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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 Beginning in the early 1990s , the debate centers largely around the publication of internal, unpublished (to the public) documents written by its founder L. Ron Hubbard .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 church 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 In late 1994 , the Church of Scientology began using various legal tactics to cease distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard .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 The official church response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.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 is abusing Copyright Law by launching lawsuits against outspoken critics of the organization.Hausherr, Tilman. "NOTS34: criminality successfully protected by copyright law" , 1998 Wachter, Kristi. "'Handling a physical condition' with the NOTs" ALT.RELIGION.SCIENTOLOGY 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. 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. 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. 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. After failing to remove the news group, Scientology adopted its current strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation. 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. In addition, Scientology operatives, under the guise of anti-Scientology posters, regulary post warnings that Scientology Special Ops have posted false links and emails for the purpose of tracking IP addresses, which has frightened many new users away from viewing links and contacting other 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. If you want to make up your own mind, please read Truth Seeker's articles by yourself. "The Hitchhiker's Guide Through A.R.S. - Complete List Of Truth Seeker's Articles About This Newsgroup" Thank you. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.scientology/browse_thread/thread/5e0a0a1a0ab9c9b4/8a1095ba9c9b4833 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 Lawyer s 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, Trademark ed, 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 Lawsuit s 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 , Colorado , California , and even in The Netherlands (see Karin Spaink ) and Scandinavia (see 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 Provider s, 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. 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 Engine s. This problem was solved by the innovation (see e.g. Google ) of clustering responses from the same Web Server , showing no more than the top two results from any one site. 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.Freedom Magazine, Vol 27, Issue 4: ''A Crime By Any Other Name'' . See "Dennis Erlich: Copyright Terrorist". (Archived January 16th, 1999.) 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 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. 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:
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 Corporation s and Federal Government s began to write their own rules and set additional standards for the regulation of copyrighted materials online. SEE ALSO
FOOTNOTES 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.
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