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Computer Undergroud Digest Vol. 07 Issue 40
Computer underground Digest Sun May 21, 1995 Volume 7 : Issue 40
ISSN 1004-042X
Editors: Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer (TK0JUT2@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Goddess of Judyism Editor: J. Tenuta
CONTENTS, #7.40 (Sun, May 21, 1995)
File 1--Church of Scientology and the Nets
File 2--Church of Scientology v. the Net (background)
File 3--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 19 Apr, 1995)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION APPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 May 95 22:51:53 PDT
From: hkhenson@CUP.PORTAL.COM
Subject: File 1--Church of Scientology and the Nets
Short report on alt.religion.scientology by Keith Henson
I am not going to try to give much more than pointers to a frey which
is running to hundreds of postings a day for months now. The "Church"
of Scientology is the main topic of discussion in a group called
alt.religion.scientology. The "Church" has taken a dim view of these
discussions and has reacted by 1) attempting to rmgroup the whole
thing, 2) cancelling posting, harrassing posters--even going to the
extent of exposing real identities, 3) breaking the anonymous server
in Finland, and many other anti-social acts (by net standards). As
a result, someone or ones has posted a mess of Scientology policy
papers (which read like a mafia policy manual) and a lot of their
closely held secrets (which read like SF Hubbard failed to sell in
the '50s). You really have to be there to get the flavor, but be
sure to bring your kill file.
(See File #2 below for further information)
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 02:11:39 -0500
From: jthomas@SUN.SOCI.NIU.EDU(Jim Thomas)
Subject: File 2--Church of Scientology v. the Net (background)
((MODERATORS' NOTE: The Church of Scientology has generated
considerable heat in a number of Usenet groups, including
comp.org.eff.talk, by engaging in actions that many observers consider
an attack on, among other things, free speech. Ron Newman's summary
below is just part of the extensive archives on the issue that can be
found on his homepage at:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/rnewman/scientology/home.html))
=============
THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY VS. THE NET
This page created by Ron Newman. The opinions expressed here are
solely those of the author, and are not necessarily shared by MIT.
Last revised May 15, 1995.
Quick index
* Grady Ward's 74-year-old mother visited by an inquisitive stranger
* Grady Ward's publisher gets a slanderous phone call from Eugene
Ingram
* Support the Dennis Erlich Defense Fund
* New section: FACTnet needs your help, last changed May 11
* Latest developments in Erlich case, last changed May 6
* Raid on Dennis Erlich; suit against Erlich, BBS, Netcom
* Legal (and extra-legal) threats against netizens, last changed May
15
* Attempt to remove alt.religion.scientology newsgroup
* Attempt to censor alt.religion.scientology newsgroup with
unauthorized cancel messages
* Attempt to intimidate anonymous remailer operators
* Raid on anon.penet.fi
* Harassment of writers and journalists
* Legal papers in Erlich case (now at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation)
* Newspaper & magazine articles
* Other sources of information
* FTP-like directory & file listing
The Church of Scientology is a religious cult which has unwisely
decided to declare war against the Usenet and Internet communities.
Since December of 1994, this Church and its followers have committed
the following acts:
Tried to censor a Usenet discussion group
Members or allies of the Church have tried to remove messages written
by other people in the Usenet discussion group
alt.religion.scientology. They did this by sending unauthorized
cancel messages, which are specially-formatted messages instructing
Usenet servers to delete a previously posted message. Here's an
example of such a cancel message, and here's another. Some of these
cancels were accompanied by text claiming that the original message
contained violations of the Church's copyrights and trade secrets. But
copyright disputes should be settled in a court of law, not by
faceless vigilantes issuing cancel messages.
The first such cancels started around Christmas of 1994, and were sent
by harryj@netcom.com (Harry Jones), who did not understand his
news-posting software well enough to conceal his true identity. He
eventually got smarter, and later cancels came from the non-existent
account robocanceller@netcom.com. The cancels quickly attracted the
attention of Time magazine's Netwatch column, which mentioned them in
the January 16, 1995 issue. After weeks of complaints, Netcom's system
administrators finally installed software that forced anyone sending a
cancel to reveal their true identity (or, at least, their Netcom user
ID). Subsequent cancels then came from: mako@netcom.com (Michael
Clark), student@netcom.com (John Palmer), and bettyj@netcom.com
(Elizabeth Jones). Netcom soon disabled logins from all of these
accounts.
