Amsterdam police seize Autistici/Inventati server in US legal push

Server seized at Science Park

A unit of the Amsterdam police on Tuesday took a server from the Italian internet service provider Autistici/Inventati, also known as A/I, at a datacenter at Science Park in Amsterdam. The seizure followed a United States mutual legal assistance request. A police spokesperson said by phone that such a request is simply carried out.

Digital experts of the police are making an image, a digital copy, of the server. That copy will go directly to the United States, after which the owners get the server back.

Provider designated by Washington

A/I is a left wing anti capitalist organization that for about 25 years offered free web hosting and email services to around 20,000 organizations worldwide. The United States government says A/I facilitated antifa, short for antifascists. The Trump administration sees antifa as a terrorist organization and designated A/I as terrorist at the end of August. That was unusual, because internet service providers are usually not held responsible for the content their users put online.

After the designation, the organization lost access to its bank account and domain name. A little more than a week after the sanction was published, the volunteers running A/I decided to stop work and dismantle it. They said they wanted to prevent people or organizations from getting into trouble because of links with A/I, for example through donations or use of its web hosting and email.

Wind down and last hardware

A/I had servers at several European locations, and those machines were closed and their disks wiped in recent weeks. The legal entity, a kind of foundation, still needs to be dissolved, which takes time. Under Italian law, no assets may remain in a nonprofit organization after it has been dissolved. A small group of former volunteers is handling the wind down, with as little contact among themselves as possible.

The Dutch server was one of the last pieces of hardware the group wanted to throw away, and it had been in contact with DC1, the datacenter and a distant successor of Xs4all. A person involved, who spoke anonymously for safety reasons, said nothing on the encrypted server could cause problems for A/I users. One spokesperson had hoped that dissolving the organization would be enough for the Americans.

Sources: Nrc