We of the Church believe.… That all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others.

—L. Ron Hubbard, from “The Creed
of the Church of Scientology”

What will happen to the traditional notions of intellectual property and copyright in the face of a technology that can create infinite numbers of copies and spray them freely across the world in seconds? This question has already been raised, and it worries many people, from small-time freelance writers to major publishers and software companies, all of whom make their living by selling the intangible products of the human mind.

You might have thought that when the laws defining the boundaries between free speech and copyright infringements, or fair use and trademark violation, were finally tested in the courts against the existence of cyberspace, it would be by a large software company. Instead, the protagonist was the controversial organization known as the Church of Scientology (CoS).¹ The story is important for two reasons. First, there had never been a case like it, where the boundaries between real life and cyberspace had been stress-tested so fiercely and for so long. Second, it began to define exactly how far intellectual property laws can be made to apply in cyberspace.

Scientology is the brainchild of the pulp science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and grew out of the theories about human psychology that Hubbard first published in the form of a long article in Astounding Science Fiction and then in a best-selling book, Dianetics, originally published in 1950 and still in print. I first heard of it at Cornell in the early 1970s, when Scientology, like many other belief organizations such as TM and est, recruited on college campuses; the science fiction fans from whom I heard about it had quite a skeptical view, as does much of the SF world even now. That fact and the heavy presence of science fiction fandom on the Net was what made it seem obvious, when I first saw alt.religion.scientology on the list of newsgroups in early 1994, that this was not going to be a quiet, orderly place. In fact, alt.religion.scientology is one of the most contentious, roisterous, fiery, and vicious newsgroups ever, and the story of what’s come to be known as Scientology versus the Net is the most extraordinary and bitter of any online hazing experience a newly wired organization has ever had.

We’re also talking about the mass distribution of documents previously kept as closely guarded by the CoS as the inner workings of classified encryption algorithms have been by the National Security Agency (see chapter 5). They are, in fact, the heart of Scientology’s teachings, written by L. Ron Hubbard and reserved for those who have passed through the requisite lower levels and many hours of “auditing,” which from the sounds of it is a sort of confessional therapy session aided by an “E-meter,” a device that is claimed to register emotional and psychological blockages much the way a polygraph detects lies. Hubbard claimed that exposure to these secrets could harm or even kill those who were unprepared. A separate organization, the Religious Technology Center (RTC), was created in May 1982 to guard the intellectual property rights in these documents, along with the many registered Scientology trademarks.² Critics allege that the secrecy has more to do with financial gain; the CoS admits on its home pages that this is also a consideration, but stresses that it’s a minor one.³

The mass media coverage of the case has stressed the distribution of these documents and the CoS’s attempts to get them back, or at least taken out of circulation. What many people don’t realize is that the hostilities between the Net and the CoS go beyond just those documents and started much earlier than the day the first suit was filed. It’s also important to understand that most people on both sides of the dispute believe they are acting in the public good.

The action centers on a single Usenet newsgroup: alt.religion.scientology. It also includes Web sites, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) discussions, and even court cases, but it was in this newsgroup that all the important connections began. By all accounts, alt.religion.scientology was never exactly a quiet newsgroup, or even intended to be so. It was created on July 17, 1991, by Scott Goehring, whose former wife was a Scientologist. Goehring says he started the newsgroup half as a joke and half as a place to discuss the truth about the organization. Many alt groups start with a forged message,4 and this one was no exception: Goehring forged the signature “miscaviage@flag.sea.org” on the “newgroup” message.⁵ The signature is itself a joke: “miscaviage” is a misspelling for CoS leader David Miscavige, and the Flag and Sea “Orgs” (for organizations) are two of the most important Scientology branches.

From the beginning, the group attracted both skeptics and believers. While the two groups never came close to agreement, they managed to coexist in the sort of tense balance the Net seems to specialize in. They argued rabidly about the scientific underpinnings of the E-meter and the medical validity, or lack thereof, of a Scientology treatment for new recruits and drug addicts called the “Purif” (short for “Purification rundown”), which involves large doses of niacin and long sojourns in steam baths, thought by Hubbard to detoxify the body. Between arguments they hammered out a more or less stable agreement to have multiple FAQs to introduce newcomers to both sides of the hot tub. While each side has criticized the other’s writings, there have been no serious attempts to interfere with these FAQs, which persist to this day.

