Scientology versus the Internet

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Scientology versus the Internet is the colloquial term for a long-running online dispute between the Church of Scientology and a number of the Church's online critics. Beginning in the early 1990s, the debate centers largely around the publication of internal, unpublished (to the public) documents written by its founder L. Ron Hubbard. The name is meant to suggest a legal case (i.e. "Scientology v. Internet"), and the assertion of the controversial organization fighting against "the Internet" in its entirety has humorous connotations.

In late 1994, the Church of Scientology began using various legal tactics to cease distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The Church of Scientology is often accused of barratry (or malicious litigation and intimidation). The official church response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.

Some critics of the Church of Scientology claim that the church is a scam and that these "secret" writings are proof. The critics claim the documents contain evidence that the Church of Scientology's medical practices are illegal and fraudulent,[1] [2] though this has yet to be proven in a United States court of law. Some now believe that the Church of Scientology is abusing copyright law by launching lawsuits against outspoken critics of the organization.[3] [4]

Contents

[edit] alt.religion.scientology

   
“
 Welcome to mortal combat between two alien cultures - a flame war with real bullets.
   
”

—alt.scientology.war, Wired magazine 3.12, December 1995

The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology was created in 1991 for the purpose of giving non-Scientologists a place to see the discussions and beliefs of Scientologists in their own words without having to join Scientology. Debate over the pros and cons of Scientology waxed and waned on the newsgroup through the first three years of its existence, and flame wars were common, as they were on most other newsgroups.

The online battle is generally seen to have begun with the arrival of Dennis Erlich to alt.religion.scientology in mid-1994. A former high-ranking official in the organization who had been personally affiliated with L. Ron Hubbard, Erlich's presence on the newsgroup caused a number of regular participants there to sit up and take notice.

In January 1995, Church lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to shut down the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology by sending a control message instructing Usenet servers to delete the group on the grounds that

(1) It was started with a forged message; (2) not discussed on alt.config; (3) it has the name "scientology" in its title which is a trademark and is misleading, as a.r.s. is mainly used for flamers to attack the Scientology religion; (4) it has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices.[5] [1]

In practice, this rmgroup message had little effect, since most Usenet servers are configured to disregard such messages when applied to groups that receive substantial traffic, and newgroup messages were quickly issued for those servers that did not do so. However, the issuance of the message led to a great deal of public criticism of Scientology by free-speech advocates, including hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, who issued a declaration of war against the Church.[6]

After failing to remove the newsgroup, Scientology adopted its current strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation.[7] Scientologists and hired third parties regularly flood the newsgroup with pro-scientology messages, vague anti-scientology messages, irrelevant comments, and accusations that other posters are secret Scientologists intent on tracking and punishing posters. This makes the newsgroup virtually unreadable via Google Groups, although with newsreader files such known spammer usernames as "Truth Seeker" may be easily ignored. [citation needed]

[edit] The Xenu revelation

On December 24, 1994, the first of a large number of anonymous messages was posted to alt.religion.scientology, containing the text of the "secret" writings of Scientology known as the OT Levels (OT stands for "Operating Thetan"). This action brought on the actions of lawyers representing Scientology, who contacted various newsgroup participants and posted warnings demanding that the unauthorized distribution of the OT writings cease. The lawyers described the documents as "copyrighted, trademarked, unpublished trade secrets", and the distribution of the materials as a violation of copyright law and trademark law.

Shortly after the initial legal announcements, representatives of Scientology followed through with a series of lawsuits against various participants on the newsgroup, including Dennis Erlich. Accompanied by Scientology lawyers, federal marshals made several raids on the homes of individuals who were accused of posting Scientology's copyrighted materials to the newsgroup. Raids took place in Virginia (against Arnaldo Lerma), Colorado (against Lawrence Wollersheim and Robert Penny), California (against Dennis Erlich), and even in The Netherlands (against Karin Spaink) and Sweden (against Zenon Panoussis). In addition to filing lawsuits against individuals, Scientology also sued The Washington Post for reprinting one paragraph of the OT writings in a newspaper article, as well as several Internet service providers, including Netcom and XS4ALL. It also regularly demanded the deletion of material from the Deja News archive.

The initial strikes against Scientology's critics settled down into a series of legal battles that raged through the courts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provided legal assistance to several of the defendants, and daily reports of the latest happenings were posted to alt.religion.scientology. The newsgroup's popularity exploded, rocketing it to the ranks of the newsgroups with the heaviest message traffic and the highest number of readers. As the months and years wore on and the lawsuits continued without end, however, a number of participants in the newsgroup grew silent and moved on.

