[The] following is a recent legal experience I have had with the CoS and thus a fairly typical account of how the CoS utilises litigation (specifically copyright) as an instrument to dodge criticism and possible public scrutiny. Yet since each little story has it's own unique flavour, I think it's worth publishing on USENET.

Background

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I determined how CoS's personality test works and applied some statistical methods to test/verify assertion made in the Foster report that the test had not been standardised. As expected, [I] discovered that the test was negatively skewed. What was a surprise though, was just how grossly negatively skewed the results were.

Release the hounds

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After initial publishing of the results, OSA wasted little time tracking me down. Lots of antagonism in my personal life ensures, plus a couple of veiled legal threats. Initial essay goes through a couple of revisions due to self imposed policing/criticism of my own work, all centre around the key point that my essay was based on mathematical modelling only, not survey data.

Digging deeper

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I put together a survey based on the OCA, in order to collect useful data. Foolishly, after sitting on the survey for a few months I post it to ars.

Empire strikes back

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24 hours later is the beginning of a very nasty process whereby the CoS threaten me to take me to the cleaners for alleged violation of their copyright unless I sign a settlement deed. The next few weeks, despite my removing the alleged infringing material from the Internet immediatly upon request, I was bombarded with daily phone calls bordering on harassment regarding the deed.

Settlement

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I employ services of a copyright solicitor, as most active ars readers will probably know, are very expensive to employ. Turns out that the document gave them everything and offered me no protection what-so-ever. So I contact them with a counter offer, plus a bunch of extra things I wanted, such as removal of the non-disclosure clause. The end result was a toothless document where the agreement basically boils down to I will not break the law, and CoS won't take me to court. I also requested, with a legal threat of my own, the persistent harassment to stop.

Much to the OSA ops credit, they accepted my terms and respected my wishes to desist direct daily contact attempts.

Conclusions and Unanswered questions

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That despite the level of urgency initially pressed upon me to sign, the CoS agreed to sign a basically toothless document that only imposes minor limitations on my continuing research and even allows me to disclose what had happened is a bit of a mystery to me. It's not an important question, but I nurture a few different speculations.

On the day of settlement signing, the OSA op signing said, "we have an agreement. You leave us alone and we'll leave you alone, agreed?". Taken off balance, again by their brazen audacity I quipped "yes". Among critics of Scientology it is taken as a given that the litigation is primarily motivated by SLAPP oriented objectives, i.e. "The purpose of the suit is to harass and to discourage rather than to win" - LRH. The OSA op couldn't of spelt it out any clearer to me.

The thing about the CoS is that it's actions are so audacious, unreal and morally questionable that to the outsider that I once was, scepticism naturally abounds. For what critics say on the surface may seem so fanciful and unbelievable, that to someone new to the debate, they can appear to be just as alarmist and ridiculous as the very thing that they are trying to dethrone. Evaluating a sizeable cross section of information that is available to you does resolve this question and shows that it is the critics who are fighting the good fight, yet experiencing stuff like this first hand rams it right home, how bizarre and at times ugly the world can be.