People who frequent alt.religion.scientology generally fall into one of four types. The first two are obvious: critics and CoS supporters. In early 1994, these were a high percentage of the group’s membership, but their relatively reasoned debates have largely been drowned out in the increasingly polarized and contentious years since. Third is the Free Zone, former Scientologists who hate the CoS but love Hubbard’s teachings, known as “the tech” (for technology), and want to continue using them independently. Fourth is the group of net.defenders who started arriving in mid-1994 in response to reports of what was happening on the newsgroup; they represent the Net’s immune response.

In an ordinary newsgroup, this sort of mix works. You can have, for example, Microsoft customers, employees, former staffers, and critics all in one newsgroup without anyone’s getting raided for posting the copyrighted source code to Windows, while others cheer them on (although there is an I-hate-Microsoft spirit in the land). The trouble is that when you mix current and former Scientologists with strident critics, someone is bound to mention that portions of Hubbard’s writings that have been made public by former Scientologists allege that those who leave Scientology or who criticize it may be dubbed “Suppressive Persons” (SPs) and become fair game for all types of harassment.

Sometime around 1992, the newsgroup began attracting posters from the Free Zone. One of the best known, Homer Wilson Smith,6 interviewed in early 1995 by email, said initially he was too scared to post anything himself. He was inspired to start posting by anonymous Usenet articles signed only “Electra,” which went into great detail about “the tech” and contained the kind of productive material he’d been hoping to find. Electra disappeared from the Net by the end of 1992, but shortly afterwards Smith received through the mail two floppy disks full of her articles, from which he went on publishing excerpts. Smith, however, was unhappy about the overall content of alt.religion.scientology and wanted a newsgroup where he and others could seriously discuss the tech. Accordingly, he created a second newsgroup, alt.clearing.technology, where relatively reasoned discussion continues today.⁷

(Occasionally, in older guides to the Internet, you’ll see a note to the effect that alt.clearing.technology is for discussing acne cures. This was another Usenet joke—Chris Schafmeister, a graduate student in molecular biology at the University of California at San Francisco, sent out a newgroup message to this effect. Because there was a mistake in one of the fields, the message failed. Smith’s version, the real one, went through a day or two later, although some system administrators objected that the group’s name was badly chosen and should have conformed better to the existing hierarchy.)

When I first began reading alt.religion.scientology in early 1994, it was the unexpected existence of the Free Zone that most intrigued me, since I had only ever read about two types of Scientologists: dedicated and disaffected. My initial impression that the Net had enabled these people to discover each other’s existence was wrong, however: Smith said he first heard the term in 1982, and the Free Zone publishes print newsletters, holds conventions, and schedules face-to-face meetings much like any other subculture.

Schafmeister was well known on alt.religion.scientology as one of the earliest strident critics on the newsgroup, inspired by posters on the walls of the UC San Francisco medical school. He was, he said, “really, really upset”8 at the way these posters targeted the sick, the sad, and the bereaved to get them into $60 Scientology courses. Accordingly, he took to spending his study breaks arguing against the organization on Usenet.

It was, he said, a Scientologist he’d befriended on the Net who on May 6, 1994, gave him a copy of a letter from a staffer in the CoS’s Office of Special Affairs (OSA) named Elaine Siegel. (According to former insiders, the OSA is the CoS’s security branch.) Appalled by its content, he posted it to alt.religion.scientology the following day.

Addressed to “Scientologists on the Net,” it reads, in part: “If you imagine 40–50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days, we’ll just run the SPs [Suppressive Persons] right off the system. It will be quite simple, actually.” She continued by describing Smith as “a squirrel and declared SP” and closed with, “I would like to hear from you on your ideas to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into.”⁹

A safe space. Few of the non-Scientologists attacking the CoS and its belief systems troubled to ask themselves what it would be like to be a Scientologist in such a milieu. Even granted that in the long run it’s been the critics who have wound up raided or in court, for unsuspecting believers, happening upon the newsgroup thinking it would be a home on the Net must have been a singularly unpleasant experience. Several messages making precisely that point appeared in 1994.

