Descripción general del mecanismo de licitación

The first Autistici/Inventati countermeasure was to withdraw the machine, clean it, and put it back online. It was an emergency intervention that completely resolved the matter by the end of June, when the fundamental services were reactivated.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. All of the good practices and technical mastery weren’t enough to protect the privacy and anonymity of their nearly 30,000 subscribers – nor of the admin- istrators themselves.

To recover the computer, a joint expedition of Autistics from various provenances was spon- taneously organized. Essentially, anyone who could leave home without warning joined the caravan. Mille, for example, recounted that at the time he was working for a company that he could leave in hurry without too many problems. Ale remembers having noticed for the first time that Aruba was based on a street named after Sergio Ramelli, that is to say a ‘fas- cist martyr’. This was a particularly disturbing fact which no one would have focused on in a different situation.

To collect the server, at least three cars filled with enraged people showed up. To avoid any misunderstandings, they were accompanied by a lawyer. A couple of people and the lawyer went into Aruba’s office. The rest of the collective waited in the street, in the deserted parking lot where every once in a while three men in black glasses peered out at them from a car. After driving around in front of the Autistici, the car stopped at Aruba’s entrance, turned around once more and disappeared onto the highway. After a while it returned. And continued like that for the rest of the visit.

Meanwhile, the discussion inside was long and irritating. The owner clumsily tried to explain himself, only worsening his position in the astonished eyes of the collective. There were moments of tension. Some insults were exchanged but in the end they were at least able to leave the company premises with the server in their arms, having dealt with the most urgent issue.

The computer was wiped and restored, then temporarily placed where ECN had their machines. Subsequently the judge ordered the police to destroy the data they had copied from the disks, so it couldn’t be used (at least officially) in the courtroom. However, the prob- lem of where to locate the server remained unchanged.

ECN benefited from being on an older contract, but the hosting costs for A/I’s server were now unreasonable. For this and other reasons, it wasn’t a sustainable solution. These moments of excitement also tested the policy of keeping the backups on another machine, in an unequipped place in the middle of nowhere.

129 SupportoLegale, ‘Comunicato di SupportoLegale’, Autistici, June 2005, https://www.autistici.org/ai/

Besides, the result of relying on a home connection is that it never works. It was a difficult and delicate moment. It had already been decided that it was necessary to revolutionize the infrastructure, but the situation continued like this for a few months, waiting for the execution of Plan R*.

Plan R*

Plan R* put in place a network of self-managed servers, defined as a ‘resistant communi- cations network’.

Ale:The terms are obviously incorrect: ‘network’ is a stupid way to say that there’s more than

one computer, and to convey that we were moving from a material structure to an immaterial one. The idea wasn’t to disappear and become untraceable, which is hard and also a bit pointless, but to make it really complicated to bypass us. And we did it using sufficiently tortuous technical solutions. This way, if someone wants some of our data, they have to deal with the Investici Association.

A/I wanted robustness for at least two reasons: technical and political. First, the new server network minimized the risk that the structure as a whole could suddenly collapse, leaving everyone stranded without a way to communicate. Secondly, it enabled A/I to support a universe of people who were resisting uniformity and control – a world of ideas that needed tools in order to spread and flourish.

Bomboclat:Our customary paranoia may seem exaggerated but it usually turns out to be fortunate. At the end of the Aruba affair we had just the one machine, but from then on there’s an exponential increase in the number of servers. And as that was not enough, other counter- measures would later be put into place to limit the damage that occurs from time to time…

As we’ve seen, when Ale joined the collective at the end of 2002, A/I was already looking to redesign its infrastructure and make it more secure and resistant to downtime or outages. His arrival on the scene was crucial.

Cojote:What we were discussing seemed very smart to me. I believe that Ale was mainly intrigued by the technological challenge and the opportunity to give what he did a social meaning. Together we built something that seemed very timely. How this then became Plan R* depended on a number of factors, and it was the years of work afterwards that determined how it turned out. That’s how it went. Once the weak points of the infrastructure were identified, we all worked towards the solution.

In response to the 2005 Aruba crackdown, it was decided that it was time to make these discussions tangible. The collective devoted itself to an engineering effort to finish it in the shortest time possible. It was a summer of hard work.

Gio:I joined A/I at a fun moment: during the crackdown. So I took part in putting Plan R* into

effect, even if they already had pretty specific ideas about what was to be done. We experi-

mented with different things during this period: Autistici’s first Tor node, a service that over

the years has come and gone; Jabber, for instant messaging; the first draft of a certification

But beyond the technical push, Plan R* really demanded political and strategic effort. Once it was decided that they couldn’t possibly have machines only in Italy, they needed to figure out in which countries they could be located.

Bomboclat:Where to put the tool itself? After the experience of Aruba, no one wanted to take unnecessary risks and it’s essential that the people holding the machines be trusted. Such peace of mind can only be guaranteed through directly knowing the comrades responsible for the servers. Here the contacts acquired outside of Italy during the internationalist undertaking that was Indymedia prove to be very useful.

