Antifa-linked sites go dark after State Department terror designation of tech collective
Websites tied to Portland’s Rose City Antifa and the militant abortion-rights group Jane’s Revenge began going dark in the days after the State Department designated their Italy-based technology provider a global terrorist entity.
Fox News Digital first reported this week that the State Department had designated Autistici/Inventati, known as the A/I Collective, as a specially designated global terrorist over its alleged support for violent far-left networks.
"Today’s news demonstrates the extent to which the A/I Collective was the digital infrastructure of the global Antifa terror network," a State Department official told Fox News Digital.
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"Just one day after the extremist collective was designated as a specially designated global terrorist, an untold number of servers and websites — used by far-left extremists to plot violent attacks, target federal agents, and conceal their crimes from law enforcement — have been shut down," the official said.
Among them was Rose City Counter-Info, a Portland-based website the State Department says Rose City Antifa used to publish personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and organize violent activity against federal agents.
The State Department said the group used the site to distribute an online flyer urging supporters to use laser pointers against Customs and Border Protection helicopters. Federal records show one man later pleaded guilty to aiming a laser at a CBP helicopter, forcing the aircraft to abort a planned landing.
Jane’s Revenge also used A/I services to publish communiqués claiming responsibility for attacks on pregnancy centers and to incite copycat violence, according to the State Department. The group claimed responsibility for the May 2022 firebombing of a crisis pregnancy center in Madison, Wisconsin.
The NoBlogs platform, which is hosted by A/I and contains thousands of sites, was intermittently unavailable Friday. Some individual pages remained accessible while others returned errors or timed out.
The State Department has not said whether any U.S. agency directly disabled A/I infrastructure or whether the outages resulted from decisions by the collective, its vendors or its users after the designation.
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The sanctions action blocks Americans and U.S. financial institutions from doing business with A/I and freezes any assets it holds under U.S. jurisdiction.
The State Department says A/I provided encrypted chat and email services, web hosting, secure video tools and anonymity services to violent left-wing groups in the United States and Europe. The department also said a media organization using A/I services disseminated material from Hamas, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah and other designated terrorist groups.
A/I denied the allegations in a statement posted on a NoBlogs-hosted page.
The collective described itself as "a small, volunteer-run, technology collective from Italy" that provides tools for "digital self-defense."
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"We will not back down," the group said. "Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism.
"The terror designation of the A/I Collective dealt a devastating blow to the transnational far-left networks that have plagued America and our allies for years," the State Department official said.