There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations.Critics split over DDoS attacks on Scientology The Register, 25 January 2008Internet group launches War on Scientology, following YouTube video Canadian Content, 23 January 2008 In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.
Scholars, journalists, and court judgements characterise the organization as a confidence scam and say that these secretive writings are proof, or that they contain evidence that the organization's medical practices are illegal and fraudulent.Jacobsen, Jeff. Medical claims within Scientology's secret teachings, 1996O'Connor, Mike. "How Scientology claims to cure physical illness", 2003 Scientology has been convicted of fraud in the courts of several nations, although not those of the United States. Others have said that the organization is abusing copyright law by launching lawsuits against outspoken critics.NOTS34: criminality successfully protected by copyright law, Tilman Hausherr (1998)
Overview
Scientology versus the internet was a phrase coined to describe the "war" that the Church of Scientology waged to try to remove their copyrighted materials and secret "advanced technology" from the internet, and to hinder, harass and punish those who used the internet to discuss Scientology and expose abuses. The efforts started in earnest in the 1990s and were effectively abandoned in the late-2000s. Former national spokesman for Scientology Robert Vaughn Young once said, "I am thankful I'm not having to face the Net. It's going to be to Scientology what Vietnam was to the US."
At first, Scientology operatives attempted to shut down the main online newsgroup about Scientology. Failing that, they tried to overpower it. When insider information started to appear in droves, the organization identified and focused on several key players, had their premises raided, and filed lawsuits against them. Their efforts to suppress speech about Scientology attracted the attention of Anonymous in 2008, who declared their own war against Scientology, called Project Chanology. And finally with the posting of virtually all Scientology materials online, including with WikiLeaks, internally Scientology conceded they had lost the war.
In 1994, Scientology official Mike Rinder was put on the case when the OT Levels appeared on the internet.
According to Tony Ortega, in the 1970s it was easier for Scientology to make scandalous stories disappear. "With limited media outlets to target, Scientology could reasonably expect to control its reputation. Critics could be marginalized or drowned out." With the internet's popularity and mainstreaming, it is more difficult because "the Internet never forgets". Mark Ebner said that the internet was the undoing of Scientology, starting around 1996: "The Internet pulled back the curtain to find Hubbard bare, and caught the Office of Special Affairs with their pants down ... years later, Anonymous came to Cyber Town and strafed Scientology while they weren't looking." Dave Touretzky says the Internet still offers "a much-too-convenient source of truth that members turn to when they have doubts about their church".
alt.religion.scientology Scott Goehring set up the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology in 1991, partly as a joke, partly for the purpose of informing the public about 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 flared up commonly, as they did on some other newsgroups.
The online battle is generally regarded as having begun with the arrival of Dennis Erlich to alt.religion.scientology in late July 1994. A former high-ranking official in the Scientology organization who had been personally affiliated with L. Ron Hubbard, he caused a number of regular participants in the newsgroup to take notice.
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"). Included among these postings was OT III (Operating Thetan Level Three), which gave L. Ron Hubbard's description of the "Xenu story".
The Xenu story had been published in the Robert Kaufman book Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman in 1972, in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, and several times in the 1980s in the Los Angeles Times;The Un-Funny Truth about ARS alt.religion.scientology, 3 September 2010 nevertheless, 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.
The first postings of the OT documents were done through an anonymous remailer, and the identity of the person who made them available on the newsgroup was never discovered. However, Dennis Erlich posted replies to these messages on the newsgroup, and his replies contained the entire text of the original messages (including the disputed materials). Scientology's lawyers therefore approached him, declaring that Erlich had re-published the copyrighted works in his newsgroup messages. Erlich's reply to this was to deny their requests to remove his postings from the newsgroup.
Attempt to remove alt.religion.scientology On January 11, 1995, Scientology 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 resulted in increased public criticism of Scientology by free-speech advocates.
Raids and lawsuits Shortly after the initial legal announcements and rmgroup attempt, representatives of Scientology followed through with a series of lawsuits against various participants on the newsgroup, including Dennis Erlich, in Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc.
The first raid took place on February 13, 1995. 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 against Arnaldo Lerma in Virginia, Lawrence A. Wollersheim and Robert Penny of FACTNet in Colorado, and Dennis Erlich in California. Internationally, raids took place against Karin Spaink in The Netherlands and Zenon Panoussis in Sweden.
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, Tom Klemesrud, and XS4ALL. It also regularly demanded the deletion of material from the Deja News archive.
Participants in alt.religion.scientology began using quotes from OT III in particular to publicize the online battle over the secret documents. The story of Xenu was subsequently quoted in many publications, including news reports on CNN and 60 Minutes.Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, (December 28, 1997) "The Cult Awareness Network". CBS News. It became the most famous reference to the OT levels, to the point where many Internet users who were not intimately familiar with Scientology had heard the story of Xenu, and immediately associated the name with Scientology. 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 defendant Tom Klemesrud and his attorney Richard Horning helped find Dennis Erlich pro bono defense. Daily reports of the latest happenings were posted to alt.religion.scientology.
In the wake of the Scientologists 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 the anonymity of his users and he decided to close down the remailer as a result.
Scientology's online campaign
After failing to remove the newsgroup, Scientologists adopted a strategy of newsgroup spam and intimidation. Scientologists hired third parties to 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 online readers such as Google Groups, although more specialized newsreading software that can filter out all messages by specific "high noise" posters make the newsgroup more usable.
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 heart 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 sporgery articles were injected into the newsgroup by Scientology management and staff; former Scientology staff member Tory Christman has spoken at length about her involvement in these attacks. Lawyers representing the Church of Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers. 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 organising these electronic attacks, though the organization consistently denied any wrongdoing.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, groups associated with Scientology employed 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. After the advent of modern search engines, this problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, so that no more than two results from any one site were shown.