Small war on internet -- entire population of China cut off
The internet feed to China was swamped earlier this month as netizens rushed to obtain the documents at the heart of the legal battle between the Church of Scientology and the Usenet community [OnLine, August 10]. The system administrator of a Beijing site was forced to remove them, remarking "Well, it's been flattering to have half the web pages in the world pointing at our ftp directory, but our lowly 64Kbps trunk has taken a severe beating in the process. Demand for the scientology documents was seriously affecting international public network access for the entire country."
Freedom-of-expression campaigners hold that the documents -- which set out doctrines of Co$'s more advanced and much more expensive levels of membership -- are now public domain, having been entered into the court record in the Californian Fishman case. They have therefore been making them available on internet sites -- in China, and also in Finland, France, Germany, and all over the Americas.
The site at Carnegie-Mellon university has withdrawn them while lawyers look at the competing claims of Co$' copyright and open justice. But you can still get details of the case, pointers to remaining sites, and an order form for the documents on paper at $36.50, from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/.
Meanwhile, there's been another spate of forged cancellation messages, attempting to remove articles quoting the Co$ documents from Usenet news-groups. Campaigners are re-activating the "lazarus" programme, designed automatically to replace the cancelled messages from news sites which still hold them.
And, just to make the already bizarre ludicrous, the senders of the articles are receiving form letters apparently from Helena Kobrin, Co$' attorney on the case, threatening legal action -- but these letters are believed by many to be forgeries.
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Written:
18 August 1995
An edited and doubtless thus improved version of this article appeared in the Guardian OnLine section.
This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.