Soon afterwards, two more cancels originated from the site
deltanet.com, and claimed to come from the address noman@odesi.com.
Don't try to send e-mail there; it's a non-existent site. But the good
news is that, on March 6, the good folks at deltanet.com found and
terminated the accounts of two users who issued forged cancels from
their site. Here's a report from deltanet's system administrator..
I thought we'd seen the last of the Cancelbunny, but it came back once
again on March 30, this time from the UK. Here's a fairly recent
cancel, dated April 7. The system administrator of demon.co.uk has
informed me that the cancel appeared to originate at another UK site,
pipex.net. That site, in turn, apparently received it from a site in
Ireland, possibly an open-access NNTP port. The search continues...
If you are familiar with certain American television commercials,
you'll understand why I dubbed this the "Cancelbunny": it just keeps
going, and going, and going...
Tried to shut down a Usenet discussion group
On January 11, 1995, a lawyer for the Church, Helena Kobrin
<hkk@netcom.com>, sent a rmgroup message, which is an instruction
to Usenet servers to delete the entire discussion group
alt.religion.scientology. This message claimed that the group's very
name infringed on the Church's trademark, and again complained that
members of the group were posting infingements of the Church's
copyrights. The "rmgroup" had little effect, because most Usenet
system administrators regard such messages as purely advisory, and
several quickly sent newgroup messages to re-create the group on any
server that had removed it.
Internet World magazine asked Helena Kobrin for an explanation, and
got a long letter back from her. I wasn't terribly impressed, and sent
her a reply. The magazine's article appeared in the April 1995 issue.
A shorter article (by net.personality Joel Furr) appeared in the April
1995 issue of the UK magazine Internet and Comms Today. Also check out
the article in the April 1995 issue of the UK's .net magazine.
Threatened the operators of anonymous remailing services
On January 4, 1995, Church attorney Thomas Small sent this e-mail to
the operators of several anonymous remailing services, demanding that
they disallow anonymous posting to alt.religion.scientology.
In response to both the rmgroup and this letter, Jon Noring
<noring@netcom.com> circulated a Net Petition asking that the
Church cease its attacks on the Net. At the same time, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation issued a statement urging the Church to stop
threatening Internet system administrators with litigation. Daniel
Akst wrote a "Postcard from Cyberspace" column in the January 25 Los
Angeles Times, and Richard Leiby wrote a "CyberSurfing" column in the
February 2 Washington Post.
Update, April 4, 1995: Helena's at it again! This time she's made
three threatening phone calls to remailer operator Homer Smith.
Compromised the security of anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer in Finland
In early February, 1995, Church representatives somehow used Interpol
and the Finnish police to demand the True Name of a user of
anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer in Finland. Julf Helsingius,
the administrator of anon.penet.fi, announced this in a Usenet message
to many newsgroups on February 18, 1995. He followed this with a press
release on February 21. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat
covered the story on February 18; this was soon followed by the
Associated Press, Time magazine, and another "Postcard from
Cyberspace" column from Dan Akst in the February 22 Los Angeles
Times.
Sued a user, his BBS, and his Internet service provider
Invaded the user's home, seizing and deleting files
On February 8, 1995, two Church corporations filed a lawsuit and a
request for a restraining order against Dennis Erlich of Glendale,
California, alleging that he was posting the Church's "copyrighted
trade secrets". They also sued the bulletin board he was using,
support.com, and the bulletin board's Internet service provider,
Netcom. Two days later, they received a temporary restraining order
against the three defendants, as well as a writ of seizure allowing
them to search Erlich's home and seize computer files.
Erlich did not know about any of this until 7:30 in the morning of
Monday, February 13, when Church attorney Thomas Small and seven other
people demanded entry to his home. According to Erlich, they spent
over six hours copying and deleting files from his computer system. A
Glendale police officer was present at the beginning and end of the
raid, but not at any other time.
Dennis posted a first-person account of the raid to Usenet that night.
The following day, both the Glendale News-Press and the Los Angeles
Times reported on the raid. Church lawyer Helena Kobrin (remember
her?) posted her version of the story to Usenet as well. (This link
also includes two responses from David Sternlight and Jon Noring.) In
addition, the Glendale News-Press published an editorial supporting
free expression on the Internet on February 21, which drew a reply
from a Church spokeswoman in the same newspaper three days later.