One Scientologist willing to talk about what it was like is Jack Farmer, who started reading the newsgroup sometime in 1993. He describes himself as a “book auditor,” that is, someone who practices Scientology with the help of books but has no standing in the CoS; his Usenet .sig read “Scientologist since 1974.” Farmer also runs a Bulletin Board System (BBS) at home and does some computer consulting on the side. Farmer largely disappeared from the newsgroup by 1996, but in a spring 1995 interview he talked about how he tried to “straighten out some of the miscomprehension in the newsgroup.”¹⁰

It wasn’t easy. “I went in there to answer people’s legitimate questions, and from the time I went in there I was fucking attacked—as soon as I said I was a Scientologist.” He went on, “What gets me—and I’m trying to be objective on this—is I’ve been a Scientologist for about twenty years, and the only thing I’ve seen is people going out and trying to help people and people’s problems. So what is all this hate about?”

Another Scientologist interviewed around the same time who didn’t want to be named—in an example of the way people often think the Net has nothing to do with real life, she uses her real name on the Net, but didn’t want her offline friends and colleagues to find out about her affiliation with Scientology—said her postings on the Net brought her abusive email, for which she wasn’t prepared. “To see all that ill-will is dismaying. It makes you sad. You can’t understand it, because you know what Scientology really is, and then to see all this rabid anti-religious [feeling]—not everybody is like this, but some people are.” She is, as she says, soft-spoken, friendly, and polite by nature, but the postings on the newsgroup brought out a vein of anger she didn’t know she had. The timing of her arrival didn’t help: she showed up in August 1994, about the same time as Dennis Erlich, who was attracted to the newsgroup in part by the Net-wide anger over Siegel’s letter, which was widely copied and distributed.

Unlike postings canceled by the more or less official cancellers, such as the Cancelmoose, these messages were not spam (usually defined as any message posted to more than twenty newsgroups of widely varying character). Further, no one claimed responsibility, whereas the spam cancellers post regular reports of their actions to the net-abuse.* newsgroups and openly take responsibility.11 The Net hates a technology vacuum, so a program called Lazarus was quickly developed to get a look at what was being canceled.

Lazarus was another of Schafmeister’s ideas. It takes advantage of the fact that along with a unique message ID every Usenet posting has a header containing the date, subject, sender’s name and email address, and a mess of other identifying information, and that those headers are recorded in a general header log on Usenet servers, while every Cancel message lands in a special newsgroup called control. Schafmeister’s notion was that at a site where Cancel is disabled (some system administrators abhor even the merest hint of censorship), a program could scan the thousands of Cancels posted to control each day and compare them to the log of headers, looking specifically for the ones pertaining to messages destined for alt.religion.scientology. A match would mean that a message to the newsgroup had been canceled.

Smith took the idea and turned it into a working script in the programming language PERL, which is available to anyone on the Net though it takes some skill to use. Smith said he could have designed Lazarus to reinstate the canceled postings, but because cancellations are sometimes intentional, he decided to configure Lazarus so it just put up a note to the newsgroup saying the message had been canceled and including all the available information about the message, including any comments entered by the cancellers.

“At least we can see when messages have been canceled,” Schafmeister said. He believed the cancellations had “too much intelligence” behind them to have been automatic. Those on the newsgroup took to calling the canceling agent—whatever it was—the “CancelBunny” or “CancelPoodle,” terms intended to disparage the unidentified flying cancelers. In the absence of evidence, when Lazarus began reporting that some messages had been “cancelled because of copyright infringement,” most of the newsgroup felt justified in assuming that the CancelBunny was one or more CoS representatives.

What Lazarus showed, according to frequent poster William C. Barwell, who signs himself “Pope Charles” and is one of the satirical Church of the SubGenius, Praise Bob! crowd,¹² was that “just about everybody got hit.” Barwell’s discovery that two of his postings had been canceled was quickly followed by another: USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 121, “Unlawful access to stored communications.” At the beginning of March 1995, he wrote a letter to the FBI asking it to enforce the code, with copies to his own Internet service provider (ISP), Neosoft, and to Netcom, the service the forgeries were coming from. “Two days later, Netcom FINALLY announced after nearly two weeks that they finally disabled the accounts through which the forgeries were occurring,” Barwell wrote by email a few months later.

