I think the same people who opposed a/i sanctions (not AI sanctions but they're really missing out by not exploiting that confusion) also opposed sanctions for """islamic terrorism""" and for """cybercrime""".

> I'm not crying for no Al-Qaeda or 8chan, mind you.

Kinda odd to put those two in the same bucket.

Left wingers wingers were quiet when:

- Canada debanked right wing truckers

- UK arrests white girls for words black people are allowed to say: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921

- multiple American platforms coordinated to silence Trump in 2021

Is it a surprise now that right wingers are doing the same?

> 8chan

8chan didn't even do shit

It's the logic of Jack Bauer taken to the end. "Come on, it's obvious who the bad guys are, who needs rules?" until suddenly it's not obvious anymore...

There is a balance that needs to be struck between freedoms and rule of law and it's quite rare to be able to actually have discussions about how to strike that balance because most folks willing to discuss have a simplistic but vaguely absolute position favoring one extreme or another and can never come to the point of deciding of where to draw the lines of enough freedom or enough control.

They will only catch the amateurs. But they can pat themselves on the back I guess that did something.

Poor government has to fight crime the old fashioned way.

Ridiculous.

But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).

Impossible for a public thing though, noblogs.org will always be traceable to where noblogs.org is hosted because that's how the packets get there.

You can maintain much better opsec in a two way communication than a broadcast.

This is about finances. If the US declares you a terrorist organization, you cannot do any banking anymore, even outside the US, since most banks do not want to gamble on SWIFT access.

Since the US considers anything "antifa" as terrorism now, it already had most concerning distant effects last year. See GLS bank cancelling Rote Hilfe in Germany. 1933 was the last time Rote Hilfe was cancelled, btw. It's an antifa OG. Pretty good indicator about the status quo..

Anyway, look at e.g. GrapheneOS, which is already treated as probable cause by law enforcement. Encrypted messaging also super sus. Thing is, funding can't escape jurisdictions. Signal servers are not running on love and fellowship, but donations and public money. Opsec won't protect your software stack's foundation against US finance attacks.

Not really. It's not like they're going after actual terrorists.

I checked for an official PKK YouTube channel. I found that they don’t have one as they’re a designated foreign terrorist organization* and Google complies with that designation by not allowing them an official presence. Unsure about the others but I doubt any of those companies would allow an official account. Probably individuals that belong to that group have accounts but I don’t know that for sure.

* I did not make the designation, I know nothing about the PKK, I am only referencing it.

So anti-fascism ist deemed an extreme movement by the US government? What does that say about them?

> radical left-wing actors

There is a lot to unpack here.

Is this a union or an intersection?

Are the people being targeted by the administration bad because they are RADICAL, because they are LEFT-WING, or because they are ACTORS?

I would imagine the words "RADICAL" and "LEFT-WING" are immaterial to whether a designation of terrorism makes legal sense. RADICAL, maybe has some connection in that the view is not a normie view? LEFT-WING seems completely disconnected -- LEFT-WING and RIGHT-WING are schools of thought and cover both respective radical fringes as well as the slightly leaning centrists.

If its a UNION that's very concerning.

I don't trust the US State Department to tell the truth. At this point, it's like citing a Wikipedia edited entirely by bad faith actors.

Yeah, that says pretty much nothing about what they do. It reads like an enterprise tech company webpage saying "we provide solutions to help transform your company into the digital age".

> some "not mainstream" political views

I would say they are pretty "mainstream" (or very widespread) in some territories. I have seen bartenders wearing those 'anti-' terms on their t-shirts at work.

It’s a sad day when antifascism is considered not mainstream

Is it truly anyone, or only anyone that politically aligns with them?

> I think its likely they do have sympathy for violent groups

The US regime is an extremely violent group, so I that's certainly the issue.

You have a very nuanced take that I broadly agree with. I would add that they were probably targeted for political reasons, it's not like the current administration is going out of their way to tackle right wing "terrorism".

> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft

This is already an extreme perversion of justice all on its own. Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism. This is simply armed conflict.

> Palestine Action has been designated a terrorist group in the UK as well after sabotaging military aircraft (the article says they sprayed paint, but does not say it was sprayed inside jet engines, rendering them inoperable).

That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Definitions of "terrorism" that extend to sabotage against occupying or invading militaries and their allies are meaningless and hollow dilutions. At that point the discourse has been reduced to something like "violence is scary".

This use is also interesting (and galling) because it frames disarming as an unacceptably violent act.

There are some definitions of terrorism that leave room to designate attacks against professional agents of state violence as "terror", e.g., attacks on soldiers who are off-duty, attacks on civilian police forces, attacks on nominally civilian intelligence organizations like the CIA, etc.

Imo such uses of the words "terror" and "terrorism" should be considered carefully, because sometimes they are meaningful or useful, but often they are essentially attempts to hoodwink the public. Effectively they are designed so that any attack against an occupying army by a faction too weak to muster a permanent standing army of equal strength falls into the "terrorism" category, which means invasion is "war" but resistance is "terrorism".

The notion of "civilian" or "non-combatant" isn't always straightforward, either. In the history of the PKK, for example, one of the "civilian" forces targeted by bombings and shootings were a local militia whose sole purpose was suppressing popular unrest among local Kurdish populations who were forbidden from speaking their own native languages, celebrating their holidays, etc. Formally these militias were not part of an army. But their scarcely concealed function was suppression of the local population, unlike (for example) a proper civilian police force whose role is at least nominally to promote public safety, assist vulnerable (weak, elderly, disabled) citizens with daily life, investigate crimes, mediate/de-escalate disputes, etc.

Anyway, it's worth sitting down and thinking through a few different serious definitions of terrorism and asking yourself what use they are. One or more definitions will likely stand out to you as particularly useful when it comes to thinking through things like the safety of innocents, the morality and bounds of acceptable political activism, and other topics that might directly affect your comfort and safety. You'll often find that governments and large press organizations try to trade on the emotional impact of those definitions while operating under rather different ones that are more convenient for themselves.

And murder foreigners, of course. It's allowed in the Constitution!

And despite it being transparent garbage, millions of Americans are eagerly lapping up Red Scare 2.0

It was only true all the other times over the past 100 years, but not this time! Trust me, I'm an expert of all world secrets, but somehow no government has hired me to get my opinion! This is nothing like back in the 70s when leftists were causing 5 bombings every single day inside the US. Gosh, we're in the future now compared to then!

China might execute more people than the rest of the world combined, be interfering in the world at historic levels, building out its military with unprecedented speed and cooperating with cartels to gain control in South America while flooding the US with lethal drugs, but they don't count, because I make the rules!

Iran and communist billionaires might be funding leftist violence inside the US, but who cares, violence is legal protest, right?

The numerous successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts against conservatives don't count either, because assassination for political reasons isn't terrorism... probably? That's like, some other kind of thing!

And remember, if we caught it before it happened, it doesn't count cause I say so.

They have.

Can I ask what you're hoping the organization does with that money? I'm genuinely interested in understanding what the expected outcome is.

Ouch.

A good friend of mine was charged with providing material support to terrorists for providing similar donations. And all his donations were prior to the US designating the recipients as terrorists. The government's arguments were "Yes yes, but you knew what you were supporting even though we hadn't designated them as such..."

Hope you're not in the US.

You are a good person.

Nice! That’s genuinely worth praise

> Nobody

In the USA - the consequences should be only related to USA pertinent actors. The newspapers in Italy say, "there is no judgement against them in Italy".

in this case, it mostly means trouble getting money, as they are funded via donations

My question now is whether European hosting providers sprouting up in the face of the US CLOUD act will step up to provide those services.