Scientology as an organization has a long history of using heavy-handed tactics to silence its critics, especially when those critics are former members. Church officials were none too thrilled when the Usenet group alt.religion.scientology started turning into a forum for critics of the Church, some of them skeptics, some of them former members who are now non-believers, some of them former members who still hold to Scientology's tenets but disagree with how the Church is managed.
The legal premise that the Church of Scientology has been using is copyright infringement: post Church documents, and you get threatened with a lawsuit. With zombie-like persistence, the Church hierarchy has pressed this sort of legal harassment against many people who have spoken out against them on Usenet. In February of this year, Scientology attorneys managed to get a court order against former member Dennis Erlich of Glendale, California which, among other things, allowed them to enter his house (along with the Glendale Police) and search his personal computer files. As Erlich himself put it: "This is not happening in cyberspace. This is happening in my house." Lawsuits are still pending against Erlich, and as the legal bills pile up, a defense fund has been established.
Faced with this sort of hounding, many Scientology critics turned to anonymous remailing services in order to get their message out. As a result, Scientology lawyers turned their attention to the remailer operators. Their most chilling manipulation of the legal system occurred on February 18 of this year, when Church attorneys working through Interpol managed to get Helsinki police to serve a warrant on Julf Helsingius, the operator of the popular anon.penet.fi remailer in Finland. The police could have seized his hardware, but Helsingius managed to satisfy them by giving up the one name that they were looking for--the identity of one anonymous user who had been posting criticisms of Scientology to Usenet. In April, Scientology lawyers continued their campaign of harassment by threatening lawsuits against operators of other remailers, notably Homer Wilson Smith, who was running an anonymous remailer at rahul.net. Mr. Smith, in refusing to turn over records from his remailer to Scientology attorney Helena Kobrin, said that the privacy of his users was "sacrosanct". The remailer crisis may have set some disturbing precedents, particularly in how easily law enforcement officials who know nothing about the Internet can be manipulated. For the most part, the remailer operators have stood their ground in spite of the threats, and the remailers are still operating, including anon.penet.fi.
The current conundrum is that Scientology enforcers have taken up the cancelbot technique to silence critics. Cancel messages are entered into Usenet through security holes in poorly-managed news servers. Instead of cancelling messages that threaten to destroy Usenet as a discussion medium, Church of Scientology "clams" as they are now called are sending out forged cancel messages to erase posts that criticize the Church. These forged cancels, unlike those of the Cancelmoose, are done without the consent of the Usenet site that they're posted from--Church "clams" have to sneak through site security to post them. Tracking down the source of these forged cancels has involved Usenet defenders in some serious detective work. As recently as the first week of July of this year, Ron Newman of MIT traced the source of some Scientology forged cancels to University College in Dublin, Ireland.
IT would have been good to ahve a discussion.
