Westword (Denver, Colorado weekly)
October 4, 1995
SHOWDOWN IN CYBERSPACE
The battle over Scientology's secrets ignites a holy war on the Internet.
By Alan Prendergast
Copyright 1995 by New Times, Inc.
Lawrence Wollersheim's hands shake as he reads his notes, ticking off the damage
done to his computers. Surrounding the 46-year-old Boulder resident is a cluster
of reporters and, beyond that, a ring of glowering, dark-suited men (and one
woman wearing a clerical collar), all packed into a hallway of the federal
courthouse in downtown Denver. Drifting from the larger ring into the smaller
one is the dapper, silver-haired Heber Jentzsch, president of the Church of
Scientology International.
"It will take us months to repair the damage," Wollersheim says.
"Larry, don't lie like this," Jentzsch says, moving closer.
"The databases are so corrupted that we can't even defend ourselves,"
Wollersheim says.
"Totally false," Jentzsch snaps, now nose-to-nose with Wollersheim.
"Will you get out of my face?" Wollersheim bellows. "I'm talking here."
"You are the criminal who stole from us," Jentzsch thunders back. "A thief will
scream very loudly."
Attorneys break up the confrontation before it can get any uglier. Call it a
draw, this latest round between Wollersheim and the Church of Scientology, the
far-flung religious empire founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
A practicing Scientologist for most of the Seventies, since 1980 Wollersheim has
been locked in legal battles with the Church, which he claims used coercive
tactics to try to keep him in the fold and then harassed him and destroyed his
business. In 1986 a jury awarded him $30 million in damages against the Church's
California branch for "infliction of emotional injury." The award was reduced to
$2.5 million on appeal; he has yet to collect. The trial judge found that the
California church transferred "virtually all of its assets" to other entities
before the trial began; Wollersheim says his attorneys are still trying to
"pierce the corporate veil" in the Golden State.
But these days Wollersheim has more to worry about than his uncollected
judgement. "Imagine if someone was mad at you," he says, "and went to a judge
and [accused you of ] stealing something, and went through all your personal
belongings--your personal records, journals, all that stuff. And took it. The
court didn't take it. Your worst enemy took it. And they're going to come
after you with it. Well, that's what happened here."
Six weeks ago a team of Church representatives and computer experts, escorted by
federal marshals, raided Wollersheim's apartment and the Niwot home of Robert
Penny, another ex- Scientologist. The group seized several computers, hundreds
of diskettes, and thousands of pages of documents--effectively pulling the plug
on the Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network (FACTNet), a nonprofit computer
archive and bulletin-board system Wollersheim and Penny launched three years ago
to disseminate information on Scientology and other cult-like "new religions."
The raid, ordered by federal Judge Lewis Babcock, had been triggered by Church
complaints that FACTNet was violating copyright and trade secret laws. At issue
are the secret, upper-level scriptures of Scientology, which members of the
Church pay dearly to see--anywhere from $20,000 to nearly $300,000 in training
and counseling sessions, according to some ex-members. Church officials claim
that Wollersheim and Penny obtained stolen copies of its "Advanced Technology"
materials and conspired with other "lawless elements" in cyberspace to post
excerpts of the documents on the Internet.
Wollersheim, who disputes the legitimacy of the Advanced Technology copyrights,
insists he obtained the materials legally and never placed them on the Internet.
The real reason for the raid, he says, was to rummage through confidential
FACTNet files and to put his archive out of business.
"They want to drive us under," he says. "They know we're on the edge, and if
they keep the equipment away from us for a few weeks, we can't get to our
mailing lists to talk to our donors, and we can't pay our bills."
Three weeks after the raid, in a startling turnabout from Judge Babcock's
earlier order, Judge John Kane ruled in favor of FACTNet, denying the Church's
efforts to obtain a preliminary injunction against the operation and ordering
all of Wollersheim's and Penny's equipment returned. The two men got their
computers back last week, but they're hardly celebrating; two of the computer
hard drives had been replaced with new ones that had all the disputed documents
deleted.
FACTNet attorney Tom Kelley immediately filed a motion to have the Church found
in contempt of Kane's order. Wollersheim says he's most concerned about the
encrypted files on the hard drives that are still in the Church's
possession--files having to do with Scientologists or ex-Scientologists who
committed suicide, he says, as well as the identity and location of high- level
"defectors" from the Church. "If they crack the encryption, we'll have to assess
the damage and start contacting people," he sighs.
California-based Church attorney Helena Kobrin denies any Scientology effort to
crack confidential files. "We went to great pains not to alter anything on the
original drives so they could be maintained as evidence of what was seized," she
says. Church officials argue that they shouldn't have to return the Advanced
Technology documents, since to do so would violate a religious belief that the
scriptures "cannot be surrendered to apostates."
But the underlying issues in the case extend far beyond the fate of five
computers and a few gigabytes of data. The FACTNet raid is part of a larger
pattern of lawsuits, computer seizures, threats, attacks and
counterattacks--what amounts to an online battle royal over Scientology's
secrets, complete with allegations of espionage, sabotage and forgery--that has
been heating up the Internet for months.
Most of the combatants tend to be allies of Scientology or its most virulent
critics. But others have become embroiled in the controversy, too, from skittish
Internet access providers and vengeful hackers to befuddled judges--who are
being asked to apply traditional laws concerning copyright and fair use to a
medium in which one user can instantly "publish" hundreds of pages of material
to thousands of other users around the globe, to be browsed, copied, edited or
ridiculed at will.
Pitting claims of religious rights and copyright protection against claims of
free speech, the brawl seems made for the Internet. Discussion of the case is
spilling over from the frenetic Scientology "newsgroup" (an electronic mail
discussion area) to other forums dealing with "Net abuse," censorship and
related issues. For the first time, many users lured to online services by the
promise of a global village of chat and commerce are discovering the dark side
of the screen--an arcane and disturbing world of Cancelbunnies and strategic
spammers, free-zoners and dead agents (see related story, below). [NOTE: This is
in a separate posting.]
Kobrin, who has fired off e-mail legal warnings to people who have cited as few
as six lines of Hubbard's copyrighted, unpublished works on the Internet, says
the dispute has nothing to do with free speech. "There are those out there who
are trying to make this into, 'The Church is trying to stop its critics,'" she
notes. "We've filed three lawsuits. If we were going after critics, we'd have
many more lawsuits than that. We're going after strictly intellectual property
violations."
Wollersheim, though, sees the case as a kind of referendum on the future of the
Internet. "Scientology has put the first heavy footprint on the Internet, and
this case is going to determine who else will speak out in the social advocacy
groups," he says. "If Scientology is able to stomp on us and remove us, the
whole capabilities of the Net come into question."
Founded in 1954 in Los Angeles, the Church of Scientology now claims a worldwide
membership of eight million people, including such high-profile parishioners as
John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart
Simpson) and at least one member of Congress--Sonny Bono of Palm Springs.
Detractors estimate membership to be much lower, but whatever the actual
numbers, Scientology has managed to survive decades of media exposes, civil
suits, and one major criminal proceeding. In the early 1980s eleven top Church
officials, including Hubbard's wife Mary Sue, were convicted of plotting
break-ins, wiretaps and other crimes to thwart government probes of the group;
the Church claims it has since cleaned house. After a mountain of litigation
dating back to the 1960s, the Internal Revenue Service finally restored the
Church's tax-exempt status in 1993, six years after Hubbard's death.
Anyone with a few bucks and a few hours to kill can embark on the road to
Scientology by reading a copy of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health, Hubbard's best-selling manifesto, first published in 1950. After
that, the process of rising through the spiritual ranks of Scientology becomes
increasingly complex--and expensive.
At the most basic level, the Church's teachings involve undergoing a process of
"auditing" with a polygraph-like device known as an E-meter in order to identify
and conquer traumatic and inhibiting thoughts, known as engrams, and unlock
human potential. Auditing sessions can cost up to $1,000 an hour, but the Church
says the process eventually allows parishioners to "go clear," achieving a state
of spiritual freedom known as Operating Thetan.
Scientology's upper-level teachings are less well-known. The Advanced Technology
documents have to do with training the Operating Thetan to attain even higher
levels of spiritual consciousness and to rid oneself of "body thetans," the
spirits of aliens exiled to Earth 75 million years ago as a result of galactic
war.
Church officials say they've gone to great lengths to safeguard the Advanced
Technology writings, which were authored by Hubbard beginning in the mid-1960s
and released to the Church hierarchy (but never published) over a period of
years. According to court filings, the materials are available "only to those
who have attained the proper level of spiritual enlightenment," who must view
them under tight security at one of seven churches around the world. Users must
sign a confidentiality agreement specifying they won't divulge what they've
learned. (Both Wollersheim and Penny apparently signed such agreements but
contend they're invalid.)
The only way the documents have ever left the possession of the Church,
officials say, is through trickery or outright theft. In one infamous incident,
two dissidents, impersonating Scientology brass, visited the Church's Copenhagen
offices and walked out with the materials unchallenged.
But certain key details of Scientology's secrets have also found their way into
the public record through other means, including news accounts and court filings
by ex-members seeking damages from the Church. After hearings on the matter last
month, Judge Kane concluded that the materials "have come into the public
domain by numerous means" and could not be considered trade secrets under
Colorado law.
"The stuff's been leaking out since 1968, when Hubbard first came up with it,"
says Robert V. Young, a former Scientology spokesman who testified on FACTNet's
behalf.
Yet even when portions of the materials have surfaced in public records, the
Church has moved swiftly to suppress them. A few years ago one of Wollersheim's
attorneys was successful in having some of the documents entered in a court file
in California, but hundreds of Scientologists mobbed the courthouse in an
attempt to bar media access to the file. One Los Angeles Times reporter
apparently beat the blockade before the judge sealed the records.
The Church was less successful in the case of Steven Fishman, an ex-member who'd
been slapped with a libel suit (since dropped) for statements made to
Time magazine alleging that Scientology officials had ordered him to kill
his psychiatrist. In 1993 Fishman attached more than a hundred pages of
exhibits, including Advanced Technology materials that he claimed to have
purchased from another Scientologist, to an affidavit in his case; the affidavit
has become known in anti-Scientology circles as "the Fishman papers."
Helena Kobrin describes Fishman as "a scam artist" who served time in federal
prison "for mail fraud and also for obstruction of justice." At least part of
the Fishman papers, two documents that claim to be "briefings" for Operating
Thetan Level VIII, are forgeries, she says.
Placing Hubbard's secret writings in the court file didn't invalidate their
copyright, but it did put the Advanced Technology at risk of exposure to
outsiders. Despite attempts by Church attorneys to have them sealed by the
court, the Fishman papers remained a matter of public record for two years--but
were not easily accessible to the public. To protect its copyrighted materials,
the Church sent members to take out the court file every day. "Those records
have been very, very, very carefully guarded," Kobrin says.
Wollersheim suggests some dissidents may have obtained copies of the Fishman
papers by mail order; instructions for ordering the documents from the court
clerk surfaced on the Internet months ago. But Kobrin insists that
Scientologists never let the file out of their sight until August 14 of this
year, when a Washington Post reporter broke through the embargo in person
and obtained a copy of the Fishman papers. The next day the judge in the case
agreed to seal the file, pending judicial review.
Even before the Post got its copy of the documents, though, the genie was
out of the bottle--and onto the Internet.
+ + +
Nobody can sue the Internet. The information it carries doesn't originate in one
place, and no one party is responsible for transmitting it. But the global
network is more than simply a cloud of electrons; despite all the cyberbunk
that's been written about it, the Net is rapidly developing its own culture,
identity--and legal problems.
Last February attorneys for two Scientology-related corporations obtained a
search warrant and restraining order against an ex-Scientology minister, Dennis
Erlich, and seized computer equipment from his California home that was
allegedly used to post Advanced Technology materials on the Internet. The Church
also filed suit against Erlich, the operator of the bulletin board he was using,
and the board's service provider, Netcom.
Days earlier, police in Finland had visited a remailer--a service that allows
computer users to post e-mail anonymously--and demanded the true identity of
another alleged violator of Scientology's copyrights. The twin raids, along with
threats of legal action directed at other system operators, soon touched off a
firestorm of protest from tech-heads concerned about privacy, free speech and
the rights of third parties who were being dragged into the dispute.
In an open letter to the Church of Scientology, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a group that advocates civil liberties in cyberspace, protested that
most online service providers are "small operators who cannot afford protracted
litigation, even if they are in the right. The mere threat of a lawsuit could
result in some [administrators] refusing to carry all sorts of contentious
newsgroups simply because they could not afford to put on a case to show that
they could not be held responsible for another party's alleged wrong."
EFF attorney Shari Steele says her organization is also concerned about the
broad scope of the search in the Erlich case and in the subsequent raids on
FACTNet. "They can't just take everything," she says. "It's like seizing an
entire file cabinet. That's clearly not acceptable under the Fourth Amendment.
They need to identify what they're looking for, go through that file cabinet on
the premises, and take the specific documents that are applicable...To go on a
fishing expedition is not legally justifiable."
Peter Beruk, litigation manager for the Software Publishers Association, says
that raids on computer operators are becoming less common, even in criminal
software piracy investigations. "It's an option we use only when we feel that
information is going to be destroyed," he says. "When we have done it, we've
always limited ourselves to walking away with paper. If you can print out
what's on the hard drive, why walk away with the whole computer?"
But the posting of Hubbard's teachings was no ordinary piracy case, and
Scientology attorneys soon discovered that even walking away with entire
computers couldn't stop the flow. In the first three days of August the Fishman
papers again surfaced on the Internet--this time courtesy of a Virginia
audio-video technician named Arnaldo Lerma. An ex-Scientologist who had once
been romantically linked with a daughter of L. Ron Hubbard, Lerma was also a
newly appointed member of FACTNet's board of directors.
According to Wollersheim, FACTNet had two sets of Advanced Technology
documents--one obtained in his own lawsuit against the Church, and another sent
to him by a defense attorney in the Fishman case, in which he served as a
consultant. And he had no intention of making either one accessible to users of
his own archives, let alone the Internet.
"I've had that material since 1984," he says. "I could have given it out, posted
it, published it, but I decided the wrath of these people wasn't worth it. Arnie
was a new director--15 days on the job. He made the right decision at the wrong
time."
Wollersheim says Lerma obtained his copy of the Fishman papers from some other
source; in asworn deposition, Lerma stated he wasn't sure who sent it to him but
assumed it came from FACTNet. Regardless of the source, Lerma's decision to post
the Fishman papers caused a sensation on the Net, particularly among "newbies"
unfamiliar with the earlier postings.
All along Church officials have contended that their opponents have infringed
their copyrights in order to ridicule Scientology beliefs, cause the Church
economic harm, and desecrate Hubbard's message by taking it out of context. But
Lerma and other dissenters have argued that it's precisely because of the claims
of distortion that Hubbard's secret writing must be brought to light--that no
summary or paraphrase of the upper-level teachings has quite the impact in a
religious debate as the founder's own words.
At least some of what Lerma posted concerning the cosmology of "body thetans"
had been reported before in some fashion. What seems to have stirred the most
response from readers were disclosures concerning the intensive training
routines for the Operating Thetan, including an exercise that involves
attempting to communicate with plants and animals "until you know the
communication is received, and, if possible, returned." Even more controversial
is a passage in the disputed Level VIII documents that debunks major religions
as instruments of "enslavement" and depicts Jesus as "a lover of young boys and
men...given to uncontrollable bursts of temper and hatred."
Although Church officials have emphatically denounced the OT VIII materials as
fakes, Wollersheim insists they're legitimate. "Two sets of defectors, at
different times in different parts of the world, came out with those documents,"
he says. "I've been working with defectors for 15 years. I have never dealt
with anyone as afraid of having their identity revealed as the people who came
out and verified those documents."
Nine days after the materials went out on the Internet, federal marshals raided
Lerma's home and seized his computers. Three days later--the same day a judge in
California sealed the Fishman papers--Wollersheim and Penny issued a press
release affirming their support of Lerma's actions and accusing the Church of
trying to hack through FACTNet's security system and "place incriminating
documents into our archives."
The lengthy screed went on to urge "volunteers" to "immediately begin putting up
100-1000 times more Fishman affidavit type public records on Scientology into
world wide distribution on the Internet. Scientology needs to learn that
attacking critics, illegal and immoral raids do not work any more."
If Wollersheim was trying to put a stop to the raids, he had a strange way of
going about it. Kobrin says that the taunting press release, promising massive
distribution of the Fishman papers, prompted Scientology's attorneys to move
immediately against Wollersheim and Penny.
FACTNet had apparently prepared for such an eventuality. The organization
carried a million-dollar insurance policy that is now funding the pair's
defense. FACTNet required its users to sign elaborate disclaimers governing the
use of its electronic library. And, months before the raid, Wollersheim and
Penny had each posted a "Search Warrant Special Notice" in their homes advising
any law enforcement personnel of the presence of attorney-client privileged
materials on the premises. The advisory concluded: "Until you recontact the
issuing judge relating this information, under no conditions are you to enter
these premises without my or my attorney's presence or with any [off-duty] or
nongovernment official!"
The Scientologists who raided Wollersheim's apartment read the notice carefully.
So did the marshals. Then they pried off the lock to his bedroom door and took
away his computers.
What happened to FACTNet's computers after the raids in Colorado and Virginia is
still a matter of dispute. A federal judge in Virginia recently upbraided
Scientology attorneys for exceeding the scope of her search order in the Lerma
case by going through his computer files "willy-nilly."
In the Denver case, Scientology's computer experts claimed that their electronic
search was focused on "principally religious terms which are unique to the
scriptures of the Church" in order to locate infringing materials. But according
to court documents, the search was soon expanded to include a host of keywords,
including the names of prominent defectors from the Church, attorneys involved
in civil litigation against the Church, the judge in Wollersheim's successful
lawsuit, the e-mail pseudonyms of Church opponents such as "Capricorn" and
"Rogue Agent"-- even CAN, the acronym for the Cult Awareness Network.
Scientology attorneys say they took precautions to ensure that their clients
didn't view privileged legal and that the search was a proper inquiry into
copyright violations. "Any name that's on that list has had some connection to
a wrongful use of those materials," Kobrin says.
FACTNet attorney Tom Kelley believes the search had another objective. "It's
real obvious that this was an intelligence-gathering operation, not just a
search for infringing material," he says.
On the heels of Judge Kane's ruling, denying Scientology's bid for a preliminary
injunction and ordering the computers returned, Judge Lonnie Brinkema made a
similar decision in the Lerma case. Last week a judge in California ordered that
Dennis Erlich's computers be restored to him, too, even though his postings of
copyrighted material were deemed too massive to qualify as fair use.
Wollersheim says he won't know the "damage" done to FACTNet until he gets his
original hard drives back. His long struggle with the Church has clearly exacted
a toll, financially and psychologically--last year he told a reporter he was $1
million in debt, excluding attorney fees -- and may never be fully resolved.
("He is what he is," Kelley notes. "In some ways, he's never left the Church of
Scientology.") Yet the FACTNet case extends beyond what Wollersheim calls "our
pipsqueak operation."
Kane's ruling prohibits Wollersheim and Penny from making any copies of Advanced
Technology materials or distributing them "other than in the context of fair
use." But it may take the courts months to decide what constitutes fair use of
Hubbard's unpublished but much- discussed writings. The existing copyright laws,
last revised in 1976, weren't written with the Internet in mind. If posting a
copyrighted document is a crime, what about browsing it? What about putting a
link to it on your Web site, so that surfers can connect to another site in
another country that contains the document?
Wollersheim notes that Lerma posted 63 pages of Church documents out of more
than a thousand pages of such material. "Sixty-three pages--that's not even a
hiccup on the Internet," he says. "We need to redefine fair use in the new
cyberworld paradigm."
In the absence of new paradigms, the Fishman papers continue to roam the Net,
with Scientology's lawyers in hot pursuit. Last month Scientologists and local
police seized the equipment of an Internet provider in Amsterdam, after the
provider refused to delete an anonymous remailer who was using the site to post
the documents. Dutch outrage over the incident has spawned numerous other Web
sites offering access to the documents, including one link on a Dutch
legislator's home page. Some sites have removed the Fishman files at the
Church's request, but at least one server in Beijing took them down because
demand was so high that it was overwhelming the service.
Wollersheim says the Fishman papers "have now been translated, encrypted, and
hid just about anywhere you can imagine around the world. They can't stop them
fast enough. They tried to put out a fire with matches and gasoline."
He adds, "It's becoming a game for newbies. The first thing you learn when you
get on the Internet is where to find the Fishman papers."
One place you won't find them is on FACTNet's new hard drives. But Wollersheim
has a pretty good idea where to find the latest buzz on Scientology. "Watch
the Net," he says. "It works. It works."
END