Another set of cancellation attempts surfaced not long afterward using the southern California provider Deltanet; the two accounts involved were terminated after only two days. After that, the forging cancellers got more sophisticated: starting in early April 1995, they were anonymized by using public-access newsreaders and falsifying the name of the machine the postings came from.13 The many cancellations that spring that appeared to come from Britain’s Demon Internet, for example, were eventually traced to a public-access news site in Dublin.

No one has ever owned up to the cancellations. When asked about them in April 1995, CoS in-house attorney Helena Kobrin replied in an email 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.”

When the cancellations continued through July and August 1995, a team including representatives from the United States, Canada, and Germany and calling itself the Rabbit Hunters or, more formally, the Ad-Hoc Committee Against Internet Censorship, began some fancy technical detective work. By comparing system logs and monitoring news servers, the group believed it had finally traced the source of the trouble to the account of a Scientologist who had posted prolifically early that spring. Asked to comment on their claims, Kobrin did not reply.

In the meantime, more drastic action was being suggested: on January 12, 1995, Kobrin posted the following message in alt.config:

We have requested that the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup be removed from all sites. The reasons for requesting its removal are: (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.¹⁴

The assembled system administrators’ collective reply, essentially, was, “Forget it.” Even if they had agreed, alt is enough of an anarchy that the newsgroup probably would have survived anyway, as most sites are set up to automatically honor all group creation (“newgroup”) requests but ignore all group deletion (“rmgroup”) requests. The reason is that there is a substantial school of thought that holds that no alt newsgroup should ever be removed, even if it’s clearly past its use-by date, like the jokingly named alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack.15 Many alt groups were not discussed on alt.config; many were also created with forged messages, just as many include company or other names without authorization. This is business as usual, however much it sounds like lawlessness to outsiders.

By email, Kobrin commented, “As the newsgroup involved were [sic] only a very small number out of the total newsgroups, it was considered that it might be preferable to do it that way than to take legal action. This did not turn out to be the case and the matter is a dead issue now.” This was probably the moment when any chance that the Net and the CoS would find some way to reach conciliatory terms was lost.

At the same time, the CoS began heading to the courts. On January 3, 1995, Julf Helsingius, the operator of the best-known anonymous remailer, anon.penet.fi, posted a copy of a letter he had received from Kobrin on behalf of Thomas M. Small, counsel for the RTC and Bridge Publications (publisher of Hubbard’s work), requesting that he block access to alt.religion.scientology and alt.clearing.technology. Copies had also been sent to four other anonymous remailers. The grounds given were that the remailers were being used as conduits for stolen copyrighted materials. On January 9, Helsingius posted a copy of his reply, which said that monitoring postings is impossible and that he didn’t feel blocking the groups was appropriate. Felipe Rodriguez, who runs a similar remailer at the Dutch ISP xs4all, which he owns, says he made a similar reply.

Anonymous remailers get used a lot on alt.religion.scientology. What they do is simple: they strip the headers and identifying information off messages and then forward them to the email box or newsgroup specified by the sender. The services vary in sophistication. The most complex and secure keep no logs, support the use of strong encryption, and bundle messages together to defeat the kind of traffic analysis that might match incoming and outgoing messages and thereby identify posters. Helsingius’s popular service was simpler than this: it could assign you an anonymous ID on the fly, rather than demanding pre-arrangement, and it handled replies. It would, in fact, be more accurate to call his service a pseudonymous remailer, since over time an individual poster could interact on the Net and build up a persona and reputation without revealing a real-world identity.

Erlich’s Usenet feed comes from a small BBS in the Los Angeles area called support.com, which in turn gets its Usenet feed from Netcom, one of the largest U.S. Internet providers. The sysop (system operator) of support.com, Tom Klemesrud, says that in early January 1995 Kobrin requested that he delete Erlich’s Internet account, which he refused to do. In mid-January, Klemesrud followed up by reporting an Outer Limits–type incident in which his apartment was smeared with blood by a young woman he had met in a bar—although it’s unlikely that exactly how and why will ever be adequately proven. Klemesrud believes this attack was meant to frighten him into removing Erlich’s account.

