Scientology cult creates censorship softwear

Last week I forwarded a note about the Scientology cult creating a censorship program which they instruct all of their followers to use. It intercepts and modifies text strings in the inbound datastream on their Internet connection such that anything remotely critical (that is "truthful") about the cult is not passed through the filter. That means that any web page which discusses Lisa McPearson's murder will have the words "Lisa McPearson" blanked out entirely so that followers don't even see her name.

It has been learned that the cult does this by patching WSOCK32.DLL and redirects object calls to STCPX.DLL which performs the censorship. A detailed examination of the API set reported by Zane Thomas:

        From: z_thomas@@ix.netcom.com (Zane Thomas)

        It patches wsock32.dll to forward calls to stcpx.dll.  The following
        calls are patched and forwarded to the indicated entry points in
        stcpx.dll:

            102   10   WSAAsyncGetHostByAddr (forwarded to STCP.I)
            103   11   WSAAsyncGetHostByName (forwarded to STCP.J)
            116   19   WSACleanup (forwarded to STCP.M)
           1107   1C   WSARecvEx (forwarded to STCP.K)
            115   1F   WSAStartup (forwarded to STCP.L)
              1   24   accept (forwarded to STCP.O)
              2   25   bind (forwarded to STCP.P)
              3   26   closesocket (forwarded to STCP.A)
              4   28   connect (forwarded to STCP.N)
             51   2A   gethostbyaddr (forwarded to STCP.G)
             52   2B   gethostbyname (forwarded to STCP.H)
             16   3F   recv (forwarded to STCP.B)
             17   40   recvfrom (forwarded to STCP.C)
             19   45   send (forwarded to STCP.D)
             20   46   sendto (forwarded to STCP.E)
             23   4A   socket (forwarded to STCP.F)

That's every object that's needed in the API to perform Internet access. At the WinSock level, it means that the Scientology hack won't allow their followers to see certain text for anything on Internet -- that ranges from E-Mail, web browsing, Internet Relay Chat... anything done on Internet.

The patch is presumed to get updated so that new banned URLs and get added on-the-0-fly and entire hosts can get added to the ban list. Even more of a worry is the fact that the patch will allow the cult to monitor and log everything their followers try to access. It further allows the software to redirect web page call-ups from undesirable sites to sites approved by the cult.

Imagine what would happen to a follower were she to try to access the #scientology chat on Efnet, the Lisa McPearson Memorial Page, or, (Xenu help them) the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup. Though the patch is censoring text strings, it's expected that when more experimentation with the patch is performed, entire hosts, newsgroups, and IRC servers will be found to be blocked off.

This latest move by the Scientology cult is a new one and, like much of what they do, is expected to be another "foot bullet." Already the media has picked up on the last "foot bullet;" the global spam that their followers were instructed to copy-and-paste to their web space. The media will doubtless cover this latest move to keep their followers from learning what Scientology is all about.

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