From http://www.microcontentnews.com/entries/20021108-1975.htm

Scientology, Guns, and Weblogs: A Blogger gets Sued Friday, November 8, 2002

Here's a recipe for making headlines in the blogosphere:

Start with a gun training camp in the Nevada desert Throw in a dash of previous legal controversy (libel! slander!) Make sure the head of the gun training camp is involved with the Church of Scientology It wouldn't hurt to have a blogger post her concerns about this involvement on her site.

And if you really want to ensure headlines: make sure to have the gun camp sue the blogger.

This all really happened! I considered writing an article about the story, but the blogosphere has already done a beautiful job. The blogger being sued, Diana Hsieh, wrote up a detailed account of her side of the story... while her friend Arthur Silber wrote an excellent followup post on the reaction of the gun community. Then Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds provided the distribution, linking to Arthur's post with the power of 100k daily pageviews behind him.

It'll be interesting to see if any mass media picks up on this made-for-TV headline: "Church of Scientology sues Blogger!"

Although to be really accurate, it's not clear that the Church itself is involved. It doesn't appear that the gun training camp is officially affiliated with the Church - and from all reports, the training camp hasn't actively used its position of influence to promote the Church's religious beliefs. It's just that the head of the camp has admitted to taken extensive courses from the church... so it's not clear that this lawsuit is really from the Church of Scientology, or just from someone who happens to be a Scientologist.

As for the rest of the headline: Diana Hsieh is definitely a blogger... but it's not clear if she's being sued for her blog posts or her email. Most of Diana's allegedly defamatory/libelous material was sent over email... and only then posted to her blog.

But this is all quibbling. I found what happened after the lawsuit to be most interesting. As Arthur described in a blog post followup:

[A] number of bloggers (too many to mention by name) have linked to and commented on the post below about Front Sight, Scientology and the lawsuit against Diana Hsieh. I thank all of those bloggers very, very much.

If as I suspect (but I emphasize again that this is only my inference, since I haven't seen the complaint), a large part of the purpose of this lawsuit is to stop Diana from even asking the questions she has about the connections between and among Piazza, Front Sight and Scientology, then the dissemination of this information as widely as possible may help to defeat that end.

In other words: sue a blogger at your own risk!

posted by john

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