On January 23, a poster signing himself “-AB-” from the address an144108@anon.penet.fi,16 an account on Helsingius’s anonymous remailer in Finland, put up an opposing account, allegedly an interview with the woman in question, that claimed that Klemesrud was the attacker rather than the victim (a claim Klemesrud vehemently denies). On February 2, Helsingius was contacted by an American CoS representative saying that information from a closed, private CoS system had been made public through anon.penet.fi and that the CoS had reported a burglary to the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI. The representative wanted the identity of the individual who had posted that material. Helsingius refused, and he was told a request was on its way to the Finnish police through Interpol. The police arrived on February 8, with a warrant. Helsingius negotiated his way into giving up only the single ID that the CoS wanted instead of his entire database of 200,000.¹⁷ He says that within an hour he was told the information had been passed on to the CoS. Helsingius later confirmed that the ID the CoS wanted was an144108@anon.penet.fi.

In an email message, Kobrin said of the anon.penet.fi raid: “The material that was stolen happened to relate to an investigation being conducted by the Church’s lawyers into false allegations about the Church that had been posted on the Internet by Mr Erlich and Mr Klemesrud. These allegations centered on an incident involving a woman whom Mr Klemesrud had met in a bar, which the investigation proved were completely unfounded.” Asked if further action was being taken against the anon-poster whose ID was handed over, she said, “The matter is under investigation. I cannot comment.” The CoS, when asked who was undertaking the investigation, did not reply.

Also on February 8, the RTC, the CoS arm that holds the copyright for Hubbard’s works, filed a complaint in San Jose, California, against Erlich and his service providers. On February 10, Federal District Judge Ronald M. Whyte issued a temporary restraining order against Erlich, Klemesrud, and Klemesrud’s ISP, Netcom. The complaint said Erlich had been posting CoS materials in violation of copyright and, in the case of the upper-level materials the CoS calls “Advanced Technology,” posting materials that were unpublished and confidential. The CoS has called the latter trade secrets, saying that the issue is one of theft, not of free speech.¹⁸

Erlich maintained that all his postings were merely fair use. “The most effective way I can discredit the cult is to use their own documents to show what they’re about.” Further, he said, “If quoting their internal documents that were legally obtained doesn’t constitute fair use, then nothing does.”19 The CoS disagrees vehemently with this assessment of things. In a 1995 prepared statement about the Erlich suit, Leisa Goodman, media relations director for the Church of Scientology International, wrote, “Numerous attempts had been made by the Church’s lawyers to persuade Erlich to halt his unauthorized, wholesale postings of the Church’s religious scriptures, which went way beyond the concept of ‘fair use’ and constituted violation of copyright law.” Later in the same statement, she wrote, “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to steal. Erlich’s attempts to misdirect and misinform the media are intended solely to divert attention from his own unlawful actions. He has spread polemic and sometimes obscene messages about the Church over the Internet—also a ‘smokescreen’ to divert attention away from his illegal activities.”

Scientologists added that the only way Erlich could have obtained these materials in the first place would have been by signing an agreement that they be kept permanently confidential (in Scientology terms, a billion-year contract). Erlich says that’s not true: “I never signed anything.” This is repeated in his statements to the court, which are available on the Net, as are many other court documents from both sides.²⁰

On February 13, 1995, Erlich’s residence in Glendale, California, was raided. Erlich claimed afterwards that his constitutional rights were violated by the raid, in which he said floppy disks, books, and papers were seized, files were deleted from his hard drive, and his house was comprehensively searched and photographed. Afterward, two of his computers would not boot properly, and he was left with no back-ups from which to restore his system. He was not given an inventory of the materials that were taken.

A flurry of legal documents and court hearings followed. The temporary restraining order against Klemesrud and Netcom was quickly dissolved. The CoS filed a request to have it reinstated, and a motion was then filed to hold Erlich in contempt of court for reposting one of the articles the CoS objected to in the first place. Klemesrud’s and Netcom’s position is that no service provider can police all of its Internet traffic and stay on the air, especially considering the international connections—a U.S. federal judge can have no jurisdiction over what people post in the rest of the world. They would, says Klemesrud, have had to shut down.

