By: DAVID RICE
Re: Tell The Net, Co$

Thursday, August 24, 1995 · Page E3
(C)1997 San Francisco Chronicle


ONLINE -- Want Everybody to Know? Tell the Net

Robert Rossney

It's awfully hard to keep something quiet once it gets online.
Combine easy duplication of information, near-instantaneous
communication all around the world and millions of people, and
you've got the most powerful tool for spilling secrets that
humankind has yet devised.

That bug in the Pentium processor, for instance. You know, the
once-in-a-billion-calculations error in the chip's floating-point
divide routines that dominated the business headlines last year.
That whole expensive public-relations nightmare started when a math
professor shared what he had found on Usenet. Within days, the whole
world knew.

Or consider the unhappy story of the enthusiastic young American
flier who sent e-mail to half a dozen colleagues after he
participated in the rescue of downed pilot Scott O'Grady from behind
the lines in Bosnia.

It's a thrilling story that builds to an emotional bang as the
pilots spot O'Grady: ``To hear comm like, `Basher 52, got you in
sight' was pretty moving, especially after thinking for most of the
week that Zulu was a mort. . . . I've never been choked up in the
jet before, but I was this morning.''

The pilot's message was so compelling that everyone who received a
copy seems to have cc'ed it to at least five other people, who all
passed it on to five more, and so on. And so our pilot found himself
in the unenviable position of having to explain to his commanding
officer why thousands of civilians around the world were suddenly
privy to remarkably intimate details of what this rescue operation
looked like from inside.

Nobody who passed this pilot's mail around seems to have been trying
to cause trouble for him. But when people online have a grudge,
watch out.

In the past few weeks, the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup on
Usenet has been home to the most incredible flame war I've ever
seen. People have been anonymously posting secret documents
belonging to the Church of Scientology to the newsgroup: internal
memos written by L. Ron Hubbard, excerpts from his ``Scientology: A
History of Man,'' and more. The results have been explosive.

The material itself is very complicated, and some of it is plain
hard to believe. The business about the evil carnival barkers and
the mechanical gorillas, for instance. Or humankind's universal
experience of the sadness that the clams felt trillions of years ago
when their young, grown upon their lips from clam spores, separated
from them and departed.

But these documents are more than weird: They're copyrighted. And
according to the Church of Scientology, they're trade secrets.

Forces friendly to the church have responded ferociously. As fast as
people post this stuff to Usenet, a program somewhere on the Net --
known variously as the CancelPoodle or the PoodleBot -- sends out
forged ``cancel messages'' to erase them.

Someone falsely claiming to be a customer called the Well and asked
them to remove postings alleged to contain copyrighted material from
a discussion of this affair. People who have posted small, six- line
excerpts from these materials to Usenet report receiving threatening
e-mail from the church's attorneys. It's a full-fledged information
war. And the battleground extends beyond the Net, out into the real
world. On August 12, U.S. marshals raided the Arlington, Va., home
of one Arnaldo Lerma and seized the computer that he is alleged to
have used to post copyrighted Scientology materials to the Net.
Attorneys for the Religious Technology Center are suing Lerma for,
as they put it, ``a statutory $100,000 for each of Lerma's
infringements.''

This seems only to have made things worse. People on Usenet tend to
be fundamentally committed to freedom of expression. That's why the
disputed materials have been showing up on publicly accessible
computers all over the world.

This is all good fun if, as many do, you look at Scientology as a
scam.

But if you look at Scientology as a religion, questions arise: Is it
ethical to trash someone's faith just because it sounds silly? When
the dust settles, we'll still have to face these questions.


... "ema aku uki ihi iha ari ihe eha ahi ima" -- Ballintaggert Stone
* Shy.David@EdenBBS.com
 * Origin: "She blinded me with science!" (1:124/9005)