Toronto's ultra-net-savvy weekly newspaper eye published a good
article in their February 23 issue.
A court hearing was held on Tuesday, Febrauary 21 in San Jose Federal
District Court. Dennis made a statement to the court. Tom Klemesrud,
the owner and operator of support.com, also made a statement. Netcom's
vice-president of software engineering, Rich Francis, filed a
statement as well, as did Netcom's lawyers. At this hearing, the
judge lifted the restraining orders against support.com and Netcom,
and modified the restraining order against Dennis.
I won't go into the details of the hearing on this page; instead, read
the official court transcript, or the first-person accounts by Shelley
Thomson, Alan Hacker, and Carl Kaun, as well as the February 22
newspaper articles in the Glendale News-Press, Los Angeles Times, and
San Jose Mercury News. The Church also issued a post-hearing press
release.
After the hearing, the Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a
February 23 edition of its newsletter EFFector Online, containing a
substantial addition to its original statement about the Church's
threats to the Net.
On February 27, Helena Kobrin wrote a letter to Judge Whyte claiming
that Dennis Erlich had violated the amended restraining order the
previous day. Erlich sent an apology to the Judge that same day,
explaining that he had not yet received the amended restraining order
before allegedly violating it. (Apparently it was delivered to the
wrong address.) That was not good enough for the Church lawyers, who
promptly filed two more motions, one seeking a contempt-of-court
citation against Erlich, the other requesting an injunction against
Netcom and support.com.
In support of this request, the Church submitted declarations by
church lawyers Helena Kobrin and Andrew Wilson, an unidentified person
named Lynn Farny, and three computer specialists: Internet service
provider David Elrod, digital image processing expert Kenneth
Castleman, and UCLA computer science professor Alfonso Cardenas. The
Church also filed an amended complaint with the court on March 3rd.
The San Francisco Chronicle belatedly covered the story on March 2nd,
as did the Philadelphia Inquirer on April 1st. The Glendale News-Press
published yet another article on March 3rd, and the UK weekly trade
magazine Computing published a brief article in the March 9th edition.
Meanwhile, the Net's own Shelley Thomson devoted the second issue of
her new net-'zine, Biased Journalism, to the Erlich case.
Dennis Erlich now has legal representation, from the San Francisco law
firm of Morrison and Foerester ("MoFo"). Because of their good work,
Judge Whyte cancelled a March 17 hearing which was to hear a motion to
hold Dennis in contempt of court. Instead, the judge issued an order
delaying all pending hearings until further notice. (Dennis reported
this news to Usenet in two messages on March 15 and March 16.)
The two sides last met in court at a "Case Management Meeting" on
April 7, where they agreed to schedule a "Mega-hearing" on June 23.
This hearing will consider Helena's motion to hold Dennis in contempt,
Helena's motion for an injunction against all three defendants, and
Tom and Netcom's motion to dismiss them from the case. The trial (by
jury) date is set for early 1996.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has established the Dennis Erlich
Defense Fund for people who want to help Dennis cover the "hard
costs" of his legal defense. Follow this link for more information.
Dennis's ex-wife Rosa continues to harass him with claims that he owes
$40,000 in child-support payments. Dennis claims that he's been denied
the right to visit the child. Here's a link to Dennis's latest
postings on this subject.
Dennis suspects that the Scientologists may have "bought" Dennis's
alleged debt from Rosa in order to collect it. A member of the
Church's Office of Special Affairs, Andrew Milne, posted a message
claiming that a Scientologist named Robert Lippman "has obtained a
restraining order against Dennis Erlich over Erlich's threat to kill
him at the 1992 Cult Awareness Network conference." Erlich says he's
never been served with any such order and has never met or heard of
Lippman. Follow this link for an index of all legal papers that the
Electronic Frontier Foundation has received electronic copies of.
Legal (and extra-legal) threats against netizens
The Church of Scientology's lovely lawyer, Helena Kobrin, has sent
intimidating electronic mail to a number of netizens, including Martin
Hunt, Nico Garcia, Grady Ward, and Daniel Davidson. Grady wrote a
strongly-worded reply to Helena's bullying letter.
