The suburbia.net administrators kindly invite you to attend to the Church of Scientology Demonstration at: The Church of Scientology Corner of Fliners Lane and Russel St, Melbourne City [Australia] SATURDAY March the 16th 1996 11am to 1pm For those completely unfamiliar with the Church of Scientology [CoS]'s attack upon the Internet and RRR radio station and critical speech generally, read my below summary and the the appended transcript of one of our users [David Gerard <fun@suburbia.net>] from JJJ radio station. The Church of Scientology was founded by the late L. Ron Hubbard in the United States some 30 years ago. To followers, Hubbard is their profit, and his prolific writings are the sacred word. The Church's hierarchy and financial viability revolve around Hubburd's verbose scriptures. Each new level gained by a church follower brings to them, among other rights and privileges access to a new and previously verboten set of the works of Ron. But to the Church it brings something else. Revenue. A very sizeable revenue. Ron's works are a required element in order for the follower to progress through the many of successive levels the Church has -- and they cost hundreds or thousands of dollars each. In fact, by the time a devote of the Church has realized the highest OT level, the Church has usually had them for over five figures. But revenue isn't the only reason for keeping the works of Ron occulted away. A common technique used by cults to brainwash their followers is gradual immersion in cult mythology and philosophy. To put it bluntly, it is often advisable to keep the more wacko beliefs and practices out of your new recruit's faces until they are sufficiently wacko themselves. Now, the problem for the Church of Scientology is that on the wacko scale the higher level works of Ron hover somewhere near the figure 10. To an outsider it is an immediate farse. But to a follower who has become psychologically dependent on the Church's philosophy & society and invested thousands and thousands of dollars in doing so, it is just another step on the road to mental subservience. What you have then is a Church based on brainwashing yuppies and other people with more money than sense. This may not concern you. If Nicole Kiddman, Kate Cerbrano, John Travolta, Burce Willis, Demi Moor and Tom Cruise want to spend their fortunes on learning that the earth is in reality the destroyed prison colony of aliens from out of space then so be it. However, money brings power and attracts the currupt. Money is something the Church has a lot of. Not all of the Church's beliefs and practices are so out of it as to be completely as irrelevant as the previous example. Some are quite insidious. For instance, L. Ron Hubbard devised a range of methods that could be used against critics and other `enemies of the Church'. Among the list was manipulation of the legal/court system. To the Church the battle isn't won in the court room. It is won at the very moment the legal process starts unfolding, creating fear and expense in those the Church opposes. Their worst critic at the moment is not a person, or an organisation but a medium -- the Internet. The Internet is, by its very nature a censorship free zone. Censorship, concealment and revelation (for a fee) is the Church's raison d'etre. The Church, via its manipulation of the legal system has had computer systems seized, system operators forced to reveal their users personal details, university accounts suspended and radio stations, such as RRR cut their programs. It has sued ex-cult members, newspapers, and many others for copyright infringements, loss of earnings and trade secret violation. Trade secret violation? Yes, the Church of Scientology claims its religious works are trade secrets. The fight against the Church is far more than the Net vs a bunch of wackos with too much money. It is about corporate suppression of the Internet and free speech. It is about intellectual property and the big and rich versus the small and smart. The precedents the Church sets today the weapons of corporate tirany tomorrow. --Julian Assange (please direct replies to fun@suburbia.net) DAVID GERARD ON 3-CR (855KHZ AM) MELBOURNE, 8:50AM THU 14 MAR 1996 ANNOUNCER: There's currently a war going on on the Internet, especially in relation to the Church of Scientology. This morning on the line is David Gerard. Good morning, David. DAVID: Good morning. A: First of all, can you tell me what, what the war is that's going on on the Internet? D: Well, OK. There's a newsgroup on the Internet called alt-dot-religion-dot-scientology, ARS. For a few years, this was like one of the thousands of backwater Internet newsgroups. A newsgroup's a sort of area with a given name where anyone can put a message on, read other people's messages, that sort of thing; it's distributed world-wide, there's no central control over it, so ... A: So it's sort of like an electronic noticeboard, where you can put up whatever you feel like. D: Yep. Free access. And, y'know, most of them are utter garbage and there's no way anyone's interested in all thousands of them. And it was like a little backwater religion newsgroup for many years, where you have a few Church people and a few critics sniping at each other, y'know, and no-one else was really interested. But then, there was an ex-Scientologist on there, a guy called Dennis Erlich, who ... Someone put on a message saying, "is this actually part of secret Scientology scripture?" It was a particularly wacky thing about 'find some plants and see If you can communicate with them and see if they receive your communication.' And he verified, 'yes, that's the real thing.' In verifying it, he quoted it. So what the Church of Scientology then did, seeing as they have tended in dealing with critics to have the subtlety of a Mack truck, what they did was, they got a judge to write a copyright violation writ. And they went round and raided his house, and took away his computers, and went through his house, and took anything they felt like. This is a good way to piss of thirty million people in one go. And the Internet sort of rose up as one to strike back at these people. So what happened was, in their attempts to quash all discussion and quash all criticism, they earned themselves a whole lot more critics. I mean, I'm not an ex-Scientologist, I have no interest in them, except that they're trying to use legal thuggery, corporate financing, to try to quash all dissent. Thankfully they're doing it very badly. They're losing cases left, right and centre when they get them into court, and the publicity has been very damaging for them. A: So there's obviously more than one legal case going on. How many people have they prosecuted, or how many people are they in the process of charging? D: Well, there was Dennis Erlich in America; Lawrence Wollersheim and Bob Penny, who are also ex- Scientologists -- they ran a computer bulletin-board called FACTNet, which contains information on all forms of cults and restrictive groups like those, and Arnie Lerma, who was an ex-Scientologist. And after Lerma was raided, someone in Holland put the thing which he had posted, the