In perhaps the most consequential move to date by the Trump administration to address the challenge of what it calls the “political terrorism” of the far-left, the U.S. State and U.S. Treasury Departments announced this week the designation of the Autistici/Inventati Collective, an Italy-based anonymous tech collective, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

As the State Department described in its official announcement, A/I Collective provides sophisticated tech tools for a variety of far-left extremist actors, including website hosting, a blogging suite known as “No.Blogs,” mail services, and similar tech services. Utilizing these anonymous tools, anarchist and autonomous groups issue communiques for designated terrorist groups, issue calls to commit criminal acts, and take credit for attacks against critical infrastructure and law enforcement both in the United States and abroad.

The State Department stressed in its release that the collective helps distribute not just opinions, but “target information, tactical manuals and techniques” for conducting criminal and terrorist acts.

While many on the online left have feigned indignation, for their part, the A/I Collective has long known that it was a legitimate target of law enforcement action. Following a series of Italian law enforcement actions in the early 2000s, the collective initiated what they called Plan R*, intended as a technical solution of decentralized servers meant to prevent physical intrusion and the collective’s clients from losing access in the event of law enforcement action. Following Plan R*, the collective published what it calls the “Orange Book,” a manual to allow individuals or groups to replicate their specific network methods.

This is in keeping with Anarchist/Autonomous methodology, which seeks to widely and deniably distribute responsibility. One can think of it as a kind of digital black bloc, where the more people participating and utilizing the techniques, the harder it is for law enforcement to address. While one site or group can be taken down, the material is quickly redistributed to other servers and other groups....