Scientology Information > Stopping Scientology Expansion
Some history of the scientology critics
ethercat:
This is a long article, written in December of 1995, which should be read, if one is interested in how the battle against scientology got to where it is now. I urge people to read the article at the link below, but I am also copying the entire 7 page article in into this thread for archival purposes. Many, many valuable articles have been lost over time, and others put into pay-per-view archives. I believe this type of information should be free. I commend Wired for keeping this article available for free for these many years.
alt.scientology.war
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/alt.scientology.war.html
ethercat:
Part 1
When computers are seized because they contain allegedly stolen intellectual property, and police pierce the security anonymous remailers,the days of the Net as a cozy, cocktail party are over. Welcome to a flame war with real bullets.
By Wendy M. Grossman
When computers are seized because they contain allegedly stolen intellectual property, or the security of anonymous remailers is pierced by police, alt.scientology.war the days of the Internet as a cozy, private, intellectual cocktail party are over.
Welcome to mortal combat between two alien cultures - a flame war with real bullets.
Saturday, August 12, 1995. The word goes out over the Net: a raid is in progress at the Arlington, Virginia, home of Arnaldo Lerma, Usenet poster and former Scientologist. The raiding party is said to consist of ten people: two federal marshals; two computer technicians, one of whom is former FBI agent and computer-security expert James Settle; and several attorneys from the Church of Scientology. One attorney is Helena Kobrin, known to many on the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology through her postings demanding the deletion of files which she claims contain copyrighted material. Another is Earle Cooley, a church lawyer who also chairs the board of Boston University. They are taking Lerma's computer, backups, disks, modem, and scanner. Although persistent and passionate about his anti-Scientology crusade, Lerma is distraught over the intrusion. Like many of us, Lerma keeps all his files, both business and personal, on his home computer.
The raiding party says he'll have his equipment back by Monday. Weeks later, he's still waiting.
Lerma is not the first. In February, similar raids were staged on Dennis Erlich in Glendale, California, and on anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer run by Johan Helsingius in Finland.
Then more - on Tuesday, August 22, 1995. This time it's two raids. The target is FactNet, an anticult electronic library and archive based in Golden, Colorado. One raid is on FactNet chair - and former Scientologist - Lawrence Wollersheim, the unpaid winner of a multimillion-dollar suit against the church. The other is on FactNet director Bob Penny. FactNet has been expecting a raid since early spring, and it long ago told Internet users to download as much of its archives as possible. There are now FactNet anti-Scientology kits on websites all over the world. With netters everywhere able to cut and paste them, transmit and download them, they become more and more difficult to track down. It would take a lot of international cooperation and a lot of police power to get them all.
On the Usenet newsgroup at the heart of all this, alt.religion.scientology, posters who've been critical of the religion are still worried. The church has filed suit against The Washington Post for quoting material the church considers proprietary; police have paid a visit to XS4ALL, a Dutch Internet service provider, to file for seizure of equipment (at issue is the service's anonymous remailer and the home page of a user who has posted Scientology materials); and rumor has it there'll be a raid on another netter any day now. The popular bet for the next round is critic Grady Ward in Arcata, California, who has told the group his 74-year-old mother was visited by a Scientology investigator. The masses on alt.religion.scientology have started a pool to guess how many people will hit Ward. Other users have reported mysterious incidents: investigators visiting their neighbors, strangers attempting to get into their telephone records, e-mail sent to their sysadmins asking that their accounts be closed down. How did we get to this, in a free country?
It turns out that a belief in free speech and an interest in Scientology may involve you in the bitterest battle fought across the Internet to date. The story of Scientology versus the Net is not a tale of friendly nethead-to-nethead hostilities like 1993's kittens-in-the-microwave flame war between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats. This is mortal combat between two alien cultures - two worlds whose common language masks the gulf between them. A flame war with real guns. A fight that has burst the banks of the Net and into the real world of police, lawyers, and armed search and seizure. Ultimately, however, the drama doesn't matter: the real issues here are the boundaries of free speech and the future of copyright and intellectual property in the face of a technology that can scatter copies across the world in seconds. The Church of Scientology will not be the last organization, controversial or otherwise, that seeks to protect its interests against the Net. Technology doesn't care about the motives of its users.
ethercat:
alt.scientology.war (continued)
Part 2
In this story, everyone's motives sound the same: all the participants believe they are benefiting humanity. Scientologists genuinely believe their secrets can save the world, but that they must be doled out only to those who have proven ready to receive them. Followers hold fiercely to the notion that their revered, secret texts must never be disseminated, save to the rigorously initiated, who pay tens of thousands of dollars to study them. Critics insist the religion is a scam that seeks to take over the minds of its adherents and bilk them of huge sums of money by selling utter nonsense; they feel that exposing these truths - and the secret texts - to the eyes of the Usenet-reading public is protecting that public from exploitation.
