Police in Amsterdam seized a server from a data center in the city’s eastern district on Tuesday, following a request from U.S. authorities. The police confirmed the seizure after it was reported by the NRC.
The seized server belongs to Italian internet provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I). Dutch police are creating a digital image of its data to hand over to U.S. authorities, as required under the American request for legal assistance.
Police have not disclosed which specific data will be transferred to U.S. authorities. The server will be returned to the data center once the process is complete.
cool cool cool lesson learnt. don’t set your vpn or host a server in the netherlands
What’s interesting to me is the Netherlands is considered one of the better hosters for internet privacy. A LOT of VPN servers are hosted there comparable to other countries from many providers because of their good laws. But as we can see even those are not enough when the US pulls out the sanctions big guns and uses the terrorism word while one of their associates dresses up in a crude Putin mask and does the whole raised arms and snarling thing to get the Euro on the floor sobbing and screaming like it’s a Mel Brooks picture.
This is the official statement from Autistici/Inventati on the server being seized. A member of the organization says that the server was wiped before being seized. The keepitfree website is owned by Austici/Inventati.
Oct 14, 2026
Amsterdam police seize server belonging to leftist internet service provider A/I at US request - by Marloes de Koning for NRC (NL)
On Tuesday, a unit of the Amsterdam police seized a server belonging to the Italian internet service provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I) at a data center in Amsterdam’s Science Park. The seizure was carried out pursuant to a US request for legal assistance. A copy of the server’s contents is now being sent to the US.
A/I was a left-wing, anti-capitalist organization that had provided free web hosting and email services to around twenty thousand organizations worldwide over the past twenty-five years. According to the US government, A/I thereby facilitated ‘Antifa’—short for ‘anti-fascists’. The Trump administration views Antifa as a terrorist organization; consequently, A/I itself was designated as a terrorist entity in late August. This was unprecedented; as a rule, internet service providers are not held liable for the content their users post online.
As a result of the sanction, the organization lost access to its bank account and domain name. Just over a week after the sanction was announced, the volunteers running the service decided to cease operations and dismantle A/I.
They took this step to avoid putting individuals or organizations at risk due to their ties to A/I—such as being donors or users of A/I’s web hosting or email services.
The seizure of the server in Amsterdam suggests that this fear is not unfounded. Amsterdam police had the server collected following a US request for legal assistance. “You simply carry that out,” a spokesperson said by phone. Police digital experts are currently creating an ‘image’—a digital copy—of the server. “That goes straight to America.” The owners will receive the server back afterwards. A/I had servers located at various sites across Europe. Over the past few weeks, these have been shut down and the drives wiped, says an insider who is speaking only on condition of anonymity for safety reasons. Dissolving and dismantling the legal entity—A/I is a type of foundation—takes time, he explains. Under Italian law, a non-profit organization is required to have no remaining assets upon dissolution. A small group of former volunteers is handling the winding-up process, with minimal contact between them.
The server in the Netherlands was “one of the last pieces of hardware we wanted to get rid of. We were in touch with DC1 (the data center, a distant successor to Xs4all) about it.” According to him, the encrypted server contains nothing that could cause problems for A/I users. “I’m not worried. Just surprised.” The spokesperson had hoped that dissolving the organization would satisfy the Americans.
edit/ more archives since archive.is is messing up
The spokesperson had hoped that dissolving the organization would satisfy the Americans.
these americans are bloodthirsty leeches. it’s all they know how to do: kill, destroy, multiply. everything they accuse their victims of, of course they want individuals. they’re still available targets
Conservatism is fascism. Always has been. The only good fascist is a dead fascist.
Please keep admitting the US is directly supporting fascist elements in EU and your nation’s sovereignty is now forfeit.
And euros will still adamantly pretend they are independent nations.
My dumb ass thought they grabbed some waiter
Fascism is global.