“Netcom is the largest provider in the US,” says Klemesrud. “It would have crippled the entire country’s telecomms, and there’d have been a backlash throughout the entire world. The judge didn’t even know that—which was kind of strange, because he’s a federal judge in Silicon Valley” (telephone interview, 1995). He characterizes the raid on Erlich’s house as the kind that’s reserved for someone running off illegal copies of Jurassic Park by the thousands.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation found Erlich pro bono defense attorneys: the high-profile California law firm of Morrison Foerster. An electronic newsletter, Biased Journalism, started up to publish eyewitness reports from all the court hearings.21

Court time is geological eras on the Net. In November 1995, Judge Whyte ruled that Klemesrud could not be found liable for direct infringement. It wasn’t until early August 1996, however, that Netcom, in a move widely criticized on alt.religion.scientology, announced it was settling out of court with the CoS, with both parties constrained from discussing the terms. Netcom simultaneously announced a protocol for handling future intellectual property disputes that involves restricting access to the disputed material pending investigation; the concern on the newsgroup was that this protocol would open the company up to the possibility of constant requests for investigation.

A settlement between Klemesrud and the CoS followed soon after, on August 22, 1996, when attorneys for the RTC agreed to dismiss Klemesrud from the Erlich lawsuit. Klemesrud wasn’t entirely happy—he believed his case had the potential to set the precedent for all service providers and establish the principle that ISPs are not liable for contributory infringement. The settlement was, he said, mandated by his general liability insurance company, which agreed to pay the RTC $50,000. He did not, however, sign any agreement enjoining him from talking about the case, something neither he nor his lawyer would have agreed to.²²

“The insurance company has the right to settle as long as they don’t trample on Klemesrud’s rights,” said Dan Leipold, Klemesrud’s attorney, noting that he had defended about forty lawsuits brought by the Church of Scientology in the previous five years. Leipold added that copyright must be revised for the digital world, but that “it should not be on an ad hoc basis by the courts. It should be revised by Congress” (telephone interview, 1996).

Said Klemesrud, “I would have liked to stay in there and participate in total exoneration.” The settlement means that the question of whether ISPs can be held liable for contributory infringement has still not been tested in court. In early 1997 Erlich’s case was still awaiting trial, although he hoped for a ruling from Judge Whyte that the general public availability of the secret documents invalidated the CoS’s claim that they were trade secrets.

The second wave of raids began on Saturday, August 12, 1995, and were announced to the Net by a widely distributed emergency email message that a raid was in progress at the Arlington, Virginia, home of Arnaldo Lerma, Usenet poster, FACTnet director, and former Scientologist. The raiding party was said to consist of ten people, among them two federal marshals, two computer technicians, one of whom was former FBI agent James Settle,23 and several CoS attorneys. One of the attorneys was Kobrin, by this time well-known to many on alt.religion.scientology for her many email messages demanding that files allegedly containing copyrighted material be deleted. Another was Earle C. Cooley, who is also the chairman of the board of Boston University. They took Lerma’s computer, backups, disks, modem, and scanner. Like many of us, he keeps everything, both business and personal, on his home computer. They promised he’d have them back by Monday, but months later he was still waiting.

Two more raids followed on Wednesday, August 23, 1995. One was on Wollersheim. The other targeted nearby Bob Penny, who because of his advanced muscular dystrophy had been replaced on the board of FACTnet by Lerma at the beginning of July. FACTnet was prepared: it had been expecting a raid since early that spring, and had long ago told Internet users to download as much of its file archives as possible. There are now FACTnet anti-Scientology kits on Web sites all over the world. It would take a lot of international cooperation and a lot of police power to get them all, and even then, some of those countries have not signed the Berne copyright convention.

Like Erlich, Lerma, whose three-hour raid was videotaped by both sides, has been described by the CoS as a “copyright terrorist.” In the familiar pattern, his service provider, Digital Gateway Systems, was included in the suit. He was defended by ACLU attorney David Lane. In Lerma’s case, the bone of contention was a set of August 2, 1995, postings that contained the complete set of court documents from the Los Angeles case Church of Scientology v. Fishman and Geertz. Copies of these documents could be obtained from the court by anyone with $36.50 to spare for the copying fees, but the key to their interest is that portions of the top-secret “Operating Thetan” materials, usually only available to initiated Scientologists, were read into the record. The CoS maintains the materials are still copyrighted, even if they’re in the public record; skeptics say there are no legal precedents to support this. Either way, by now there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of copies of these documents around the world. Shortly after the raids, the judge granted a CoS request to seal the records. Digital Gateway Systems eventually settled out of court on undisclosed terms.