Daniel Davidson is a student at San Francisco State University in
California. Because of Helena's complaint, SFSU's director of
computing services, John True, filed a disciplinary charge against
Davidson. Davidson was required to appear at a disciplinary hearing on
Friday, March 31. He explained his predicament in a series of Usenet
messages. Fortunately, Davidson was exonerated of all charges. This
was partly due to the good work of Netizens throughout the world, who
sent numerous e-mails and faxes to San Francisco State University
officials explaining why Helena's groundless complaint should not be a
cause for punitive action by the University. One of the best such
letters was sent by Bruce Tober, a reporter for the UK magazine
Internet and Comms Today.
Bob "Sloth" Bingham received an ominous e-mail note from a known
Scientologist, informing him that his Web page had been "reported" to
the Church's Office of Special Affairs (intelligence unit).
Not all the harassment has come from lawyers. The Church's private
investigator, Eugene Ingram, visited Jeff Jacobsen, and also dropped
in on Jeff's sister and his neighbor's 13-year-old son. Private
investigators again lurked near Jeff's house on May 1st. Someone
called the long distance phone companies of both Jeff Jacobsen and
Homer Smith, impersonating each of them to try to obtain logs of
their long-distance calls. A policeman visited Martin Hunt, asking
about messages he allegedly posted to alt.religion.scientology.
In Oklahoma, TarlaStar got a phone call from someone falsely claiming
to represent her Internet Service Provider. A few days later, two
Church of Scientology representatives posted her real first and last
name, her address, her phone number, and her husband's name to
alt.religion.scientology.
On April 15, two Scientologists paid Grady Ward an unannounced
personal visit. This link contains both Grady's story and a
counter-story from Scientologist "Chris Miller", who seems to have
some kind of inside connection with Scientology's Office of Special
Affairs.
On May 8, Grady's publisher received a threatening and slanderous
phone call from a man identifying himself as Gene Ingram, who is a
private investigator for the Church of Scientology. On May 10, a very
inquisitive stranger visited Grady's 74-year-old mother in Oregon.
Last November, Arnie Lerma received both an unnnounced visit and a
threatening anonymous fax.
Gary Reibert, who had only posted two messages to
alt.religion.scientology, experienced a variety of disturbing events:
his car was tailed, someone phoned him to do a survey in which "not
participating is not an option", and somone else impersonated him in a
phone call to his gas company, falsely reporting damage to his line.
Finally, someone claming to be both a Scientologist and an MIT alumnus
sent this complaint to the MIT webmaster. (Unfortunately, a bug in
MIT's comment gateway truncated the message.) The webmaster sent him
this reply.
Will Scientology force FACTnet to shut down?
Scientology has also threatened the FACTnet bulletin-board system with
numerous lawsuits, forcing them to remove their Web page. This BBS
contains a huge library documenting the activities of Scientology and
other religious cults. FACTnet may have to to shut down entirely in a
few weeks, and they have issued a general appeal to netizens asking
that you download their files free of charge while they are still
available.
Update, April 21: FACTnet seems to be back on the air, sort of. Some
anonymous person has created a "FACTnet Scientology WWW-Kit", which
they are serving from http://xs4all.nl/~fonss. Another netizen has
reorganized the FACTnet table of contents, which much improved
readability: see http://power.stu.rpi.edu/newfact.html. You can
download your own copy of the kit from
http://xs4all.nl/~fonss/factkit.zip.
Update, May 11: FACTnet has put all of its text files, in .zip format,
onto its FTP site, ftp://ftp.rmii.com/pub2/factnet/. These files were
scheduled to disappear at the end of April, but seem to have been
given a reprieve. Still, they could vanish at any time. Get them now!
It's been going on for years...off the Net
Internet users are finding out something that writers and journalists
have known for years: the Church of Scientology doesn't take kindly to
people who write negative things about it. They've sued and harassed
numerous writers of books, such as biographer Russell Miller, who
described his courtroom experience in a Punch magazine article in
February 1988. More recently, they've picketed and distributed
defamatory leaflets about writer Jon Atack, whose story is told in a
1994 Evening Argus article. Los Angeles Times writer Robert Welkos was
followed by private investigators and received unsolicited
hand-delivered ads from funeral homes; you can read a first-person
account in his Quill magazine article.
For more information...
