OFF:Scientology tentacles

[M Holmes]

Paul Mather writes:

> On Wed, 13 May 1998, Christian000Mumford wrote:
>
> > > Not to worry.  I'm sure the enormous legal arm of the "Church" of
> > > Scientology will manage to overcome the German government (and all other
> > > SPs ["Suppressive Persons"] who stand in the way of Scientology). :-)
> >
> > There was a hilarious case in Sweden a few years back regarding some
> > "secret scripture" of Hubbard's being made availible to read for the
> > public, after a nightmare of legal battles against the Swedish government,
> > at some official institution. The Scientologists had agents there around
> > the clock, working in shift to continuously to "browse" (occupy) the
> > documents - without reading them, just holding them, as the agents were
> > told they would spontaneously combust or something reading them. This of
> > course turned alot of "real" people (or SP's I guess) off from even
> > attempting to stand in line for days, just to get a peek at Hubbard's
> > unpublished SF drivel for free (otherwise it would cost years of toil and
> > brainswashing and hundreds of thousands of dollars).
>
> This reminds me of another incident we can thank the gigantic legal arm
> of Scientology for.  If memory serves, they were responsible for the
> anon.penet.fi anonymous e-mail gateway guy having to hand over the
> subscriber list, because someone was posting "secret Scientological
> doctrines" (and maybe anti-Church rants) anonymously through that
> service.  It may have shut down the service for a while, I don't
> remember.

These were the same documents that the Scientologists swamped the web
and a usenet group (by spamming thousands of posts) in order to prevent
others reading them. They even sued for ownership of alt.scientology

The documents were also read into Court records as the scientologists
sued the net poster. They then also set up relays to look at these in
public records to protect the public from seeing them (other than by
taking 30,000 Dollars worth of Scientology courses).

The Net was beating the Cult until the penet.fi anonymous remailer
incident. Usenet posts of the documents used penet.fi to gain aonymity
(and therefore perhaps avoid similar Court cases). This was also used by
dissidents in totalitarian regimes to get information out and compromise
could have meant their death.

The scientologists (allegedly using members highly placed in the
country) managed to organise a Police raid after which they gained
access to the files. The person who had provided the penet.fi server
through much voluntary effort, found this the last straw (after sundry
accusations and Court cases about porn and child porn - he didn't allow
binaries to be posted) and closed down the server.

> Paul.

FoFP