You cannot have operational security while operating in the west or comprador states. Anything with cold storage or more than a proxy should be hosted in China or Russia. If you need the latency, frontend proxies might be fine to host in Europe.
Meanwhile Hexbear servers in France…
It’s wide ass open anyway.
the left needs be thinking meshes and crypto (and seemingly only xmr (?) which is compromisable in very specific circumstances and still can be interchanged otherwise) as necessary evil if money is involved, everything with isbn/swift is compromisable by d-tier suit in amerikkka.
incidentally, in hypothetical internationalist future, having a server with fiber optic out to 100 km remote starlink or whatever europe/china/russia analogue is also an option in the middle of jungle
The CIA is just going to send a guy with scissors and cut your cable.
to where from where? optic cables don’t even need to ring on metal detectors.
Start at the uplink and follow the line.
100 km of a line in the ground? you have a much better opinion about work ethic of agents. leaving aside that global uplink might be moving in radio contact with stationary one. the obvious signature is 1kw of solar panels, but even that can be obfuscated down to satellite resolution. but considering even the first step (fully owned servers) is not implemented that’s whatever theorizing about cyberpunk future tbh.
Send a backhoe operator. They always hit something like this
Police have not disclosed which specific data will be transferred to U.S. authorities.
“It’s a fishing expedition.”
The server will be returned to the data center once the process is complete.
“We’re backdooring everything on it, right down to the firmware.”
I think that opens questions about the safety of this website’s hosting? “antifa” isn’t a plausible crime in either jurisdiction AFAIK and they still went all out?
The US had designated Austici/Inventati as a terrorist organization and OFAC sanctions before seizing the servers. A terrorism designation is basically meant to strip an individual or organization of their rights. The US government will try to seize the assets of anyone who financially aids an entity on the OFAC list. The Dutch complied with the seizure order because of the terrorism designation. This is also a violation of the law known as ‘Section 230’, which says that internet services are not legally liable for communications made by their users. The US government could designate Hexbear as a terrorism organization and place OFAC sanctions on Hexbear, but that would be extra steps.
We’re on a domain registered with US-based Verisign and hosted in France. It’s a valid concern.
France is probably among the least bad core west countries from my admittedly casual understanding of things (I am not a lawyer or expert on internet rights, law, etc). At least in so far as France doesn’t extradite citizens under any circumstances for the US (Polanski is still sitting there despite warrants for him) and because they have nukes they have some airs of being somewhat independent of and not totally subjugated to the US like most Euro-vassals who spend their evenings sobbing about how to better please the US and fearing the imminent Russian hoards who will surely appear any day now. That said a terrorism designation and request like they did here might still get the French to cooperate especially since the website owners/holders are as far as I know not French citizens so not strictly entitled to full defense of the French state of their rights.
US registrar is indeed not great but I believe the US could seize the domain regardless as it’s dot net address which I believe is under US legal jurisdiction. You’d need to move to a country level domain held by a country that is independent of the US and wouldn’t seize a domain even if it was run by foreigners they couldn’t care less about. At that point you’re down to Russia, China (including Hong Kong), Vietnam (maybe, they’ve done some piracy cooperation with the west and might play ball since it involves non-nationals), and then all the domains commonly used by criminal elements like pirate sites which tend to resist most normal attempts at taking them down. Even then if the US pulls out the big sanctions guns you’d have to hope the registrar does no business at all with the US of note and doesn’t care about being sanctioned and for that only really Russian and Chinese registrars are applicable.
As I understand (just recalling last time this was discussed) it it’s not practical to host in Russia because you need Russian ID and someone in Russia to be point of contact and/or technical owner of the servers themselves, that someone could do whatever they want with the contents at any time and there would be no stopping them. Russian authorities may also take a dim view of some of the anti-Putin, pro-communist, pro-USSR restoration sentiment here to say nothing of all the LGBTQ+ content that would be against the law there.