* on the Church of Scientology, check out all of the following:
+ the first-person accounts by three Netizens who joined the
Church, then realized their mistake: Kim Baker of South
Africa, Patrick Jost, and Chris (last name unknown) of San
Diego State University.
+ My online archive of newspaper and magazine articlesabout
Scientology
+ Bob "Sloth" Bingham's, Martin Poulter's, Tilman Hausherr's,
and David Dennis's web pages, which contain pointers to many
other interesting documents.
+ Don Lindsay's Non-Scientologist FAQ
+ Rod Keller's FAQ
+ Martin Hunt's guide to the cult's strange vocabulary
+ the FTP sites of Jeff Jacobsen, Modemac, and FACTnet.
* on preserving free expression on the Net: browse the web sites of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and MIT's Student Association
for Freedom of Expression (SAFE).
Return to Ron Newman's home page.
For an FTP-like list of available files, follow this link.
_________________________________________________________________
Ron Newman <rnewman@mit.edu>
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THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY VS. THE NET
This page created by Ron Newman. The opinions expressed here are
solely those of the author, and are not necessarily shared by MIT.
Last revised May 15, 1995.
Quick index
* Grady Ward's 74-year-old mother visited by an inquisitive stranger
* Grady Ward's publisher gets a slanderous phone call from Eugene
Ingram
* Support the Dennis Erlich Defense Fund
* New section: FACTnet needs your help, last changed May 11
* Latest developments in Erlich case, last changed May 6
* Raid on Dennis Erlich; suit against Erlich, BBS, Netcom
* Legal (and extra-legal) threats against netizens, last changed May
15
* Attempt to remove alt.religion.scientology newsgroup
* Attempt to censor alt.religion.scientology newsgroup with
unauthorized cancel messages
* Attempt to intimidate anonymous remailer operators
* Raid on anon.penet.fi
* Harassment of writers and journalists
* Legal papers in Erlich case (now at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation)
* Newspaper & magazine articles
* Other sources of information
* FTP-like directory & file listing
The Church of Scientology is a religious cult which has unwisely
decided to declare war against the Usenet and Internet communities.
Since December of 1994, this Church and its followers have committed
the following acts:
Tried to censor a Usenet discussion group
Members or allies of the Church have tried to remove messages written
by other people in the Usenet discussion group
alt.religion.scientology. They did this by sending unauthorized
cancel messages, which are specially-formatted messages instructing
Usenet servers to delete a previously posted message. Here's an
example of such a cancel message, and here's another. Some of these
cancels were accompanied by text claiming that the original message
contained violations of the Church's copyrights and trade secrets. But
copyright disputes should be settled in a court of law, not by
faceless vigilantes issuing cancel messages.
The first such cancels started around Christmas of 1994, and were sent
by harryj@netcom.com (Harry Jones), who did not understand his
news-posting software well enough to conceal his true identity. He
eventually got smarter, and later cancels came from the non-existent
account robocanceller@netcom.com. The cancels quickly attracted the
attention of Time magazine's Netwatch column, which mentioned them in
the January 16, 1995 issue. After weeks of complaints, Netcom's system
administrators finally installed software that forced anyone sending a
cancel to reveal their true identity (or, at least, their Netcom user
ID). Subsequent cancels then came from: mako@netcom.com (Michael
Clark), student@netcom.com (John Palmer), and bettyj@netcom.com
(Elizabeth Jones). Netcom soon disabled logins from all of these
accounts.
Soon afterwards, two more cancels originated from the site
deltanet.com, and claimed to come from the address noman@odesi.com.
Don't try to send e-mail there; it's a non-existent site. But the good
news is that, on March 6, the good folks at deltanet.com found and
terminated the accounts of two users who issued forged cancels from
their site. Here's a report from deltanet's system administrator..
I thought we'd seen the last of the Cancelbunny, but it came back once
again on March 30, this time from the UK. Here's a fairly recent
cancel, dated April 7. The system administrator of demon.co.uk has
informed me that the cancel appeared to originate at another UK site,
pipex.net. That site, in turn, apparently received it from a site in
Ireland, possibly an open-access NNTP port. The search continues...
If you are familiar with certain American television commercials,
you'll understand why I dubbed this the "Cancelbunny": it just keeps
going, and going, and going...
