Church Versus Cyberstate

When the Church of Scientology coerced the search engine, Google.com, into dropping the anti-Scientology site Xenu.com from its listings, free-speech advocates were outraged. But Xenu's owner wasn't worried; he knew what happens when you mess with the Net.

Readme By Richard Salem Posted: 5.1.02, (Issue 2).

http://journalism.fas.nyu.edu/opensource/readme/index.php?art_id=129&page=1

Seventy-five million years ago, a galactic tyrant named Xenu (pronounced "ZEE-NOO") killed all living beings with a hydrogen bomb, then brainwashed their disembodied minds. Eventually, Xenu was overthrown by his former followers and locked away in a mountain prison encircled by an impenetrable force field. He remains there to this day.

This story is one of the fundamental beliefs of the religion known as Scientology, founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. According to "Countercultures", a 1995 book by the cult critic William Zellner, the Church of Scientology charges as much as $400,000 to completely free a believer from the residual effects of Xenu's brainwashing. Scientology has come under fire for its controversial practices, which critics allege include cult-like brainwashing and lucrative global racketeering. The Church has trademarked its teachings and has a reputation for using legal threats, specifically the charge of copyright infringement, to muzzle these disaffected onetime believers and anti-cult activists.

During the early 1990s, many of those who once fought in small numbers, armed with picket signs and leaflets, took their protests against Scientology's abusive practices to larger audiences via the Web, in critical websites and discussion groups. Apparently, Xenu got his hands on a Net connection.

In the most recent Web war between Scientology and its critics, the popular search engine Google caved in to legal pressure from the church and removed any mention of the most well-known anti-Scientology website Xenu.net from its search results. According to the church, Xenu had made secret Scientology teachings public, in violation of church-owned copyrights and trademarks.

Surprisingly, the owner of the controversial site, a Norwegian IT General Manager named Andreas Heldal-Lund, has kept a low profile, seemingly untroubled by Google's censorship.

According to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), the service provider, which in this case is Google, cannot be held responsible for copyright infringement as long as they respond "expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing upon notification of claimed infringement." On March 21 2002, within 24 hours of the site's removal, Google sent Heldal-Lund an e-mail with a listing the Xenu pages that they had removed from their searchable archives. The e-mail also stated that his webpages could be reinstated if he submitted a counter notification to Google. Heldal-Lund did not respond. Because of his silence, recent articles, such as the March 25 Reuter's item on the affair, portray the Xenu founder as a cowering victim of Scientology's legal abuse, afraid of being sued. Two days after sending the e-mail, battered by a barrage of protests and under scrutiny from free-speech advocates for the hasty decision, Google restored Xenu.net's homepage and related links to its archive, claiming they had been "inadvertently removed."

"I do not consider this a Scientology victory," said Heldal-Lund, in an e-mail interview. "The result [of the church's actions] is a lot of media attention and hundreds of thousands of hits on Xenu. The cult achieved the opposite of what they aimed for."

Although the exact amount of increased traffic on Xenu is unconfirmed, the site has jumped to number two in a Google search for the term "Scientology."

Former church member-turned-online critic Arnaldo Lerma believes that, while the Church of Scientology may have won this battle, it has lost the war. Lerma, who lost a copyright infringement case against the church in which lawyers ransacked her house and confiscated her church documents, contends that the war is over, whether the church knows it or not. "They can't stop it," he said when interviewed in the article "Getting Clear at BU?," which appeared on Salon.com. "They might win a case. But they're not going to win against the Net."

Don Marti, a free-speech activist, was angered by Google's decision Ñ so much so that he formed the Mountain View, California, Xenu Independent Study Group to discuss DMCA policy with Google officials in hopes of preventing unfair censorship.

"I got interested in Scientology because they decided to abuse the DMCA, [using it] for censorship," he said in an e-mail interview. "If Xenu.net had been trying to suppress Scientology.org [The official homepage of the Church of Scientology], I would have come in on the other side."

Marti is just one of the many free-speech fighters that who've been caught in the web of Scientology activism.

In 1995, when Helena Kobrin, a lawyer for the Church of Scientology, attempted to use the "remove group" command to remove the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology from the Internet, her heavy-handed attempt at censorship caught the attention of Internet free-speech advocates.

"When the CoS began canceling Usenet messages and tried to get [alt.religion.scientology] removed, I was outraged because of the obvious threat to free speech on the Internet," said Ron Newman, in an e-mail interview. Newman is the founder of the Church of Scientology versus the Net website. He and other civil libertarians rallied around alt.religion.scientology, making "a.r.s.," as it came to be known, one of the most popular groups on the Net; at one point, a.r.s. member Keith Hensen estimated the newsgroup's membership at nearly 100,000 users.

"Before the Internet, most critics and defectors stood alone," said Heldal-Lund. "Now, we have a community of support and information [composed of] people who are not frightened by anything the cult can do to them and [people who] are attracted to the controversy."

The Net has revolutionized the fight against Scientology by harnessing a world wide network of anti-cult protesters, free-speech advocates, and HTML-literate journalists such as Newman and Marti, all of whom bring attention to Scientology's repressive legal actions. These Web-savvy activists have exploited what might be called the medium's "hydra effect":

whenever the church cuts off a dissenter's head, a dozen new ones spring up in its place. As Heldal-Lund points out, "Xenu.net is the best-known Scientology-critical site by far because [of] the many attempts from the cult to close it down."

With millions of paying devotees around the globe, among them wealthy stars like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, Scientology will most likely be able to fund its online battles for some time. Nonetheless, Heldal-Lund seems confident that Scientology's attempts to decapitate the many-headed medium will prove futile. "The Internet is the ultimate nightmare for Scientology," he declares. "The more they handle it, the bigger [the] problem seems to become."

Richard Salem is a double major in a journalism and computer science at New York University.

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