That spring, there were complaints about three users who posted large quantities—ten to twelve per few minutes—of single-paragraph postings in a practice eventually labeled “vertical spam.” One of these users, Andrew Milne, who in an email message described himself as a “Church staff member,” defends this on the grounds of stimulating discussion of specific points, but admits that after those postings, “A lot of complaints were made to Delphi [his service provider] to try to get my account canceled. In fact, it was suspended briefly but the suspension was lifted after I contacted Delphi and explained the situation.”24

Milne, one of the three most prolific posters to alt.religion.scientology, eventually adopted more standard practice, but it didn’t improve his image much—one regular gleefully posted a “killfile count” (sample: 534 of Milne’s messages killed in one week). Milne criticized this: “What the killfilers are showing is that they can’t tolerate a point of view other than their own—the exact allegation they level against the Church.” He has, he says, also received hate email, including the statement “Scientologists should be hunted and shot like dogs.”

Also in late March, Daniel Davidson, a student at San Francisco State University, found himself called on the carpet by his system administrator after Kobrin complained that he had posted copyrighted and confidential information to the Net. Davidson said that all he did was hit a couple of keys to copy a posting from alt.activism into alt.religion.scientology, since it was relevant to the discussion there—behavior which on the Net is generally accepted as normal rather than a copyright violation. By the time the meeting with his system administrator took place, email from Netizens had gotten him out of trouble.²⁵

By that time, too, regular critics had begun reporting strange incidents in which their long-distance phone companies were asked for information about their bills by unauthorized strangers; one said his neighbors had received visits from a private investigator; and another said the local police had come around bearing printouts of alt.religion.scientology postings. One user’s real name and hometown (she used her husband’s account and a consistent pseudonym for posting online) were divulged by Milne in what she considered to be an invasion of privacy, “for no other reason than asking questions of the wrong group.”

And then there was Scamizdat, still jeering and posting anonymously, taking the law into his own hands. A day or so after I let it be known that I’d welcome a quote from this person about his or her activities, an anonymous message landed in my email box. It read: “I am just a netizen fighting a litigious cult in the age of information. While the net has its own perpetual struggles among its orthodoxy and revisionists, it strobes into immobility lawyers and money that darken the battles in the ordinary world. Once a representative portion of the Scientologist cartoon mythology is posted into undeniable digital immortality I will snow crash back into oblivion. SCAMIZDAT.”

It took until March 21, 1996, for the CoS to file that expected lawsuit and obtain a temporary restraining order against Grady Ward. The accusation: that he was Scamizdat.

Ward was quickly followed into the courts by Keith Henson. Henson, whose interests in space colonization and cryonics were chronicled in Ed Regis’s 1992 book Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition,26 welcomed the case, saying by email in 1996, “It will increase my status on the net.” Henson has filed a counterclaim for $500 million in damages.

Ward and Henson pose a new challenge for the CoS. Unlike the shocked former Scientologists raided earlier, these two seem to be enjoying their situation enormously. Acting as their own attorneys, they also seem determined to push the CoS as far as possible into producing witnesses and documentary evidence, even successfully demanding that David Miscavige make himself available to testify (Miscavige was deposed in May 1997). The transcripts of the court hearings, available in full on the Net, reveal a true clash of cultures in which the CoS attorneys have to come to grips with the kind of Net humor that posts directions to copies of the secret documents which, when decoded, lead only to the searcher’s own computer’s directory. It doesn’t seem to be easy for them.

These suits must be the first ever to have been reported in such intimate detail on the Net. Every affidavit, every court judgment, and full transcripts of every hearing are all available in one or another archive. If the suits were intended to deter other posters, surely the detail in which they are reported should suffice. But they have not chilled the newsgroup.