Tried to shut down a Usenet discussion group
On January 11, 1995, a lawyer for the Church, Helena Kobrin
<hkk@netcom.com>, sent a rmgroup message, which is an instruction
to Usenet servers to delete the entire discussion group
alt.religion.scientology. This message claimed that the group's very
name infringed on the Church's trademark, and again complained that
members of the group were posting infingements of the Church's
copyrights. The "rmgroup" had little effect, because most Usenet
system administrators regard such messages as purely advisory, and
several quickly sent newgroup messages to re-create the group on any
server that had removed it.
Internet World magazine asked Helena Kobrin for an explanation, and
got a long letter back from her. I wasn't terribly impressed, and sent
her a reply. The magazine's article appeared in the April 1995 issue.
A shorter article (by net.personality Joel Furr) appeared in the April
1995 issue of the UK magazine Internet and Comms Today. Also check out
the article in the April 1995 issue of the UK's .net magazine.
Threatened the operators of anonymous remailing services
On January 4, 1995, Church attorney Thomas Small sent this e-mail to
the operators of several anonymous remailing services, demanding that
they disallow anonymous posting to alt.religion.scientology.
In response to both the rmgroup and this letter, Jon Noring
<noring@netcom.com> circulated a Net Petition asking that the
Church cease its attacks on the Net. At the same time, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation issued a statement urging the Church to stop
threatening Internet system administrators with litigation. Daniel
Akst wrote a "Postcard from Cyberspace" column in the January 25 Los
Angeles Times, and Richard Leiby wrote a "CyberSurfing" column in the
February 2 Washington Post.
Update, April 4, 1995: Helena's at it again! This time she's made
three threatening phone calls to remailer operator Homer Smith.
Compromised the security of anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer in Finland
In early February, 1995, Church representatives somehow used Interpol
and the Finnish police to demand the True Name of a user of
anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer in Finland. Julf Helsingius,
the administrator of anon.penet.fi, announced this in a Usenet message
to many newsgroups on February 18, 1995. He followed this with a press
release on February 21. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat
covered the story on February 18; this was soon followed by the
Associated Press, Time magazine, and another "Postcard from
Cyberspace" column from Dan Akst in the February 22 Los Angeles
Times.
Sued a user, his BBS, and his Internet service provider
Invaded the user's home, seizing and deleting files
On February 8, 1995, two Church corporations filed a lawsuit and a
request for a restraining order against Dennis Erlich of Glendale,
California, alleging that he was posting the Church's "copyrighted
trade secrets". They also sued the bulletin board he was using,
support.com, and the bulletin board's Internet service provider,
Netcom. Two days later, they received a temporary restraining order
against the three defendants, as well as a writ of seizure allowing
them to search Erlich's home and seize computer files.
Erlich did not know about any of this until 7:30 in the morning of
Monday, February 13, when Church attorney Thomas Small and seven other
people demanded entry to his home. According to Erlich, they spent
over six hours copying and deleting files from his computer system. A
Glendale police officer was present at the beginning and end of the
raid, but not at any other time.
Dennis posted a first-person account of the raid to Usenet that night.
The following day, both the Glendale News-Press and the Los Angeles
Times reported on the raid. Church lawyer Helena Kobrin (remember
her?) posted her version of the story to Usenet as well. (This link
also includes two responses from David Sternlight and Jon Noring.) In
addition, the Glendale News-Press published an editorial supporting
free expression on the Internet on February 21, which drew a reply
from a Church spokeswoman in the same newspaper three days later.
Toronto's ultra-net-savvy weekly newspaper eye published a good
article in their February 23 issue.
A court hearing was held on Tuesday, Febrauary 21 in San Jose Federal
District Court. Dennis made a statement to the court. Tom Klemesrud,
the owner and operator of support.com, also made a statement. Netcom's
vice-president of software engineering, Rich Francis, filed a
statement as well, as did Netcom's lawyers. At this hearing, the
judge lifted the restraining orders against support.com and Netcom,
and modified the restraining order against Dennis.
I won't go into the details of the hearing on this page; instead, read
the official court transcript, or the first-person accounts by Shelley
Thomson, Alan Hacker, and Carl Kaun, as well as the February 22
newspaper articles in the Glendale News-Press, Los Angeles Times, and
San Jose Mercury News. The Church also issued a post-hearing press
release.
