversary is the United States. On 26 August 2026 the State Department designated Autistici/Inventati as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224, and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, added it to the Specially Designated Nationals list the same day. The Federal Register notice records three organisations blocked that day, Palestine Action, Autistici/Inventati and Masar Badil, and gives the collective’s organisation type as data processing, hosting and related activities. The clause is the same one used for Palestine Action: for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, an act of terrorism. The category is a relationship, not a kind of organisation, and a sentence that fits a group that blockades a factory and a collective that runs mail servers will fit the next one.

The adversary is not, however, a government directly attacking the system. Nobody was charged, no court was asked to find anything, and no request was made to the collective for a takedown or a record. The class is any actor that can fine, prosecute, cut off or publicly name one or more intermediaries in the dependency graph, or credibly threaten to. The United States is the instance the model is built from. Any actor with that property fits the class.

Ten instruments

That actor may act through:

  • sanctions or designations

  • legal process

  • regulatory pressure

  • payment restrictions

  • contractual restrictions

  • jurisdictional exposure

  • threat of enforcement

  • uncertainty about what constitutes prohibited conduct

  • public association with a designated entity

  • pressure on an intermediary’s other customers or operations

The property that does the work is the ability to make someone else reconsider maintaining the relationship.

Seven moves

The adversary can:

  1. identify a target or relationship;

  2. attach a sufficiently severe potential cost to that relationship;

  3. leave the intermediary to calculate its own exposure;

  4. exploit uncertainty about where enforcement begins and ends;

  5. allow intermediaries to withdraw voluntarily;

  6. allow successor providers to observe what happened;

  7. make several independent intermediaries do the sum at once, without coordinating with them.

The seventh, turned into a method, is the mechanism: transfer the cost of enforcement to the dependency graph. The designator does not have to defeat the target directly. An intermediary can solve its own exposure by terminating the relationship, and each intermediary does that sum alone.

Other people’s desks

Intermediaries are not allies of the adversary and need not be. Banca Etica condemned the use of OFAC listings for political ends in the same statement that suspended the account, and described itself as forced to do it, while the collective’s appeal answered that no Italian law requires a bank to freeze funds on a foreign designation. A choice, described by the player making it as an obligation. The intermediary only has to decide that the customer is not worth what the United States could take from it.

Successor providers are the second set of players the adversary acts through. Where the displaced users go decides whether the first move ends the story or routes it. Within two days of the designation a policy commentator had named Riseup in Seattle as a likely destination and described the trade in the open: relocation to a US entity would limit what State or Treasury could do, while placing the data within reach of the Justice Department. That does not establish that any destination was selected. It establishes that at least one prominent commentator understood migration towards a US-jurisdiction provider as a useful consequence of the first move, and the vectors draw both branches.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.