Whatever the motives, when computers are seized because they contain allegedly purloined intellectual property, messages are intercepted as they traverse the network, or the security of anonymous remailers is pierced by police, the days of the Internet as a cozy, private, intellectual cocktail party are over. Welcome to real politics.
We hold these truths
Alt.religion.scientology was never a quiet newsgroup. It was created on July 17, 1991, by Scott Goehring, who says he started the newsgroup half as a joke and half "because I felt Usenet needed a place to disseminate the truth about this half-assed religion." He forged the signature miscaviage@flag.sea.org onto the message used to create the group - a misspelling for church leader David Miscavige (flag and sea refer to Scientology branches, known as orgs).
From the start, the group attracted both skeptics and believers. While never coming close to agreement, the rivals managed to co-exist in the sort of tense balance the Net seems to specialize in. They even hammered out a more or less stable agreement to have multiple FAQs - rather than the standard single list of frequently asked questions - to introduce newcomers to both sides. While each side has criticized the other's writings, there have been no serious attempts to interfere with the dual FAQs. There has even been a certain tolerance for a particularly vehement Dutch poster who has declared most of the newsgroup's participants to be Suppressive Persons (SPs), the Scientology equivalent of excommunicates. He calls himself Ron's Inspector and believes he's telepathically in touch with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986.
Hubbard was a pulp-fiction writer by trade. His published books, monographs, internal-policy documents, and taped lectures form what the church calls its sacred scriptures. The more advanced materials are closely guarded: Hubbard claimed that exposure to the secrets of an Operating Thetan, as the church refers to its acolytes, could harm, even kill, the partially initiated. The church's Net-related legal actions have all focussed on protecting the scriptures from disclosure.
These recent raids and suits have come after a long period of increasing verbal violence. One of the first steps toward open warfare was the emergence, in about 1990, of a group that wanted to separate the church and its scriptures. Calling itself the Free Zone, this group consists of people who have left the church but still want to practice its teachings - use the tech, as Free Zoners say. Ex Scientologist Homer Smith is one of these (ex meaning "expanded," not "former" Scientologist, says Smith). Wanting to encourage serious discussion of the tech away from the noisy brawl next door in alt.religion.scientology, Smith set up a second newsgroup, alt.clearing.technology, for this purpose. Even then, a church critic nearly got there first. Chris Schafmeister, a graduate student in biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, perpetrated a Usenet prank: in some older Internet guides, you'll read that alt.clearing.technology is for discussing acne cures.
Schafmeister was one of the first strident critics to join the discussion of Scientology on the Net, inspired by fliers on the walls of the UC San Francisco medical school. He was, he says, "really, really upset" at the way these posters targeted the sick, the sad, and the bereaved to get them into US$60 Scientology courses. Accordingly, he took to spending his study breaks arguing against the organization on Usenet. Schafmeister was the first to find in 1994 that the church had more than a passing interest in the discussions taking place in alt.religion.scientology.
ethercat:
alt.scientology.war (continued)
Part 3
It was a Scientologist he'd befriended on the Net, he says, who gave him a copy of a letter from a church staffer named Elaine Siegel. Appalled by its content, he promptly posted it on alt.religion.scientology. Siegel identified herself as writing from the Office of Special Affairs International, which former insiders say is the church's security branch. Addressed to Scientologists on the Net, the letter suggested flooding the Net with positive messages about Scientology as a counter to criticism posted. It said, in part, "If you imagine 40 to 50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days, we'll just run the SPs right off the system. It will be quite simple." She ended with, "I would like to hear from you on your ideas to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into."
Church lawyer Helena Kobrin, asked later about the letter by e-mail, said, "Ms. Siegel's letter was not an official church policy." Things might be different now if the church had said so at the time. Through the summer of 1994, the letter was copied, and its widespread circulation heated the debate to yet another degree, bringing a new constituency into the newsgroup: people who wanted to defend the Net against what they saw as a threat to their freedom. Many of them knew nothing about Scientology except for that letter, and they were incensed. Other arrivals knew a lot about Scientology, and were incensed for different reasons. Chief among them was Dennis Erlich, who calls himself a minister and who provides "information and support to people who have been subjected to high-demand groups." He was a Scientologist for 15 years.
Erlich left the church in 1982 after what he describes as a failed attempt to reform it from within. "That made me persona non grata, and they couldn't work with me because I wouldn't follow orders anymore." He was declared an SP and has since devoted himself to debunking the church at every opportunity. Several of the newsgroup's old-timers say the tone changed when Erlich showed up in '94. He agrees - and he's proud of it. "People were discussing this stuff like it was some sort of tea party," he says disdainfully. His own views against the church are so vehement it's hard to imagine he could reach any sort of amicable agreement with Scientologists - or they with him. His critical posts, with quotations from the church literature, turned alt.religion.scientology from debating club to battlefield.
Duelling cancelbots
Shortly before Christmas 1994, messages started to mysteriously vanish from alt.religion.scientology. The contents of the missing messages are not known today. Many people believed they knew who was responsible, but gathering evidence and understanding what was happening were different tasks altogether.