After the hearing, the Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a
February 23 edition of its newsletter EFFector Online, containing a
substantial addition to its original statement about the Church's
threats to the Net.
On February 27, Helena Kobrin wrote a letter to Judge Whyte claiming
that Dennis Erlich had violated the amended restraining order the
previous day. Erlich sent an apology to the Judge that same day,
explaining that he had not yet received the amended restraining order
before allegedly violating it. (Apparently it was delivered to the
wrong address.) That was not good enough for the Church lawyers, who
promptly filed two more motions, one seeking a contempt-of-court
citation against Erlich, the other requesting an injunction against
Netcom and support.com.
In support of this request, the Church submitted declarations by
church lawyers Helena Kobrin and Andrew Wilson, an unidentified person
named Lynn Farny, and three computer specialists: Internet service
provider David Elrod, digital image processing expert Kenneth
Castleman, and UCLA computer science professor Alfonso Cardenas. The
Church also filed an amended complaint with the court on March 3rd.
The San Francisco Chronicle belatedly covered the story on March 2nd,
as did the Philadelphia Inquirer on April 1st. The Glendale News-Press
published yet another article on March 3rd, and the UK weekly trade
magazine Computing published a brief article in the March 9th edition.
Meanwhile, the Net's own Shelley Thomson devoted the second issue of
her new net-'zine, Biased Journalism, to the Erlich case.
Dennis Erlich now has legal representation, from the San Francisco law
firm of Morrison and Foerester ("MoFo"). Because of their good work,
Judge Whyte cancelled a March 17 hearing which was to hear a motion to
hold Dennis in contempt of court. Instead, the judge issued an order
delaying all pending hearings until further notice. (Dennis reported
this news to Usenet in two messages on March 15 and March 16.)
The two sides last met in court at a "Case Management Meeting" on
April 7, where they agreed to schedule a "Mega-hearing" on June 23.
This hearing will consider Helena's motion to hold Dennis in contempt,
Helena's motion for an injunction against all three defendants, and
Tom and Netcom's motion to dismiss them from the case. The trial (by
jury) date is set for early 1996.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has established the Dennis Erlich
Defense Fund for people who want to help Dennis cover the "hard
costs" of his legal defense. Follow this link for more information.
Dennis's ex-wife Rosa continues to harass him with claims that he owes
$40,000 in child-support payments. Dennis claims that he's been denied
the right to visit the child. Here's a link to Dennis's latest
postings on this subject.
Dennis suspects that the Scientologists may have "bought" Dennis's
alleged debt from Rosa in order to collect it. A member of the
Church's Office of Special Affairs, Andrew Milne, posted a message
claiming that a Scientologist named Robert Lippman "has obtained a
restraining order against Dennis Erlich over Erlich's threat to kill
him at the 1992 Cult Awareness Network conference." Erlich says he's
never been served with any such order and has never met or heard of
Lippman. Follow this link for an index of all legal papers that the
Electronic Frontier Foundation has received electronic copies of.
Legal (and extra-legal) threats against netizens
The Church of Scientology's lovely lawyer, Helena Kobrin, has sent
intimidating electronic mail to a number of netizens, including Martin
Hunt, Nico Garcia, Grady Ward, and Daniel Davidson. Grady wrote a
strongly-worded reply to Helena's bullying letter.
Daniel Davidson is a student at San Francisco State University in
California. Because of Helena's complaint, SFSU's director of
computing services, John True, filed a disciplinary charge against
Davidson. Davidson was required to appear at a disciplinary hearing on
Friday, March 31. He explained his predicament in a series of Usenet
messages. Fortunately, Davidson was exonerated of all charges. This
was partly due to the good work of Netizens throughout the world, who
sent numerous e-mails and faxes to San Francisco State University
officials explaining why Helena's groundless complaint should not be a
cause for punitive action by the University. One of the best such
letters was sent by Bruce Tober, a reporter for the UK magazine
Internet and Comms Today.
Bob "Sloth" Bingham received an ominous e-mail note from a known
Scientologist, informing him that his Web page had been "reported" to
the Church's Office of Special Affairs (intelligence unit).
