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© IDG Communications Nederland
"This article has not been translated by or on behalf of IDG Communicatio= ns The Netherlands. Therefore, IDG Communications The Netherlands accepts= no liability for the content of any translation of the Dutch article."
Recently, XS4All received a letter from Scientology with the message:
'Sending documents through the remailer has to stop, or we will take
legal action'
"SX4All has become, just like other Internet users and providers,
victim of Scientology actions"
Jack has a request: would I prove that I'm a reporter.
He has become nervous by the latest news in alt.religion.scientology
instead of sending a 'reply' the Scientologist
has rekeyed my questions and mutilated them
'Never defend, Always attack'
There is almost a Holy War between the Internet community and
the Scientology Church. Authors rights and anonymous remailers are the chips
in this game, which does not limit itself to online bickering
about mysterious 'Fishman-documents'. Outside the net house searches,
court cases, intimidation and private detectives play a role.
A shocking story about the way Scientology silents its critics.
Or as an employee of Internet provider XS4All puts it:
"Before you know it they hit you with a court case. Scientology is
a dangerous organisation".
What is is about
This story starts in August, when I receive the minutes of the founding meeting
of NLIP, an organisation of Dutch Internet providers.
In it, as an aside there is mention of a possible lawsuit of Scientology
against XS4All, because the latter has an anonymous remailer through which
documents of 'the church' are distributed.
Before I call XS4All, I go onto the WWW, and key 'scientology' into
the Webcrawler
(location:http://www.webcrawler.com).
Within a few seconds, an impressive list of hyperlinks appears. I turn onto
the net and find in a short time a wealth of information, mainly
anti-scientology.
I read about Scientology, criminal practices, child pornography,
lawsuits, private detectives and murder and suicide. It is too much
and too complicated. I am looking for a list of FAQs.
The alt.religion.scientology Frequently Asked Questions I find on
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/scientology-faq/faq.html.
It is an FAQ full of criticism of Scientology, with the message:
Scientology has never delivered proof of its teachings.
The FAQ is rather superficial (according to Scientology, a 'collection
of untruths') but makes clear that something is rumbling on the net.
Back at Webcrawler I glide the mouse arrow over the hypertext links
and look at the URLs. I discover a Dutch homepage at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~fonss/.
Click, and I'm on a page of FACTNet. FACTNet
(Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network Inc.),
led by two ex-Scientologists, is a non-profit electronic library
with public information about 'dangerous sects such as Jonestown, Branch
Davidians (Waco) and Scientology'.
And Scientology doesn't like that, it appears from information
on and after the FACTNet page and on the homepage The Church of Scientology
against the Net at
http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html.
Earlier this year, Scientology has threatened several times with a lawsuit
if FACTNet refuses to remove all information about Scientology.
According go FACTNet the pressure of Scientology is increasing, and the
organisation names a series of examples of the financial battle to
exhaustion that Scientology has started.
FACTNet doesn't think it can keep up the battle, and calls as many people
as possible to download the information to prevent an 'electronic book burning'.
All text files have been since the end of May in .ZIP format on an ftp
site (ftp://ftp.rmii.com/pub2/factnet/),
and since april an unknown has put a 'FACTNet Scientology WWW-kit' on the net,
which everyone can install on a homepage.
The kit can be downloaded on http://www.xs4all.nl/~fonss/factkit.zip.
On #clambake there is conversation, and soon I'm addressed.
Carefully, because there is tension, and it looks as if no one trusts
another.
After half an hour of short exchanges with Jack
(he doesn't want his real name in this story, do I start to get
clear information. Jack is interested in the freedom of speech,
and read something in a newsgroup about forged cancel messages in
alt.religion.scientology, a way of removing someone's articles from
a newsgroup. In other words: censorship. More about this later.
After having participated in alt.religion.scientology for a while, Jack writes,
he received email from scientology lawyer Helena K. Kobrin.