Most Usenet newsreader software has built-in cancellation facilities. These are simple enough: the poster sends out a cancel-command message, often containing a brief explanation for the cancellation, which propagates around Usenet from server to server. The cancel command instructs the system to ignore the user's previously sent post, identified by a unique code assigned to every Usenet post when written. While the feature allows users to cancel their own posts, canceling somebody else's message is a little more complicated: the would-be censor has to forge the message to make it look as though it came from the original poster. It's not that hard to do if you know how.
There are legitimate - or at least Net-approved - reasons for forging cancellations. A loose collection of individuals known as the Cancelmoose, for example, removes spams, those mass mailings inappropriately posted all over the Net, usually for commercial purposes. When spurred by complaints in alt.current-events.net-abuse, the Cancelmoose typically culls messages posted to more than 25 newsgroups of widely varying content. Those who compose the Cancelmoose take open responsibility for their actions - in fact, they advertise them as a public service. The cancellations on alt.religion.scientology, however, were different. The messages that disappeared were sent to a single newsgroup, and no one ever claimed responsibility. So, this being the Net, a program was developed to get a look at what was being canceled. The program was called Lazarus.
ethercat:
alt.scientology.war (continued)
Part 4
Lazarus was another of Chris Schafmeister's ideas. It takes advantage of the fact that the header of every Usenet post - with the date, subject, sender, and a mess of other information packed in at the top of each file - is recorded in a general header log on a Usenet server and that every cancel command lands in a newsgroup called Control. Schafmeister's notion was that a program could scan the thousands of cancel commands posted in Control each day and compare them to the megalog of headers, specifically those that are routed to alt.religion.scientology. If Lazarus came up with a match, it would mean that a message headed for alt.religion.scientology had been canceled. Lazarus would automatically put up a note saying the message had been canceled, which would then propagate to all the Usenet servers, thereby alerting alt.religion.scientology readers everywhere. It would be up to the original poster to reinstate the message if he or she wanted to. Homer Smith took the idea and implemented it as a Perl script that is available to anyone on the Net, although it takes some skill to use.
"At least we can see when messages have been canceled," says Schafmeister. But Lazarus is limited: it cannot identify the CancelBunny, as the unidentified flying cancelers were disparagingly called. When Lazarus began reporting that messages had been "CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT," most on the newsgroup felt their instincts had been right - that the CancelBunny was one or more church representatives.
When asked in April about the cancellations, Helena Kobrin replied in an e-mail message: "In an effort to protect its rights, the Church has contacted several computer bulletin board operators in recent months who, when apprised of the illegal and offensive nature of the postings, agreed to remove the infringing materials from the Net." However, there has been no proof to support Kobrin's claim that sysadmins have cooperated with the church by deleting postings from their boards.
"Just about everybody got hit," wrote William Barwell, who signs himself Pope Charles. "I had two posts canceled." It was Barwell who discovered a bit of law, United States Code Title 18, section 2701 concerning "unlawful access to stored communications." The law includes provisions prohibiting unauthorized access to and malicious destruction of an electronic message; it also prevents unauthorized access to or alteration of electronic communications. Barwell felt all three of these applied to the forged cancellations. At the beginning of March, Barwell wrote a letter to the FBI asking the agency to enforce the code, and he sent copies to Netcom, where most of the cancel commands were originating, as well as his own service provider, NeoSoft. Later, Netcom closed the accounts of those canceling from its system, on the grounds that, having forged the cancellations, they were violating Netcom's terms of service. When a new spate of cancellations started coming from DeltaNet, a Southern California Internet service provider, accounts there were rapidly shut down as well. Recently, the forgeries have become more adept. The many postings this spring that appeared to come from London's Demon Internet service were eventually traced to a site in Dublin.
When the cancellations continued through July and August, a team calling itself the Rabbit Hunters, or, more formally, the Ad-Hoc Committee Against Internet Censorship, which includes representatives from the US, Canada, and Germany, began some fancy technical investigating. By comparing logs and monitoring news servers, the group believes it has finally traced the CancelBunny to the account of a Scientologist who posted prolifically early this spring. Asked to comment on their claims, Kobrin did not reply.
You can't say that here
At the same time, the church was pursuing other options. On January 3, 1995, about a week after the cancellations started, Johan Helsingius, the operator of the world's best known anonymous remailer, anon.penet.fi, posted to alt.religion.scientology a copy of a letter he had received from Helena Kobrin on behalf of Thomas Small, counsel for the Religious Technology Center and Bridge Publications Inc. (copyright holder and publisher, respectively, of Hubbard's work). Kobrin wanted him to block access from his remailer to alt.religion.scientology and alt.clearing.technology on the grounds that the remailer was being used as a conduit for copyrighted materials. Four other anonymous remailers received the same letter. On January 9, Helsingius replied that monitoring postings is impossible, and that he didn't believe blocking newsgroups was appropriate.
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