expressed here are solely those of the author, and are not necessarily shared by MIT.+lt;b
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...
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.
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.
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.)
A second court hearing was held on
Friday, June 23 at 2 pm at the San Jose Federal
Courthouse. This hearing considered a number of motions from all
parties in the dispute, including 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.
Dennis described the motions in
this "preview",
written a few days before the hearing.
Brian Harmon attended the hearing and wrote
this description of what he saw.
(Dennis later sent several replies, which I've intercut into Brian's text.)
The San
Francisco Chronicle also covered the story in its June 24 edition.
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. Update, June 8: You may now
contribute to the Fund by bank wire transfer!
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.
The British Broadcasting Corporation covered the Erlich case
in its first edition of "the Net" TV show on May 15, 1995.
They've put a transcript
of the show on the Web.
Dennis continues to experience petty harassment of various kinds,
as reported in this message
of June 3.
Follow this link
for an index of all legal papers that the Electronic Frontier Foundation
has received electronic copies of.
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.
Last November, Arnie Lerma received both an
unnnounced visit and a
threatening anonymous fax.
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, calling himself "Jack Hoff",
visited
Grady's 74-year-old mother in Tacoma, Washington.. Grady's mom
later identified Mr. "Hoff" positively as Eugene Ingram, with
help from this photo,
taken by Jeff Jacobsen. As a result, the Tacoma
Police Department has filed criminal case #95-1530374 against
Ingram, on the charge of criminal impersonation.
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.
Jim Lippard has created a web page containing
pictures
of Eugene Ingram and other Scientology private investigators.
The page also contains the details of the warrant for Ingram's
arrest in Tampa, Florida, on charges of impersonating a police officer.
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!
For an FTP-like list of available files,
follow this link.
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 June 25, 1995.Quick index
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.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. 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.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
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.
Invaded the user's home, seizing and deleting files
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.
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.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...
Return to Ron Newman's home page.
Ron Newman
<rnewman@mit.edu>
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank