Scientologists, Foes Wage War on the Internet

Some on the Net call it cyberspace’s Vietnam. Others prefer the analogy of the Spanish Civil War.

Whichever it is, the back-and-forth skirmishing of this guerrilla conflict is an excellent example of the vigilantism that thrives in the anarchy of the Internet.

The battle pits the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology against a few loosely organized bands of free speech advocates who have taken up what they believe to be the flag of truth.

At issue is the right of the church to safeguard its sacred writings, some of which it says are copyrighted and some it calls trade secrets. The church has fought, both in the courts and in online arenas, to protect those writings. And that has raised the ire of free-speech advocates, wily in the ways of the Net, who see the conflict as a fight for the soul of cyberspace.

The ongoing confrontation is perhaps the best example of the Internet as a self-regulating anarchy: When the church utilized the U.S. legal system to stop the illegal posting of its copyrighted materials, Internet users countered with hit-and-run online networks to spread information faster than the church could file suits.

Things began quietly in July 1991, when Scientology critic Scott Goehring formed the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, which quickly became home to a crowd of current and former Scientologists arguing endlessly about the nature of the church.

With more than 1,700 separate newsgroups devoted to everything from the DNA structure of the fruit fly to raucous shouting matches on feminism, Usenet is a mix between Hyde Park on a Sunday and the World Wrestling Federation.

It wasn’t until people unknown began posting secret teachings that the church considers protected by copyright that things began to heat up. The posters claimed they were making “fair use” of the writings--allowed under copyright law--because they were commenting on them, much the way a reviewer can quote a passage from a book without getting into trouble with the publisher.

Not according to the church.

“They’ll publish three pages and then one line, ‘Isn’t this crap?’ ” said Jeff Quiros, a Scientology spokesman.

The online battle was never the church’s idea, Quiros said. “The church was dragged kicking and screaming into cyberspace.”

Things boiled over in January 1995, when Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to delete an Internet discussion group devoted to Scientology because she believed that it violated the church’s intellectual property rights to the word “Scientology” itself and that it had been initiated with a forged e-mail address--one that misspelled the name of a church leader.

“It was intended as an attempt to protect intellectual property rights. Nothing more,” Kobrin said from her Los Angeles office.

As news of the failed attempt spread, Internet users who had never heard of Scientology took up arms. They marched over to the newsgroup in question--alt.religion.scientology--and checked things out themselves.

“It offended me. They’re resorting to real-life egregious acts to remedy criticism in cyberspace,” said self-described 1st Amendment fanatic Grady Ward of Arcata, Calif. Ward was hit with a copyright-infringement suit in March when he posted Scientology material on the Net.

Ward’s response was typical. Avid Internet users tend to get involved in any argument they run across, and many who dropped by the group to look around took up the fight--partly because they felt free speech on the Net was threatened, but also because they thought it would be fun to play hide-and-seek with the church.

“Essentially, it’s a hobby,” said Jerod Pore of San Francisco, who has helped distribute an electronic ‘zine called “Scamizdat” that posts any secret Scientology writings the anonymous editors can get their hands on.

The Scientologists countered with suits against whomever they could track down and writs of seizure that permitted church lawyers and computer experts to stage surprise raids on the posters, taking their computers. In addition, the church sued the companies that provided the posters with Internet access, arguing they were directly liable for their users’ copyright violations.

When the Washington Post published a story about the disputes, quoting 46 words of the secret writings, the church also sued the paper and two reporters.

All that set off a firestorm on the Net, with the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology as the primary battleground.

Attack programs were written by both sides. Pro-Scientology hackers created files that automatically canceled damaging postings, and the anti-Scientology forces quickly countered with a program that alerted posters that their words had been canceled.

To protect themselves while continuing to post materials, the partisans countered with “hot potato” computer files.

An anonymously posted file described these as “[traveling] from host to host, rather than permanently residing in a fixed location. With each attempt to remove the file from a particular machine, which may involve threats of legal action against the file’s owner [host], it jumps to another location.”

Numerous anti-Scientology Web sites also have gone up, meticulously detailing each court case, summons and outcome, with whole libraries of newspaper and magazine articles appended.

Scientology has countered with its own massive Web site, weighing in with more than 30,000 pages in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. It includes information on church beliefs and a virtual reality tour of Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles.

In June, a “vertical spam” of alt.religion.scientology overwhelmed almost all discussion.

To spam, in Internet parlance, is to flood a newsgroup or a mailing list with off-topic messages and thereby render it unusable. In the June attack, more than a thousand posts a day were pouring into the newsgroup, each carrying a fake e-mail address. They were prefaced with a note saying that “much false information” on Scientology had been distributed and that here was true data.

Scientology spokeswoman Debbie Blair said the church had no part in the attack.

More than anything else, the war around Scientology shows the true, irrepressible nature of the Internet. As a loose collection of networked computer networks with no governing body, there’s no one to run to when anyone misbehaves.