Jack sends me the electronic letter, and I read that Kobrin asserts that
Jack put Scientology documents on the net. Kobrin demands that he
remove them immediately (including from his hard drive and floppies)
and report by email that he has honoured her request.
If not, legal steps will be taken.
Interesting aspect of the Fishman-document is that it is not a Scientology
document, but a public domain court document that contains Scientology
texts.
The complete piece (case CV-91-6426 HLH (Tx)) can be obtained at less
than fourty dollars from the
Federal Courthouse, Central District of California.
This is how: Steven Fishman, ex-Scientologist,
talks to Time Magazine in 1991 about fraudulent activities that
he engaged in, ordered to by Scientology.
This I read in a press statement by Fishman on
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman.
Fishman's statements result in an article with heading 'The lucrative
worshop of greed and power'. Subtitle: 'ruined lives, lost fortunes, federal
crimes'.
At http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/media/quill-11.91
I read that the reporter has been repeatedly harassed after the publication,
and was watched by lawyers and six private detectives.
Finally, Scientology started slamming Time with daily ads in USA Today --
an action that is to have costed 3 million dollars.
Fishman explains in a statement to the press that he got in
psycological trouble, and was ordered by Scientology to kill
his psychiatrist.
(Scientology and psychology are as water and fire.)
Later, he would be ordered to commit suicide.
Fishman attributes his psycological problems to 'mind control' techniques
of Scientology.
To prove this, he hands over to the court the OT-levels, and these are
entered in the archives.
This archived material is freely available, but Scientologists want
to prevent this. The court clerk related in the Washington Post
of 19 August that a group of people, for over a year, has requested
this document every day the court opens and kept it the whole day long.
A Scientology official admits this in the paper.
When Fishman is set free later, a civil trial follows.
Together with FACT, Fishman defends himself.
Celebrities, who Scientology uses to bolster their name, are called
as witnesses.
Subpoenas are served to, among others, Lisa Marie Presley
(daughter of Elvis, wife of Michael Jackson), and John Travolta.
Subsequently, Scientology abandons the trial.
Author and Scientology adherent Tom Cruise was able to avoid
being subpoenaed by hiding in the toilet.
(sidebar: Celebrities).Internet-community: Scientology Church silences opponents with searches,
law suits, intimidation and private detectives
author:Jeroen Pietersma
Talk to my lawyer
The Fishman-document
Murder plans
Scamizdat = swindle
It is almost science fiction
Search warrant
Raid
Sorry Folks, party's over
No policing
Ruin him completely
alt.religion.scientology
Fishman freely available via FTP
Journalism
L. Ron Hubbard
Celebrities
The Church
To 'clear' someone for 20,000 dollar
Scientology in the Netherlands
What is it about
In the usenet group alt.religion.scientolgy, the internet community
has acted against several aspects of what they call 'Scientos'.
But doing this they also post Scientology texts. These text,
which are copyrighted, constitute a large part of the source of income
of Scientology.
A number of these texts, known as Operating Thetan levels (OT levels, a series
of courses that members can follow after paying a lot of money),
has become public through ex-Scientology member, and can easily be found
on the Internet. The texts are distributed through anonymous remailers,
for fear of repraisal. An anonymous remailer is a computer that strips
email of name and address. In place of this comes a number, for which the
remailer can substitute the correct address if someone wants to send
a message to an anonymous mailer.Talk to my lawyer
I want to contact people who criticise Scientology.
It takes too long to contact participants of the newsgroup and to wait
for an answer. I start an Internet Relay Chat program, and type the
command '/join #scientology'. Bingo; it's a channel, there are people,
but no word is spoken. The command '/whois' combined with the names of
channel mates shows me that they are all on the IRC channel #clambake.Fishman document
After searching for the email address of Kobring in the
Four11 White Page Directory
(location: http://www.Four11.com/),
I mail her a list of questions.
