Global
The Trump administration, through both Treasury and State, is designating Autistici/Inventati, a small band of nerds in Italy, a terrorist organization.
The US’s reasoning is, essentially, that A/I helps organizations they don’t like use infrastructure that isn’t easily controlled by the US. So they will end this by using the control they do have, financial and technical, to stop the nerds.
And which organizations do they not like? The Treasury names only PKK, which could be accused of a Sinn Féin-like questionable past but IMO is a very legit liberation party working only to escape oppression and build one of the most admirable liberal states I know of. State provides a list, but it names 5 (some admittedly dangerous) organizations that used A/I software only to distribute public communications (as, you know, ISIS has used Twitter/X), and only 2 that use A/I “tools and services” to do bad. Those are Rose City Antifa, who as far as I can tell are guilty of hurting the Proud Boys’s feelings, and "The anarchist cell responsible for waging a violent campaign to prevent the construction of a law enforcement training center in Atlanta and “The anarchist cell responsible for waging a violent campaign to prevent the construction of a law enforcement training center in Atlanta” which I guess the full power of the US government is unable to stop without trying to force Italians to take down their Wordpress site.
As I write this, A/I has already lost their ability to use PayPal and one of their .org domain names.
This is obviously an egregious abuse of censorship power from a country that pretends to worship free speech. But more than that, it ought to be a huge wake-up call regarding digital sovereignty. These are EU citizens in Italy, using open source software, who have angered a foreign regime by assisting a socialist, feminist movement in a third jurisdiction. We’ve allowed the digital world to be built in such a way that this foreign regime controls critical infrastructure and can effectively turn off the lights anywhere in the world they would like.
It seemed fine to let the US manage cyberspace when it was a friendly and stable nation, but that is clearly no longer the case. I really hope that Europe’s leaders are listening to ENISA and CCDCOE while citizens and businesses consider carefully the jurisdiction of their infrastructure services. Especially as the AI revolution is leading us back into heavier dependance on fewer providers.