The Autistici/Inventati Collective

The A/I Collective (by A/I we mean autistici.org / inventati.org) was born in March 2001 from the encounter of several individuals and collectives engaged in technology, privacy, digital rights and political activism. Our fundamental aim is to provide free communication tools on a wide scale, while favouring the choice of free rather than commercial ways to communicate. We wish to inform and train people about the need to protect their privacy and to escape the indiscriminate looting perpetrated by governments and corporations alike both on data and personalities.

Four years after our first server was activated, A/I hosts nearly 5,000 mailboxes, over 500 websites and more than 700 mailing lists. Besides these services, we offer a small anonymous FTP, an anonymous remailer and several training and information activities in the field of digital communication. At the moment, the community surfing in the obscure sea of the A/I services amounts to thousands of people.

It's not that many, especially if you consider the grim global scenary we are facing, but it's enough for undergoing censorship and overt repression: as early as in 2003 we received the official request of handing over some mail users' personal data, but even commercial servers don't always keep such data, and following a conscious political choice, we have never kept them. In 2004 one of the websites we hosted (Zenmai) was seized due to the guilty conscience of Trenitalia (the Italian railways company) relating to war (that case definitely ended in our favour). [Now that website is online again and Google has a new story to tell about Trenitalia.]
That same year, finally, the police seized and copied the content of all disks in our server with the help of the provider which hosted it (Aruba) and without us knowing anything about it (we discovered it by chance after one year). In the face of all this, we had to find out a strategy allowing us to make a significant step forward. That's why we have developed the R* Plan.

Note
[1] See the Trenitalia vs. zenmai23 and A/I case: http://www.autistici.org/ai/trenitalia/index.en.php
[2] See the A/I Crackdown case: http://www.autistici.org/ai/crackdown/#en