Not all the harassment has come from lawyers. The Church's private
investigator, Eugene Ingram, visited Jeff Jacobsen, and also dropped
in on Jeff's sister and his neighbor's 13-year-old son. Private
investigators again lurked near Jeff's house on May 1st. Someone
called the long distance phone companies of both Jeff Jacobsen and
Homer Smith, impersonating each of them to try to obtain logs of
their long-distance calls. A policeman visited Martin Hunt, asking
about messages he allegedly posted to alt.religion.scientology.
In Oklahoma, TarlaStar got a phone call from someone falsely claiming
to represent her Internet Service Provider. A few days later, two
Church of Scientology representatives posted her real first and last
name, her address, her phone number, and her husband's name to
alt.religion.scientology.
On April 15, two Scientologists paid Grady Ward an unannounced
personal visit. This link contains both Grady's story and a
counter-story from Scientologist "Chris Miller", who seems to have
some kind of inside connection with Scientology's Office of Special
Affairs.
On May 8, Grady's publisher received a threatening and slanderous
phone call from a man identifying himself as Gene Ingram, who is a
private investigator for the Church of Scientology. On May 10, a very
inquisitive stranger visited Grady's 74-year-old mother in Oregon.
Last November, Arnie Lerma received both an unnnounced visit and a
threatening anonymous fax.
Gary Reibert, who had only posted two messages to
alt.religion.scientology, experienced a variety of disturbing events:
his car was tailed, someone phoned him to do a survey in which "not
participating is not an option", and somone else impersonated him in a
phone call to his gas company, falsely reporting damage to his line.
Finally, someone claming to be both a Scientologist and an MIT alumnus
sent this complaint to the MIT webmaster. (Unfortunately, a bug in
MIT's comment gateway truncated the message.) The webmaster sent him
this reply.
Will Scientology force FACTnet to shut down?
Scientology has also threatened the FACTnet bulletin-board system with
numerous lawsuits, forcing them to remove their Web page. This BBS
contains a huge library documenting the activities of Scientology and
other religious cults. FACTnet may have to to shut down entirely in a
few weeks, and they have issued a general appeal to netizens asking
that you download their files free of charge while they are still
available.
Update, April 21: FACTnet seems to be back on the air, sort of. Some
anonymous person has created a "FACTnet Scientology WWW-Kit", which
they are serving from http://xs4all.nl/~fonss. Another netizen has
reorganized the FACTnet table of contents, which much improved
readability: see http://power.stu.rpi.edu/newfact.html. You can
download your own copy of the kit from
http://xs4all.nl/~fonss/factkit.zip.
Update, May 11: FACTnet has put all of its text files, in .zip format,
onto its FTP site, ftp://ftp.rmii.com/pub2/factnet/. These files were
scheduled to disappear at the end of April, but seem to have been
given a reprieve. Still, they could vanish at any time. Get them now!
It's been going on for years...off the Net
Internet users are finding out something that writers and journalists
have known for years: the Church of Scientology doesn't take kindly to
people who write negative things about it. They've sued and harassed
numerous writers of books, such as biographer Russell Miller, who
described his courtroom experience in a Punch magazine article in
February 1988. More recently, they've picketed and distributed
defamatory leaflets about writer Jon Atack, whose story is told in a
1994 Evening Argus article. Los Angeles Times writer Robert Welkos was
followed by private investigators and received unsolicited
hand-delivered ads from funeral homes; you can read a first-person
account in his Quill magazine article.
For more information...
* on the Church of Scientology, check out all of the following:
+ the first-person accounts by three Netizens who joined the
Church, then realized their mistake: Kim Baker of South
Africa, Patrick Jost, and Chris (last name unknown) of San
Diego State University.
+ My online archive of newspaper and magazine articlesabout
Scientology
+ Bob "Sloth" Bingham's, Martin Poulter's, Tilman Hausherr's,
and David Dennis's web pages, which contain pointers to many
other interesting documents.
+ Don Lindsay's Non-Scientologist FAQ
+ Rod Keller's FAQ
+ Martin Hunt's guide to the cult's strange vocabulary
+ the FTP sites of Jeff Jacobsen, Modemac, and FACTnet.
* on preserving free expression on the Net: browse the web sites of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and MIT's Student Association
for Freedom of Expression (SAFE).
Return to Ron Newman's home page.
For an FTP-like list of available files, follow this link.
_________________________________________________________________
Ron Newman <rnewman@mit.edu>
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1995 22:51:01 CDT
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