Fishman Affidavit, which contains quotes from the Scientology scriptures, someone in the Netherlands put it on a Web page -- on a World Wide Web page, the thing you get through Netscape and so on. And in magazines where you see the Internet, they usually have a screen shot from Netscape -- and what happened was, they tried raiding the Internet provider in Holland, and the Dutch people were outraged with this and promptly there were a hundred different copies of it all over Holland. And then they tried mounting a case against them, and it just came in, word came in a few days ago that they lost. A: So is the Church of Scientology actually using the Internet to display information, or to put out information about the positive sides of the Church, or the sort of information that they would use to draw people in? D: Yeah, they finally got their own Web server up, but the point is ... And that's fine. The more information the better. The critics have their information up, and the Church is trying to stop that, but they're having a lot of trouble, because basically, once information's out there, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, you can't squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube. They feel that if people find out about their secret scriptures, they might think that they're very silly and laugh at them and not want to be Scientologists. And also when things like the prices of these things come out, like when you discover you've paid a hundred and sixty thousand US dollars to learn that Xenu the galactic dictator took people to Earth seventy-five million years ago, strapped them to volcanoes and blew them up, and that you've paid this much money for that and you're supposed to believe it. A: Well, you'd want to believe it after paying all that money. D: Well, actually, that's exactly it. The further people get in, the more fanatical they seem to be. Experts on cults say that the Church of Scientology is one of the hardest cults to get people back to the real world from. And you have that cognitive dissonance between 'this is a load of rubbish' and 'I've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and worked for years for this.' A: Probably fits into the same philosophy that once you've paid a lot of money for a car, it's the best car there is. [laughs] D: Something like that. Yeah. And the issue goes beyond the Church of Scientology. I mean, they're weird and vicious, and this is well-documented, and if they care to object to me making that statement I'll back it up in court if they like ... A: Is this a fairly typical scenario on the Internet? Are there other groups who are behaving in this manner, or is it a fairly limited ... D: Well, at first only the Scientologists tried this, but, um, the Unification Church, Reverend Moon's lot, have recently been trying this, there's another small cult called Eckankar which is descended from a church which is descended from Scientology, have recently been trying this as well. It's quite amazing. It's not an issue of Scientology, it's not an issue of Scientology teachings, it's an issue of the corporate behaviour in the world where they attempt to silence critics by using legal bigfooting, money ... Can small people criticise big corporations or big financial interests? A: I guess in some ways it's very similar to the McDonalds case in Britain, where they're suing two unemployed people as this huge corporation. D: And the same thing is happening: it's backfiring on them. A: Yeah. D: 'Cos the thing about the Internet is, you can't stop the information going out, because if you make something restricted, suddenly everybody wants it. They've tried suing one person in Holland, a hundred more sprung up. They've tried getting their critics pulled off the Internet altogether -- my University Internet account was locked for two months because of the Church of Scientology, so I then went out and got a private provider. Their behaviour is ... it's intolerable in a multicultural society, where the implicit rule is we all have to get along. A: I understand that a similar thing has happened to the 'Liars' Club', a show put together by the Skeptics on 3-RRR. D: Yep. The Church spent about ... a few years trying to shut down the 'Liars' Club', 'cos they dared to mention, criticise Scientology. And they finally got it taken to the Australian Broadcasting Authority, who ruled that a particular show, where they had an ex-Scientologist called Cyril Vosper ... that he went on and he talked about the Church and what he didn't like about it and what was bad about it. And he knows his stuff, he's been there, he actually knew L. Ron Hubbard, that sort of thing. A: Is this L. Ron Hubbard the science fiction author? D: Yes, the guru of Scientology, the source of everything in Scientology. Every word he wrote is taken by them as scripture. A: [laugh] I've read his books and thought they were novels! [laughs] D: Ha, well, yeah, pretty well ... But anyway, Vosper went on, and the Tribunal ruled that no word or sentence that Vosper said was religious vilification, no word or sentence that Adam Joseph, presenter, said was vilification, no word or sentence that Vanda Hamilton, the other presenter, said was vilification, but, because the presenters agreed with the guest, it was therefore vilification. Now, they didn't ask RRR to pull the show, but RRR pulled the show. They also didn't give them any due process in pulling the show; if a show's in danger of being pulled, y'know, you give them the chance to speak. Stephen Walker just killed it. A: Actually, you're holding a demonstration, that's right. D: It's a small thing, where we politely state our case and hand out leaflets, it's outside the Church, corner Russell Street and Flinders Lane, on Saturday morning at 11am. A: So you'll be providing people who turn up with leaflets to hand out? D: Yep. We'll have hundreds of leaflets, we'll have a few signs ... We expect it to be a very polite demonstration. We had one in September last year, we politely stated our case, the Church people had a leaflet of their own, that sort of thing. It was ... A: [laughs] That's all very nice! D: It's all about ... It's not to do with the local people, I mean, the individual people are fine. We're talking about management actions in America. It's a multinational organisation. A: Anyway, we've got to go. Thanks very much for your time, David. D: Thank you very much. A: See you later. That was Dave Gerard talking about the war on the Internet and the way that the Church of Scientology is ... taking action against people who publish information which is negative about the Church. You've been listening to Thursday Breakfast, it's now two minutes past nine, we've gone over time, and we'll catch you again next week. It's time for 'Scheherazade'. -- "I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - Leo Bulero/PKD +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | |proff@suburbia.net | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | |proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690 | +---------------------+--------------------+----------------------------------+