From: lawrence@factnet.org (Lawrence Wollersheim) Date: Sun, 26 Mar 95 17:58 MST SUBJECT: EMERGENCY MESSAGE TO INTERNET USERS INTERESTED IN PROTECTING FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET FROM LAWRENCE WOLLERSHEIM CO-DIRECTOR OF FACTNET For those of you unfamiliar with me I am a co-director of the United States non profit 501(c)(3) victim advocacy organization and electronic library and archive called FACTNet. We provide electronic information on dangerous cultic groups like Jonestown, Waco, the Swiss Solar Temple, and Scientology. Lately we have focused on public records and research information on Scientology because of the dangerousness of this group, its economic size, and its worldwide history of criminality. Scientology has responded to our collecting and electronic making available of these public records by threatening our organization with 4 lawsuits using three different law firms covering everything from copyright infringement to libel and slander. They have followed and intimidated our staff, attempted to infiltrate to possibly sabotage our organization, threatened our Internet Web page provider with a lawsuit, and they have even threatened to sue our secure mail and offices services provider (Mail Boxes Ect.) if they even send out another fax out for us. Through Scientology's now notorious overt and covert operations (just one was as widespread anonymous mailings calling FACTNet's Board of Directors and network associates everything from criminals, perverts, con men, CIA operatives to insane) Scientology seems to be taking every step to destroy our ability to archive and preserve public records and research and make those records available to the public who wants them now or who will want this information in the future. Over the past year FACTNet has been able to survive this onslaught, but we are a small humbly funded all volunteer organization and are getting to the point that if our insurance premium is raised because of all these new threatened lawsuits we will not be able to continue to exist. (We are paying $1,000 a month in insurance now.) We also are concerned the library and archive may soon be made unavailable to the public because we believe that we are about to be raided and our equipment seized. We believe Scientology is preparing to do a search and seizure of our premises based on false affidavits and illegal applications of copyright law as it applies to religious freedom. This raid expectation is not at all paranoid. This just happened to Dennis Erlick a outspoken Scientology Internet critic. Although our organization is expendable and our staff have come to grips with we may be run out of operation by the nazi tactics of Scientology, the information in our library is NOT expendable and much of it is NOT replaceable. We urgently need you to help us frustrate this new "electronic book and library burning" evolution of Nazism for the 90's called Scientology. Do this by downloading as much of our library as you can to safe places around the world and helping get our report out. It is very important for you to help us tell the Internet and non internet world what is happening to us. Pass and copy this message to other BBS's, other libraries and library associations, and other Internet Newsgroups so that everyone who should know about this new Scientology form of electronic book and library burning and intimidation on the Net will be informed. (We simply do not know everyone to turn to and who is best out there that can help us frustrate Scientology's efforts to destroy our library and to curtail Internet freedom of information.) If others are informed maybe they will know what to do to creatively and ethically to show this neo nazi cult the power of free and open dialog and what will happen to them when brave individuals and brave coalitions are willing to fight for this valuable freedom which libraries and archives such as we at FACTNet help preserve. For those faint hearted who have heard what Scientology does to its critics, take heart. It is not generally known, but if you can last the harassment Scientology is horribly unsuccessful in the courts. It really has NO victories other than intimidating critics by spending or scaring them into silence. Like cowards Scientology usually only attacks those who have no insurance or whom they believe are weak or they can intimidate or wear down. I do not say the following lightly or for effect. Scientology really IS the new face of Nazism, a "white" collar new evolution of Nazism drawn in substantial part from the worst of the secret society principles and occultism of the old Nazism. (FACTNet has a report coming out soon on all the details of this.) For those of you who understand what Nazism does if it is not resisted and understand the "NEVER AGAIN" painful lessons learned from the rise of the first generation of Nazism we invite you to stand with FACTNet to stop or frustrate this ruthless organization's efforts before it destroys our library. If you are going to help you must act now! We have only a matter of a few weeks left before we may loose our insurance be forced to go off line because of Scientology's activities. Begin downloading all of or the best of our library so the information is preserved. Our direct BBS # in the U.S. is 1-303-530-1942. Call this number and follow the instructions on the screen. (There is no downloading charge and the downloading is unlimited.) Thank you for your help, ideas and courage in advance, Lawrence Wollersheim HOW TO GET FACTNet'S FILES If you are going to help, you must act now! We have only a few weeks before we may be forced by Scientology's activities to go off line. Our direct BBS # is 1-303-530-1942. There is no downloading charge and the downloading is unlimited. Please provide this material to as many other BBS's and ftp sites as possible. First download a file called INDEX2.TXT. This ASCII file contains descriptions which "translate" the cryptic names under which files are stored on our hard disk. You will need this file as a "roadmap" through the information you download. After you have INDEX2.TXT, there are three ways to go. 1. Read INDEX2.TXT and locate specific files that interest you. Call the FACTNet BBS and download those specific files. Files with the .TXT extension are ASCII and may be used as downloaded. Compressed files (smaller, faster downloads) are compressed with the DOS program PKZIP.EXE and have a .ZIP extension. You must unzip them with PKUNZIP.EXE. If you do not have a DOS system, either download ASCII or try to find our files on somebody's ftp site. [Note from Stanton McCandlish, mech@eff.org: the Unix clone of pkunzip, called simply unzip, will handle that as well. PKZIP-compatible archivers are available for almost all platforms. There are quite a few for Mac, at least one (stzip) for Atari, InfoZip (aka 'zip') for Unix, VMS and OS/2, etc.] 2. Read INDEX2.TXT and locate specific directories that interest you. Each directory contains a .ZIP file which contains all of the text files in that directory. Call the FACTNet BBS and download the specific .ZIP files that you want. Before you unzip them, copy each one into its own directory so you won't wind up with hundreds of files all mixed together with no organization. The DOS directory structure is as follows: \pcb All of the BBS is under this directory. \pcb\conference The main board conference is in a directory called GEN. There are others at this level for Scientology, Moon, Lenz, etc. \pcb\conference\files This directory is required but it contains files only in those conferences whose files are not further subdivided. \pcb\conference\files\filearea Subdivisions of this conference's files. For example, the Scientology conferences has subdivisions for Professional, Legal, Index, etc. files, all under the "Scientology" conference. In rare cases there may be further subdivision. 3. Download the one file, ALLTEXT.ZIP, which contains all the other .ZIP files assembled for a single download. It contains its own directory information, so UNZIP it with the -d switch. The entire BBS directory structure will be created under the directory in which you unzip it. You will still have to unzip the individual .ZIP files which you will find in each directory. This file is about thirteen megabytes in size. Be sure you have enough disk space and a fast modem. This .ZIP contains only text files. There are no image files of scanned documents. We have hundreds of megabytes of those. The uncompressed total for all the text files is about 48 megabytes. The compressed file is about thirteen megabytes. The directory structure is necessary for the result to be useful. Get it out in the world and then keep redistributing it by ftp, tape, or any means possible. Bob Penny ---------------- From: Bob Penny Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Library week: about threats against FACTNet, from lw Date: Fri, 14 Apr 95 16:23:51 -0500 Message-ID: THE SCIENTOLOGY CULT'S CONTINUING EFFORTS TO DESTROY THE FACTNet ELECTRONIC LIBRARY AND HISTORIC PRESERVATIONAL ARCHIVE April 14, 1995 In national library week, it is appropriate to update the Internet on the ongoing and escalating attack on FACTNet, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) electronic library and historic preservational archive. FACTNet provides and preserves electronic and non-electronic public information and research on dangerous cultic groups such as Jonestown, the Branch Davidians (Waco), the Swiss Solar Temple, and Scientology. I will begin by listing some of the secret "sacred scriptures," policies, and tactics employed by Scientology. This will help put Scientology's actions against our library and archive into an understandable frame of reference. "[An enemy] may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist... may be tricked, sued, lied to, or destroyed." -- from the words of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, in the organization's HCO policy letter of 18 October 1967, known as the "Fair Game Policy." "The purpose of a lawsuit is to harass and discourage rather than to win... Don't ever defend. Always attack. Find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace. Originate a black PR campaign to destroy the person's repute and to discredit them so thoroughly that they will be ostracized. "The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease... If possible, of course, ruin him utterly." -- from "A Manual on the Dissemination of Material" (1955) by L. Ron Hubbard "It is my specific intention that by the use of professional PR [black PR] tactics any opposition not only be dulled but permanently eradicated." -- from a confidential Board Policy Letter of 30 May 1974, titled "Handling Hostile Agents/Dead Agenting" "Threat and mystery are the lot of intelligence." -- from HCO Policy Letter of 11 May 1971 "The purpose of the legal officer is to help LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] handle every legal, government, suit, accounting and tax contact or action for the organization and by himself or employed representative, to protect the organization and its people from harm and to bring the greatest possible confusion and loss to its enemies." -- from Vol. 7 of Scientology's OEC, titled "Executive Division" For more information on Scientology's notorious overt and covert operations against its perceived enemies, read our 144 page report called "Scientology's Policies Toward its Adversaries." This document can be downloaded from FACTNet's BBS (303-530-1942) or ftp site at rmii.com (ftp/pub2/factnet). The filename is APP3.TXT. ABOUT SCIENTOLOGY'S ATTACK ON FACTNet 1. Scientology has threatened FACTNet as a corporation with four lawsuits using three different law firms. The threatened suits cover everything from copyright infringement to libel and slander. Scientology's actions have thus far consisted only of intimidation; they have not followed up on ANY of these suits. We believe their intent is to scare our insurance companies into dropping us or raising our rates far beyond the $1,000 a month we already pay. 2. Scientology is suing a current member of FACTNet's Board of Directors, Jon Atack, in England, trying to drive him bankrupt with legal expenses in a frivolous and malicious lawsuit. 3. Scientology is suing a former member of FACTNet's Board of Directors, Gerald Armstrong, in the US, to prevent him from saying anything about Scientology in the future. Scientology has asked the court for a preposterous and over-broad court order that would remove ALL information about Scientology "from any and all databases, electronic or otherwise, within the possession, custody or control of FACTNet." We believe that Scientology's purpose in requesting this over-broad order is preparation for approaching a different and uninformed judge to rush to authorize a raid on FACTNet's library and archive to enforce the order (in the way that they did in the case of Dennis Erlich and Netcom). The Erlich case is discussed in the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology. 4. Scientology appears to be buying up the 10-15 year old debts of another current member of FACTNet's Board of Directors, debts that Scientology itself was completely or partially responsible for causing according to a court decision against Scientology almost 10 years ago. It appears Scientology is trying to repeat a tactic it used recently against two other critics, buying up and forclosing on outstanding debts to threaten the critic with bankruptcy. 5. Scientology agents have stalked, intimidated and continued to "fair game" harass our staff in spite of repeatedly being warned to stay away from everyone in our organization and their families and friends. 6. Scientology agents or members have called potential FACTNet financial donors and threatened that if they support FACTNet they could get in trouble. The potential donors were also told that any money they gave would be misused personally by one of FACTNet's directors. 7. Scientology agents or members may have attempted to infiltrate our electronic library and hardcopy archive to sabotage our organization by hacking through our BBS's security system or by surreptitiously placing incriminating documents into our archive. 8. Scientology agents or members threatened to sue our Internet WWW (World Wide Web) page provider if they continued to provide web page services to our library (the web page was cancelled). 9. Scientology agents or members threatened to sue our secure mail and office services provider (Mail Boxes Ect.) if they so much as send another fax for us. 10. Scientology agents or members have initiated a widespread anonymous black PR smear mailing. In this document, FACTNet's Board of Directors and network associates are called everything from criminals, perverts, con men, and CIA operatives, to insane. We recommend you view this document for yourself to see the level of personal and organization attack our library is under. The file ANTIFACT.TXT can be downloaded from our BBS or ftp site. 11. Using the same smear tactics, Scientology has repeatedly written the IRS in an effort to get our nonprofit educational status canceled. A Scientology training document for teaching a person to lie effectively, called TR-L (Training Routine, Lying), will give you further insight into how far Scientology will go to smear a perceived enemy. TR-L is reproduced in the FACTNet publication cited earlier. Scientology seems to be taking every step to destroy our ability to archive and preserve public records and research and make those records available to the public who want them now or who will want this information in the future. Their strategy against FACTNet and its principals is everything I was told would happen. One of Scientology's former top intelligence operatives summarized the essence of their intelligence strategy for unconditional victory over any adversary. Their "sacred scripture" in this case is a book of military and espionage strategy by Sun Tzu called the "Art of War." It is used as a basic training manual in the church for its intelligence people and in most international intelligence agencies. The following principles come from the "Art of War." 1. Destroy any and every type of personal or financial resource the adversary could use to support their attack efforts. 2. Completely isolate the target. Isolate, destroy or "dead agent" any and every ally or alliance of the adversary which could be of any type of support - personal, familial, financial, professional, etc. 3. Destroy the adversary's reputation with black PR or dis-information. 4. Destroy their emotional and psychological sanity and ability to continue by constant hammering. 5. Keep doing 1-4, NOT just until the attack is stopped, but ideally until you have insured the adversary will never have any future capacity or inclination to mount any future attack. WHY SCIENTOLOGY IS ATTACKING FACTNet SO VEHEMENTLY 1. Lately we have focused more efforts on gathering and preserving the public records and research information on Scientology. Evidence is accumulating of the group's dangerousness, of casualties among its members, its economic size, and its worldwide history of criminality. 2. Our library was established on two concepts that are the antithesis of Scientology's totalitarian structure. Those two principles are: a) A democratic society runs on the Jeffersonian concept that man is a rational animal and that democracy will work if citizens are allowed to be rational. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." John Dewey wrote, "The human power to respond to reason and truth protects democracy." Democracy cannot work unless we protect the individual's capacity for rationality. Good decision-making depends on the availability and quality of information and on free and unimpaired use of one's rational faculties. Our library provides and preserves information that will be required in the future to make good choices about Scientology. b) FACTNet runs on a solid belief in the value and merit of the open information and dialog process as brilliantly stated by John Stuart Mill in the second chapter of his essay, "On Liberty." In this chapter on freedom of thought and discussion, Mill is concerned with the pursuit of truth. With truth as the ultimate goal to be achieved, he advocates toleration of competing doctrines and opinions so that, when all are fairly considered and submitted to arguments pro and con, the truth is more likely to be discovered. Mill advocates toleration of individuals who differ in thought and speech, but not tolerance for competing doctrines or opinions as if they were all equally acceptable or preferable. He does not look upon pluralism with respect to matters of truth in the same way that he looks upon pluralism with respect to matters of taste. Here are some crucial passages on liberty of thought and discussion from Chapter 2 of Mill's essay, "On Liberty." "But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. . . . We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate. "First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. "Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. "Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. "And not only this, but fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but encumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience." FACTNet's library encourages the process of open dialog. Thousands of former members, media people, lawyers, family members, and government investigators have used our library to gather critical competing information to balance against whatever information Scientology reveals about itself. THE RESULT OF SCIENTOLOGY'S TOTAL ATTACK ON US We are concerned that any day our library and archive may be made unavailable to the public. We have reason to believe that we may be raided and our equipment seized OR that we will have to shut down because it will be impossible to survive much longer under such all-out warfare on every aspect of our organization. This raid-and-seizure expectation is not