Jack by then has taught me that the Scientology documents that it's all about
(the so-called Fishman-document) not only regularly appears
in the newsgroup, but can also be downloaded on several FTP-sites.
Scientology wants to tackle these sites too, but the Internet community
has found a way around that: someone has put a copy of the Fishman-document
on a server in Beijing.
Jack: "Let Kobrin try to convince the Chinese to remove that document"Murder plans
Back to Fishman. He is sentenced for his crimes and goes to jail.
According to his press statement, prison guards prevent that he is murdered.
In the locker of fellow prisoner Luis Martinez they find a knife
and Scientology documents. Martinez is a Scientologist from Miami.
He was lined up for extradition to Cuba, and Scientology was to assist
him legally if he would kill Fishman.Scamzidat = swindle
Jack has a request: would I prove that I'm a reporter.
He has become nervous by the latest news in alt.religion.scientology:
someone has used a false name to request the registration of
phone calls of one Grady Ward from his phone company Pacific Bell.
It is feared that Scientologists will now bother him and his family.
An email from head editor Oscar Kneppers puts Jack at ease. From that time, he and I exchange several email messages per day. Jack spends a lot of his time on the matter of Scientology and the net. He reports that more and more people are sending the Fishman document Jack sends me statistical data on alt.religion.scientology. In early August, 83,5 procent of all bytes in the group consisted of Scientology documents. Without too much trouble I find and download a large file; SCAMIZ9.ZIP. Unpacked, this turns out to be called Scamizdat, and to be full of Scientology texts. Scamizdat is a contraction of 'scam' and 'samizdat'. Scam is slang for swindle, and refers to the millions that Scientology is making. Samizdat was a practice in the former Soviet Union: privately printing and dristributing literature that had been prohibited by the Soviet regime. From an ftp-stie I download the Fishman document, and find a joke from the net community, which is not only concerned about Scientology, but can also see the humour of it all. The joke is a cartoon in GIF-format; a photo of Kobrin on which a piece of text about communicating with plants has been stuck. The text is from the OT-levels. It reminds me remind Kobrin of my questions, because several days later I have not received an answer from her.
"This is a matter of principle to us", says the employee, "remailers have to have a chance, you cannot just shoot them down. Many people can only communicate anonymously. For instance, people who are HIV positive often cannot speak under their own name because of their job." "It will probably come to a court case, but we are not worried. The harder they threaten us, the more belligerent the Internet-users are getting. The public discussion about censorship on the Internet by Scientology will be very interesting. XS4All, just like other Internet-users and providers, has become victim of the practices of Scientology.."
In a statement to the press, (http://www.sky.net/~sloth/sci/sci_index.html) Julf questions the research, because the remailer does not allow big files, hence photos. Julf and the Internet community did their own investigation, and discovered that Wiklund's research was sloppy, and that the only photo in his report was rather innocent, with children in a nudist camp. Further investigation of Julf and fans even showed that the photos were not sent through Finland, but from Great Brittain, and that the origin had been forged. At that point the internet community was starting to wonder: what were the motives of the Swedish researcher. The community quickly suspected that sending the photos and the publicity around it were a trick by Scientology, to make the remailer look bad.
Helena Kobrin states, two days later, in the New York Times: "If these documents have left the church, it is because they are stolen." Lerma stays calm in the New York Times: "This is the big secret at the end of the rainbow, and you can get it from the court at 50 cents per page.
Besides, Arnie Lerma was already visit in november 1994 by Eugene Ingram, a private detective for Scientology, as Ron Newman tells us on his WWW-pagina's 'The Church of Scientology vs. the Net'. Also Grady Ward (whose phone records had been taken) was visited by Ingram. Not long after, Ingram visited Ward's mother. She identified him from a photo and the Tacocom Police department made a case out of it. Florida seems to have an arrest warrent for Ingram, because he had been impersonating a police officer. Ingram was removed from the Los Angeles Police Department, because he tipped off drug dealers about raids, and because he had sideline as a pimp. Pictures of and information about Ingram and other Scientology-detectives are on http://www.primenet.com/~lippart/pis.html.