Indymedia had served as global connective tissue, fostering by its nature a sort of militant internationalism. It had an in-built radio bridge to other countries, a connection that allowed groups even very far from the antagonist area to meet and coalesce.

Bomboclat:For example we organized the No Border130_{camps with Indymedia, events where}

Italian hacklabs with their own identity, ethics, and needs, met people from a Belgian internet cafe who were inspired by completely different principles. Both recognized each other as brothers with a shared commitment to specific goals.

Through this and other similar efforts, Indymedia not only acknowledged the historical sig- nificance of each different European political group, but also gave them a new boost and continuity, and provided or strengthened the contacts that later proved to be a great help.

Bomboclat:In reality Plan R* had been ready for a year, at least since Ale and Phasa went

to Brazil for the fourth Debian Conference, where they met the Americans from Riseup.

In 2006, when the new structure had been active for a year, Blicero and Ale undertook a long trip to Scandinavia. That summer they crossed half of continental Europe by car. Their destination was Norway, but it was a journey with many stops.

Ale:In Oslo we met the person who hosted our Norwegian server. Then we went to Germany,

France, the Netherlands… it was a tour for socializing, we went to present Plan R* and at the same time meet people from the various backup communities that had made it possible!

During the 7000-kilometer trip the two made numerous stops to present the infrastructure to various international groups similar to A/I, though none of them adopted a comparable approach.

Blicero:Among our various international contacts, few followed our path. This is in part due to the fact that they have less users and their projects are of smaller size. With the Americans from Riseup, our relationship is stronger because their community isn’t as small and the scale of their problems is similar to A/I’s.

In brief, with Plan R* the collective turned a new page, even if the internationalist impulse was quickly limited to the mere management of technical issues. Besides, there was a linguistic problem attributable to the difficulties in dealing with the dominant English-speaking world.

130 No Border: A network born in 1999 to show solidarity with migrants, campaign for freedom of movement, and fight deportations from the EU.

Alieno:When we say ‘Autistici’ around the world, no one understands. The world speaks English and the Italian names of our domains are crippled because of it… We can’t find a solution! For Plan R* we spent a while bogged down on the domain name that would let us overcome the Autistici-Inventati dualism. It was a bit of drama. We chose ‘onenetbeyond’ (but luckily then we haven’t had to use it except for the launch campaign) together with English

words containing the R: R*esist, cR*ypto, oR*gasm, that have almost come to equal +kaos!

In October 2005, the multiplication of servers occurred, from one to a geographically dis- tributed many, making use of a series of technologies later described in the Orange Book. Roughly speaking, the basis for the new structure lies in the interchangeability of servers. They are configured identically and this makes them individually replaceable. None of them are essential.

The servers are then synchronized and the communication between them and outside traffic is encrypted.

But although the machines are functionally identical, the data they host is different. People’s sensitive data, for example their email boxes, are distributed so that at any moment they can be moved to another server. This is very useful when the server they originate from becomes compromised, as events in Norway would soon show.

Plan R* wasn’t conceived to back up and restore data, but rather to ensure that the structure as a whole would continue to function even when under attack. This reflects the collective’s political priority – to give everyone the possibility to communicate and circulate censored material.

Ale:Fundamentally the aim is to guarantee that people will still be able to communicate, no

matter what happens.

2005 marked a momentous change for A/I, expressed not only in the new technical struc- ture, but also in a change of political orientation. And as much as it accomplished – from the survival of the service to the emergence of non-techie abilities within the collective – it wasn’t a completely painless transition.

With Plan R*, and in spite of itself, A/I became exactly what it didn’t want to become: a movement provider. The initial idea wasn’t for the multiplication of servers as much as the growth of new groups to manage them, but except for a few cases, that clearly didn’t work. As a result, some people slowly withdrew from the project. Caparossa left during this period. Beyond the reasons noted above, their motives for leaving included the difficulty of sharing skills and technical knowledge within A/I. In the push for Plan R* they recreated a very obvious gap between those who were technically qualified, and had time to grow in this respect, and those who found themselves carrying out either unskilled labor or unable to contribute to the project at all. It was a classic problem which in some ways is a constant and still unresolved; only with time and the stabilization of the new structure did it begin to fade. With Plan R* the collective let itself embrace the role of movement provider, but tried to implement a structure that this time was purpose-designed and technically very different from the original. This expansion led to another class of citizenship on the internet.

Ale:On the internet there exist various levels of protection for user data, based on the social class to which you belong… as also happens to be the case in offline society. Well that goes for the digital world as well: it’s your economic category that makes the difference. The low end, where people pay a few euros for a domain each year, is home to all sorts of abuses. The commercial providers have hyper-compliant policies towards the powers that be and don’t protect their clients from legal problems because these costs aren’t covered by what they charge. They take down the site at the first complaint and you have to prove that a mistake was made. A general attacker with enough power could simply send a request letter or fill out a form, and it doesn’t cost them anything to get your data. We couldn’t change that, because it’s the industry standard, so we reversed the problem. With Plan R* our technical structure is comparable to a medium-sized corporation or institution and therefore going through us has a cost. Even if this doesn’t prevent anyone from messing with us, it discourages people from doing it on a massive scale and whenever they like.