at all paranoid. This just happened to Dennis Erlich, an outspoken critic of Scientology. For full details on the Scientology raid against Dennis Erlich, see the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology or e-mail your questions to "dennis.l.erlich@support.com". FACTNet (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network, Inc.) will continue to fight on as long as we can, but we need your help and we need it now! WHAT YOU CAN DO 1. Our organization is expendable. Our staff have come to grips with the possibility of organizational demise and personal harassment. But the information in our library is NOT expendable and much of it is NOT replaceable. We urgently need you to help us frustrate this new "electronic book and library burning." Download as much of our library as you can to safe places around the world. Help us get our story out. Since our first request for help, several other libraries and archives have contacted us to help preserve our documents but much more needs to be transferred out while we are still in operation. We thank those of you who are putting our library on other ftp sites and on other web pages. You can downloading either individual files or a variety of packages in .ZIP file (compressed) format. Call our BBS at (303) 530-1942 and follow the instructions on the screen. For a limited time, we will maintain a ftp site at rmii.com (ftp/pub2/factnet). There is no downloading charge and the downloading is unlimited. The above refers to text files. In compressed form, all of the text can be downloaded as a single 14 Mb .ZIP file. But most of our data is in IMAGE FILE format (multi-page group 4 .TIF). We have more than three GIGABYTES of image files. We look forward to someone's solution to the problem of how to make this quantity of multi-page .TIFs (which is only a beginning) accessible on a web page. When the time comes, this data will be available on CD ROM. 2. Tell the Internet and non-Internet world what is happening to us. Pass and copy this message to other BBS's, other libraries and library associations, and other Internet newsgroups so that everyone who should know will be informed about Scientology's electronic book and library burning and intimidation on the Net. Some major media have contacted us and are beginning to tell what is happening, but it may be too little too late unless these and other stories break soon. 3. Some unsolicited donations have come in to help with our legal, security, and data transfer expenses but much more is needed. We are trying to get what could be millions of pages of materials into new archives and quickly scan the most important for secure preservation. If you are going to help, you must act now! We have only a little time left before we may lose our insurance and be forced to go offline because of Scientology's activities. In closing, I ask you to think of how you would cope without help if everything that was happening to us was happening to you and your organization. Consider the secret goals of Scientology as described in their own documents which were seized by the F.B.I. in its authorized search of Scientology's headquarters. "The vital targets on which we must invest most of our time are: (T1) Depopularizing the enemy to the point of obliteration. (T2) Taking over the control or allegiance of the heads or proprietors of all news media. (T3) Taking over the control or allegiance of key political figures. (T4) Taking over the control or allegiance of those who monitor international finance and shifting them to a less precarious standard." -- from Guardian Order 060971, titled "Targets" "The goal of the department [of government affairs] is to bring the government and hostile philosophies or societies into a state of complete compliance with the goals of Scientology. This is done by a high level ability to control and in its absence by a low level ability to OVERWHELM. Introvert such agencies. Control such agencies...." -- from Hubbard's OEC Vol. 7 titled "Executive Division" (caps added for emphasis) "Intelligence is not concentrating on what they should be - the WFMH [World Federation of Mental Health], the NAMH [National Association of Mental Health] - These are the groups I want destroyed... "Thus in the case of Scientology Orgs [organizations] one should attack with the end view of taking over the whole field of mental health... "Our war has been forced to become, to take over absolutely the field of mental healing on the planet in all forms..." -- from Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter of 14 Jan 1969 Please copy and forward this message to all Internet groups which deal with library associations and archives. Also inform groups which deal with free speech, legal issues and journalism and media issues on the Internet. Thank you in advance for your help, ideas and courage. Lawrence Wollersheim "lawrence@factnet.org" for the Board of Directors of FACTNet Inc. This document is available on FACTNet's BBS and ftp site under the name LIBRARY.TXT