Around that time I received answers from Helena K. Kobrin.
The lawyer, who was supposed to be so busy, has chosen for a strange
way of responding by email:
instead of sending a 'reply' (so that the questions from my mail
would automatically -- hence fast -- be quoted in her letter)
she has rekeyed the questions and mutilated them.
Terms like free flow of information and freedom of expression have been
scrapped. And Kobrin writes immediately that I can not publish anything from
the public Fishman document: "If you publish this material,
my client will find it necessary to take appropriate legal action against
you and your publisher to protect his rights."
In her letter Kobrin bandies the names of Netcom and Ehrlich and Fishman
She calls Steven Fishman a 'heavy criminal' and a 'notorious liar who
invents all sorts of accusations against the church'.
When Jack reads the remarks of Kobrin, he dismisses them as 'dead agenting'.
He refers me to the semi-official Scientology WWW-pages of the head of
Public Relations, Leisa Goodman (http://www.theta.com/goodman/).
On Goodman's web pages Kobrin has written a commentary on computer crime. Which is ironic, as Kobrin herself is guilty of computer crime. She sent a so-called remove-group messsage. This is a specially formatted instruction to remove a whole newsgroup. This failed, because Usenet-administrators quickly sent a command to recreate the group. Kobrin denies nor confirms this story in the replies she sent to me, and only writes that she sent a request to the usenet system administrators. She closes her reply with "My request is no longer relevant, but the matter of copyright is."
Jack refers me to a letter that Kobring sent, earlier this year, to Internet World magazine, because the magazine had asked her for a statement about the rm message. After a lot of idle talk about copyright, Kobrin implicitly admist in that letter: "We do not intend to persue the 'remove group' message if it is not a fitting method".
The XS4All employee states: "Erasing a message that is not yours, is an illegal act. The copyright of messages on the Internet lies with the user. Only the user has the right to remove his message, before this happens automatically by the cancel-period on a news host".
Helena Kobrin states in the New York Times of 14 August about the Internet: "There are people who think that the Internet has created a new medium where all rules will disappear, and that is not true. Things go faster on the Internet, and we will keep up with them".
Just before the deadline I hear that the administrator of the anonymous remailer on XS4All, have moved the remailer. It is unclear whether legal steps against XS4All will follow. Btw, anyone can start up a remailer. And get in trouble if through this remailer Scientology-documents are posted.
In May 1950, Hubbard published his best known text 'Dianetics: an introduction to a new science' in a science-fiction magazine. The whole print run sold out immediately. Hubbard is said to have claimed in those days: "If you want to be a millionair, you have to start your own religion". The book 'Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health' published shortly after, quickly reached sales of 150,000 copies, and is still sold by Scientology. After the publication of Dianetics, Hubbard-led institutes open, and dianetics appears to be a golden opportunity. Hubbard mostly gets the attention of young people, and soon they are camping in his yard.
Jack, too, has information about the stars. In an MTV-show (new Religions: The Cult Question, first broadcast in June 1995) that talked about Scientology, Tom Cruise, Kristie Alley, Julliette Lewis and John Travolta appeared on tv, singing songs of praise. John Travolta is to have stated: 'I think this is the most important movement on the planet'.
According to the anonymous expert, Scientology is basically the following: it's a mixture of religion, science fiction and mind-control. In his book Dianetics, Hubbard uses the term 'auditing'. Auditing (listening to) is a modern variant of old-fashioned Christian confession: make people pronounce their problems, secrets, fears, and uncertainties, and make them dependent on you.
Scientology keeps its texts secret through copyright. Strange for a church, which usually are all too eager to spread the faith. According to Leisa Goodman this is to 'keep the religious techniques orthodox'.
About the faith, the expert reports that at auditings the so-called E-meter is used, a lie detector developed by Hubbard himself.
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