Nor has the worst vertical spam in the history of the Net. From the end of May to the end of July 1996 an estimated 20,000 messages consisting of brief quotations from Scientology promotional materials were posted to alt.religion.scientology. Posters, who had to pick their way through acres of the stuff in order to continue considering the ramifications of the Netcom settlement, arguing about Scientology practices, and, of course, flaming each other, were initially as stunned as you might be if you got up one morning to find out that your street had been buried under trainloads of eggplant. Many were convinced that the barrage, eventually dubbed ARSBOMB, would kill the newsgroup entirely.27

After a few weeks of panic reactions, a couple of schemes were proposed for by-passing the problem. One is very clever if you don’t mind making fun of other people’s alien gods. Knowing that Scientologists are not supposed to say the name of Xenu, the alien being Hubbard is said to have named supreme, one poster proposed using it in message subjects to identify non-spam articles so they could be filtered into a sub-newsgroup accepting only those postings. This rather arcane-sounding proposal was adopted and did pretty much work, although it was never more than a stop-gap, as newcomers wishing to participate wouldn’t catch on right away.

Over time, the same beings who cancel other types of spam were able to remove most of the worst of it, and it became routine to see messages on news.admin.net-abuse.misc detailing huge lists of what material had been removed and by whom.

At the same time, new waves of defiance have seen the secret documents posted in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and on IRC. In a message to alt.religion.scientology in early December 1996, a Norwegian poster listed the first month of a program he called “Operation Clambake.”²⁸ One of the more interesting items on the list was a “Random NOTS locator,” which would find you a copy of the documents wherever they happen to be posted that day.²⁹ (In another context, this could be highly useful technology.) In the Netherlands, well-known Dutch writer Karin Spaink and her ISP, xs4all, won in court.³⁰

From the CoS point of view, the Swedish case may be the most alarming. When Zenon Panoussis posted the papers to his home pages on the Web, he got the standard response: a request to take them down. Instead, he turned a copy of the papers over to the Swedish Parliament, thereby making them a public document under laws written into the Swedish constitution. The Parliament is accordingly required to show a copy of the documents, for a modest copying fee, to anyone who wants to see them. Although some of the papers were eventually stolen from the Parliament buildings, and Panoussis himself in early January 1997 was awaiting a visit from the bailiffs to seize the documents from his house, Panoussis had given copies to several other institutions to which the same law applies. What once would have been spirited abroad in someone’s luggage could now be sent to sanctuary in a matter of seconds.

One scenario sounded so paranoid when it was first proposed on the newsgroup in 1995 by a poster calling himself only “Capricorn” that I dismissed it out of hand. This was that the CoS would eventually try to build a conspiracy case against the Internet and take action under the RICO statutes. At the end of 1996, however, a day before the final hearing on the CoS’s demand for attorney fees in the Lerma case, Scientology representatives filed an affidavit from an Internet user identified as Peter Mante, alleging a conspiracy among Internet users to violate Scientology’s copyrights. Mante, apparently using the nickname “newkid,” declared that he had participated in discussions over IRC in which some of the newsgroup’s best-known regulars (a few of whom have denied the allegations) had stressed the importance of continuing to post the secret documents all over the world.31

The Irish film censors who banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian only to see it turn into an underground video hit could have warned the CoS that controversy brings popularity. Throughout 1995 the traffic on alt.religion.scientology increased, from an average 2,500 postings a week in March to 2,700 articles a day by August, according to the “Arbitron” ratings posted to news.admin.misc by DEC research scientist and Usenet expert Brian Reid throughout 1995. The raids only boosted interest, summed up by one newcomer as the sort of instinct that makes you go take a look at a 200-car pile-up. By April 2, two months after the first raids, alt.religion.scientology had moved into the top 40 in the categories of megabytes (no. 40), traffic (no. 8), and per number of readers (no. 18). Some of the fallout landed in alt.journalism, news.admin.misc, comp.org.eff.talk, alt.current-events.net-abuse, and even, with the Scamizdat postings, the hacker newsgroup alt.2600—which wasn’t too thrilled at the incomers, even though the group had to admit there’s something like hacking involved in anonymously posting secret scriptures.

As for alt.religion.scientology, I think what has happened is WONDERFUL on many fronts, not all of which are obviously good. Compared to what alt.religion.scientology used to be like two years ago, this is marvelous. The whole world knows about Scientology now, and those that are able to see the good will find out about it (and probably become Free Zoners!) and those that are mad at the bad have something big enough for them to chew the bone with. The Church is a formidable opponent and there are lots of people look just for such a game. (Email interview, 1995)