Hosting in China I believe has similar problems of local point of contact, ID, and technical ownership of the server and its contents with the additional problem of the GFW. Probably if we were wealthy we could hire a law firm in China to act as the holder of the website and register all the relevant paperwork and host out of Hong Kong but even then the foreign real ownership and usage might present a problem. I don’t know. I know they’d bop you with the hammer without a second thought or a second chance the instant they learned of the drugs community but getting rid of that would seem a small price to pay to not have comrades black-bagged and renditioned if that plan is otherwise found viable.
In the meantime it would be nice if the admins review security and privacy posture, tighten up automatic deletion or removal of IP addresses in any logging facilities that would enable post-seizure them to connect specific accounts to real people’s IPs and thus their speech could be used to start a prosecution or worse.
We should also consider the reality that with AI-assisted hacking some independent, zealous, but well connected to DOD/FBI/etc reactionary group could hack the site, dump logs and IP addresses and hand them over for investigation to the feds. Another reason to absolutely minimize the logs held (though in such an instance they could install their own logging facilities as long as they can keep the compromise unnoticed for a little while).
We should also consider the reality that with AI-assisted hacking some independent, zealous, but well connected to DOD/FBI/etc reactionary group could hack the site, dump logs and IP addresses and hand them over for investigation to the feds
that’s what happened to a/i
Antif isn’t real though
That doesn’t matter obviously.
Anti-fascists are real. I am real. Conservatives want anti-fascists dead. I wonder why that is… hmmm.
where the hell can you put stuff anymore
Don’t the Dutch have some sort of house where you can hide things from fascists?
Tor hidden services on a computer you physically control perhaps. I’m working on something along those lines, a self-contained easy-to-install forum system with zero javascript and a layout that works in the standard Tor browser layout. It’s got some other fun security tricks that I don’t see much in other forum software. It’s not intended as a replacement for large-scale interconnected forums like lemmy, it’s more like a replacement for a private discord server.
I’m expecting to have it ready in a month or so. I’ll make a post about it when I’m satisfied that it’s fit for purpose and reasonably safe. I built something similar years ago but the code was pretty amateurish and I’d feel safer building it from scratch with the experience I’ve gained since then.
You should call it Phppb
That’s truly disgusting.
I would never use PHP.
You can run an eepsite on a laptop on public WiFi
Alibaba Cloud (maybe?). I have no idea really. I’ve not looked into it.
Home-server or e2ee could storage providers (I use the latter). It is reasonably cheap, I think I pay like 17£/year for 200 GB.
this computer is antifa
cool cool cool lesson learnt. don’t set your vpn or host a server in the netherlands
it’s not clear to me if the data center handed it over freely or if they did the bare minimum “on what grounds???” type injunction requests.
Italian internet provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I)
I guess never use this company also?
not a company, an anarchist collective that offered website hosting software no-blogs with a privacy focus for free. they were hacked and doxxed this august by a fully auto-objectified republican freelancer with the pentagon’s blessing/resources. true fanatic, certain that the world has stolen from the usa for years and that (with full awareness of the truth because it also categorized the victims accurately on the website “trump-blogs” it made) anarchism/the left is defined as irredeemable and violent thuggery no matter how pacifist they actually are. an evil thing, to do so knowingly, went onto twitter to gloat a bout dehashing passwords and so on.
I guess never use this company also?
Org doesn’t exist anymore. They shut down after they were declared a terrorist group and all their bank accounts and domains seized.
I’d like to think no serious leftist org would continue using their infrastructure in the wake of this, when clearly any operations that are allowed to continue will be fully compromised. But I’m too acutely aware of how tech savvy even intelligent well-read people are.
they were declared (farcically and flatteringly given the neo-nazi providence) a terrorist organization in the usa, but was that technically true of anywhere in europe too? to my knowledge it was the compromising of their user-base that was the blow forcing them to shut down
Related article https://nltimes.nl/2025/09/19/dutch-parliament-wants-follow-us-example-label-antifa-terrorist-organization doesn’t look too good