In the wake of the Scientology actions, the Penet remailer, which had been the most popular anonymous remailer in the world until the Scientology "war" took place, was shut down. Johan Helsingius, operator of the remailer, stated that the legal protections afforded him in his country (Finland) were too thin to protect him and he was forced to close down the remailer as a result.

[edit] Scientology's online campaign

While legal battles were being fought in the courts, an equally intense and aggressive campaign was waged online. The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology found itself at the center of an electronic maelstrom of information and disinformation, as the newsgroup itself was attacked both literally and figuratively. Tens of thousands of junk messages were spammed onto the newsgroup, rendering it nearly unreadable at times when the message "floods" were at their peaks. Over one million (1,000,000+) sporgery articles were injected into the newsgroup, apparently by Scientology management and staff. Hacking methods were used to wipe out messages from news servers carrying the newsgroup. Lawyers representing Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers. When these requests were repeatedly rejected, one of their lawyers unilaterally issued a rmgroup command to the Usenet server network to cause the group to be removed, an action which was quickly undone by the news server administrators. Furthermore, anonymous participants in the newsgroup kept up a steady stream of flame wars and off-topic arguments. Participants on the newsgroup accused Scientology of orchestrating these electronic attacks, though the organization consistently denied any wrongdoing.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, Scientology attempted a similar strategy to make finding websites critical of the organization more difficult. Scientology employed Web designers to write thousands of Web pages for their site, thus flooding early search engines. This problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, showing no more than the top two results from any one site (e.g. Google).

Since the inception of the Internet, Scientology has made a policy of using copyright infringement laws to prosecute various Scientology critics posting exposing information on the Web. The Church uses legal pressure combined with blackmail and character assassination to attempt to win many court cases in which it involves itself.[8]

On the other side of the battle, many Web-page developers have felt ethically obligated to link the words "Dianetics" and "Scientology" to Operation Clambake. This resulted in the anti-Scientology site having the highest Google index on the term for a while, which in turn resulted in Scientology persuading Google to remove links to the site[9] until international outcry led to the links being restored. This might be considered an early example of a Google bomb, and certainly has led to interesting questions about the power and obligations of Internet search providers.

Scientology has introduced a special software package for its members to protect them from "unapproved" material about the church. The software is designed to completely block out the newsgroup a.r.s, various anti-Scientology Web sites, and all references to various critics of Scientology. This software package was derided by critics, who accused the organization of censorship and called the program "Scieno Sitter", after the censorware net-filter program Cyber Sitter. Since no updates have been reported since 1998 (and the original filter program only worked with Windows 95[10]) the package is unlikely to be in use with recent operating systems and browsers due to software rot.

In June 2006, Scientology lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to Max Goldberg, founder of the website YTMND, asking him to take down all sites that either talked about or mocked Scientology, which had recently become a fad on the site following a popular South Park episode. Goldberg responded by saying that the "claims are completely groundless and I'm not removing anything," adding to the members of the site, "it should only be a matter of time before we're sued out of existence." In response, YTMNDers created yet more sites about Scientology, and these were highlighted on the main page. They also campaigned to Google bomb "The Unfunny Truth About Scientology" site. As of December 2006, no legal action has been taken against YTMND or Goldberg.

[edit] Notable legal cases

A few of the court cases were decided in favor of Scientology, while most of the cases were settled out of court. Noteworthy incidents in the later years of the online war included:

  • Scientology's lawsuit against ex-member Arnaldo Lerma, his provider Digital Gateway, and The Washington Post. Lerma posted the Fishman Affidavit that contained 61 pages of the allegedly trade-secret and copyrighted story of Xenu.
  • In 1995 Scientology caused a raid on the servers of Dutch Internet provider XS4ALL and sued it and Karin Spaink for copyright violations because of citing out of some confidential materials of Scientology. There followed a summary judgment in 1995, full proceedings in 1999, an appeal in 2001 which has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Netherlands in December 2005,[11] all in favor of the provider and Karin Spaink, putting freedom of information above copyright.
  • Activist Keith Henson was sued for posting a portion of Scientology's writings to the Internet. Henson defended himself in court without a lawyer, while at the same time he carried out protests and pickets against Scientology. The court found that Henson had committed copyright infringement, and the damage award against Henson was immense: $150,000, an amount claimed by Scientology to be the largest damages ever awarded against an individual for copyright infringement. Henson's case became increasingly more complex, however, with charges of "terrorism" being added. In his Internet writings, Henson claims that he was forced to flee the United States and seek asylum in Canada due to ongoing threats against him.
  • Zenon Panoussis, a resident of Sweden, was also sued for posting Scientology's copyrighted materials to the Internet. In his defense, he used a provision of the Constitution of Sweden that guarantees access to public documents. Panoussis turned over a copy of the NOTs documents to the office of the Swedish Parliament and, by law, copies of all documents (with few exceptions) received by authorities are available for anyone from the public to see, at any time he or she wishes. This, known as the Principle of Public Access (Offentlighetsprincipen), is considered a basic civil right in Sweden. The case, however, was decided against Panoussis. The results of his case sparked a legal firestorm in Sweden that debated the necessity of re-writing part of the Constitution.
  • Dennis Erlich settled his lawsuit with Scientology and withdrew from the online battle entirely.
  • Scientology also sued Grady Ward, a known free speech activist and cypherpunk, claiming that Ward was the person behind an anonymous figure known only as "SCAMIZDAT". This individual had posted a large number of copyrighted Scientology materials to the newsgroup. Ward denied the accusations, and the lawsuit was settled out of court. A sizable portion of the lawsuit involved the legalities of the use of encryption software. As part of the lawsuit, Scientology hired computer experts to try to decode the famous Pretty Good Privacy encryption — but all attempts to "crack" the encryption failed.
  • Philanthropist Bob Minton funded a number of court cases affecting the online battle, and he also became involved in the legal battle over Scientology's role in the death of one of its members, Lisa McPherson. Minton founded a short-lived organization called the Lisa McPherson Trust to support his cause and make a considerable amount of information about Scientology legally available online. After becoming involved in personal issues that resulted in the loss of his marriage and many of his business contacts (which many Scientology critics ardently believe were intentionally caused by Scientology), Minton capitulated and began working for Scientology in a strange about-face.
  • Scientology is one of the first organizations to make use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In June of 1999, Scientology used the controversial law to force AT&T Worldnet to reveal the identity of a person who had been posting anonymously to alt.religion.scientology with the pseudonym of "Safe".
  • The organization also used the DMCA to force the Google search engine to erase its entries on the popular anti-Scientology Web site Operation Clambake in March 2002, though the entry was reinstated after Google received a large number of complaints from Internet users. The publicity stemming from this incident was the impetus for Google's founding of the Chilling Effects archive, which archives legal threats of all sorts made against Internet users and Internet sites. [2]
  • In September 2002, lawyers for Scientology contacted the administrators of the Wayback Machine (archive.org) and asserted ownership of certain materials archived as historical contents of the Operation Clambake site. In response, the Wayback Machine administration removed the archive of the entire Clambake site, initially posting a false claim that the site's author had requested its removal. This claim has been removed but (as of July 2006) the site remains absent from the Wayback archive.

Although the legal precedents set by the Scientology court battles would initially have a profound effect on the way the Internet was seen by the legal system (the ruling of Religious Technology Center vs. Netcom was used as a precedent for a number of Internet copyright cases), the Scientology court cases were eventually superseded as large corporations and federal governments began to write their own rules and set additional standards for the regulation of copyrighted materials online.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Jacobsen, Jeff. "Medical claims within Scientology's secret teachings", 1996
  2. ^ O'Connor, Mike. "How Scientology claims to cure physical illness", 2003
  3. ^ Hausherr, Tilman. "NOTS34: criminality successfully protected by copyright law", 1998
  4. ^ Wachter, Kristi. "'Handling a physical condition' with the NOTs"
  5. ^ Grossman, Wendy [October 1997]. “Copyright Terrorists”, Net.Wars. New York: New York University Press, 77-78. ISBN 0-8147-3103-1. Retrieved on 2006-06-11.
  6. ^ Swamp Ratte. "Statement Concerning the 'Church' of Scientology." CULT OF THE DEAD COW Press Release, June 4, 1995. Retrieved June 14, 2006.
  7. ^ Jones, Colman. "Freedom Flames Out on the 'Net - Who launched the largest-ever sabotage of the Internet?", NOW Magazine, 1996-07-04. Retrieved on 2006-12-03.
  8. ^ Freedom Magazine, Vol 27, Issue 4: A Crime By Any Other Name. See "Dennis Erlich: Copyright Terrorist". (Archived January 16th, 1999.)
  9. ^ Matt Loney, Evan Hansen. "Google pulls anti-Scientology links", CNet, 2002-03-21. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.
  10. ^ Brown, Janelle. "A Web of their own", Salon, Salon.com, 1998-07-15. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
  11. ^ Final Victory! XS4ALL and Karin Spaink Win Scientology Battle, Press Release, December 16, 2005

[edit] External links and references

The online war has seen a large number of persons participating fervently on both sides of the conflict. Neutral, unbiased commentaries are difficult to locate, and parties in both the pro- and anti-Scientology camp are known to use rhetoric and emotional appeals.

[edit] Church of Scientology

[edit] Critical and other sites

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