The CoS Copyright War on the Internet
To the best of my knowledge, the whole thing
started a few years back in the United States when ex-scientologists
and critics of the CoS began to openly discuss scientology on
the internet and quoted from texts that they made available on
their web pages. The church sued and won, sued and won, and there
were police raids all over America, arrests being made, and computers
being confiscated. Then the battle for free speech and for freedom
of information about religion crossed the Atlantic to Holland,
where author Karin Spaink and a hundred others had posted copyrighted
Hubbard manuscripts. The church sued, and the Dutch netizens
were ordered to remove the offending documents from their websites.
But they refused. The church started intense and vicious harassment
procedures against Spaink, who was the initiator and leader of
this civil disobedience campaign. The CoS began to "dead-agent"
Spaink by spreading rumors that she was a member of Ku Klux Klan
- a typical scieno tactic. But she held out, and the court ruled
that the net users who refused to remove the Hubbard-documents
had not acted illegally. This was the first legal defeat for
the CoS.
In early February, 1995, Scientology representatives
somehow used Interpol and the Finnish police to demand the True
Name of one particular user of anon.penet.fi, an anonymous remailer
in Finland. The owner of the remailer reluctantly complied, fearing
that if he resisted, he might be forced to give up his entire
database that matched anonymous IDs to True Names. In 1996, Scientology
once again demanded the names of two anon.penet.fi users; as
a result, Julf Helsingius, the remailer's owner, has closed it
down. The scienos succeeded in planting a story in the media,
which was printed twice in the respectable "Observer"
in England, that the anonymity in question had not been protecting
ex-scienos from the vindictiveness of the church, but child pornographers
from the arm of the law!
After Holland and Finland, the war moves to
Sweden where it reaches a climax. In August of 1996, Zenon Panoussis,
in Stockholm, appeared from out of nowhere on alt.religion.scientology
and posted a copy of Scientology's "secret" NOTs levels
to the newsgroup. Zenon invited CoS to sue him, and they did
so, in the process raiding his apartment while he was not present.
This was apparently an illegal search and seizure.
Zenon Panoussis had a powerful weapon: A very
good knowledge of Swedish law, which he played to the hilt. Sweden
has an absolutely unique law about public documents - everything
that is mailed to the members of parliament or to any other public
officials becomes public property, i.e. anybody can demand copies.
When the CoS flew across the Atlantic and got an immediate court
order to raid Zenon's home and computer equipment in search of
these NOTs, Zenon had deleted the files from his harddisk but
made backup copies on removable disks that he had buried in his
garden. Immediately after the raid, he registered and mailed
these copies to the Swedish Parliament and to the Department
of Justice. The consequence of this action was that the top secret
NOTs were now, according to Swedish constitutional law, available
to the public. The church threatened. They even got an American
senator (Carlos Moorhead or something) to send a threatening
letter to the president of Riksdagen, who promptly told him,
in diplomatic language of course, to take his church and shove
it. Swedish law in Sweden!
That's when the circus began and the scienos
showed how crazy they really are. You see, the church had explained
publicly that the reason why it was so important to keep these
documents secret, was that they were only for high OT level initiates,
and the unprepared could actually die if they tried to read them.
Naturally, this made the disputed docs very popular indeed, and
while they were being illegally transported and copied all over
the globe in cyberspace, the Swedish government also had to make
them available at Riksdagen's public library. The scienos crowded
the library from dawn to dusk and occupied the documents to prevent
others from seeing them. (They weren't really allowed to read
them, because they were pre-clears.) The library had to make
two separate reading rooms with two separate copies of the docs,
one for scientologists and one for non-scientologists (or "wogs").
The NOTs could (and still can) be ordered
legally from the Swedish Parliament, and the requests came in
from all over the world after Zenon's announcement, and the official
employees had never been so busy keeping the copy machines rolling.
These employees also had to put up with threatening and psychotic
behavior from the scienos, harassment, fax bombs, telephone terror
etc. The requests had to be made anonymously after interested
parties were subjected to scieno harrassment.
Then it happened - now get this: For the first
time in history, Riksdagen was burglarized at night. Yes, the
scienos broke in and stole the NOTs from the Swedish Parliament.
Then they tried to convince the public that Zenon was the guilty
party! (In their desparation, their lies became so idiotic that
nobody believed them anymore.) But Zenon had his backups ready,
which he promptly delivered to Riksdagen.
The circus went on for over two years, and
Zenon eventually lost his case against the CoS, but he is still
refusing to pay. In the meantime, the battle moved to Stavanger,
Norway, where Andreas Heldal-Lund posted the NOTs on his website
after purchasing them legally from the Swedish parliament. The
scienos came to his home immediately, making threats. The scieno
lawyers in California became very busy. But Andreas succeeded
in keeping his NOTs posted for six months before he was forced
to remove them. They're always available somewhere, but they're
always being moved. My own posting is an extra, and notice that
I've done it on a Norwegian server. You see, Norway is one country
where the CoS has lost every case and where they don't have the
money or the will to sue. They're practically non-existent. This
country is the last stronghold in this war, the only place that
is safe from the church and their obnoxious dirty tricks and
mischief.
This is the drama behind the NOTs. But they
are no good unless we can understand them. And perhaps anthroposophists
are precisely the people who are best qualified to make use of
these pilfered treasures as a tool to investigate scientology.
Let's read them and discuss them.
Tarjei
Entheta
Uncle
Taz Back Gate
Uncle
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