Amsterdam police seize Autistici/Inventati server on US legal assistance request

Amsterdam police have seized a server belonging to Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an Italian activist internet provider, at a data centre in the city's Science Park. The seizure was carried out on the basis of a legal assistance request from the United States, and a forensic copy of the server's contents will be sent to American authorities, according to a report by the Dutch newspaper NRC published on 14 October.

How the seizure unfolded

Officers collected the machine on Tuesday. A police spokesperson told NRC that such requests are simply executed: digital specialists make an image of the server, the copy goes directly to the United States, and the hardware is then returned to its owners.

The timing caught A/I's former volunteers off guard, because the Dutch server was due to be decommissioned anyway. A person involved, who spoke to NRC anonymously for safety reasons, said it was one of the last pieces of hardware the group still wanted to dispose of, and that they had been in contact with the data centre, DC1, which NRC describes as a distant successor of the Dutch internet pioneer XS4ALL.

A designation that broke with precedent

A/I was an anti-capitalist collective that spent twenty-five years providing free web hosting and email services to roughly twenty thousand organisations worldwide. According to NRC, the US government took the view that in doing so the group facilitated antifa, shorthand for anti-fascists, which the Trump administration treats as a terrorist organisation. In late August, Washington designated A/I itself as terrorist, a step the paper calls unprecedented, since internet providers are not normally held responsible for what their users put online.

The consequences were immediate: A/I lost access to its bank account and its domain name. A little over a week after the sanction was published, the volunteers decided to stop their work and dismantle the organisation, explicitly to avoid endangering people and groups connected to them, for example donors or users of their hosting and email services.

Disks wiped across Europe

According to the person involved, A/I had servers at several locations in Europe; in recent weeks those machines were shut down and their disks wiped. Formally dissolving the legal entity, which is structured something like a foundation, takes time, because Italian law requires that no assets remain in a dissolved non-profit. A small group of former volunteers is handling the wind-down, keeping mutual contact to a minimum.

The person said nothing on the encrypted Dutch server could cause problems for former users. He described himself as surprised but not worried, and said he had hoped that dissolving the organisation would satisfy the Americans. The seizure, as NRC notes, suggests the fear that associations with A/I could cause trouble was not unfounded.

Why it matters

The case illustrates how far US legal and sanctions instruments now reach into European infrastructure. Dutch police treated the request as routine, and a server physically located in Amsterdam, operated by an Italian organisation that had already announced its dissolution, will still have its contents copied for US investigators. It also marks a departure from the norm that service providers are not liable for their users' content: here the provider itself was designated as terrorist over the alleged behaviour of the people it hosted. Related NRC coverage frames the episode as exposing Europe's lack of autonomy over its own digital and financial infrastructure, and for the thousands of collectives that relied on A/I, it confirms that merely being associated with a sanctioned provider can attract legal attention.