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Project Chanology in Wired
The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
By Julian Dibbell

The Scientologists can't follow one simple bit of Internet wisdom: Don't feed the trolls.

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site's mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like "I Can Has Cheezburger?" to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley's ghastly "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world's injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the "only ones who can help" at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

We all know most of this from the inside, but it's still worth reading.

Wired also has this bonus feature.

Scientology: The Web's First Copyright-Wielding Nemesis
By Julian Dibbell

But it turns out, curiously, that one of the most illuminating things you can know about Scientology is this: Its relationship to intellectual property is not quite your typical copyright holder's— let alone your typical religion's. Granted, spiritual traditions have always been great generators of what we nowadays call content (the Bible was the first best-seller and remains the biggest), but it's hard to think of any that has made both the legal fact and the economic logic of intellectual property as central to its doctrine as Scientology does.

To be a practicing Scientologist is to rely, at every step of a long, steep climb to enlightenment, on paid access to some piece or another of the church's copyright-protected "tech"— the several million words of instruction left behind by L. Ron Hubbard not only in heavily marketed self-help books like Dianetics and Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, but in secret texts revealed only at the highest and most expensive levels of progression. "Scientology and Dianetics are technologies that work if applied exactly," says the church-produced handbook What Is Scientology? "If they are altered, the results will not be uniform. For this reason, the writings of the Church are protected by copyright and the words and symbols which represent the technology are protected by trademarks."

For Scientologists, in other words, enforcing the church's intellectual property rights isn't just a business practice, it's an article of faith. And it's this curious distinction that— years before Metallica's Lars Ulrich shook his fist at Napster or the MPAA's Jack Valenti battled online prescreener leaks— made Scientology the Internet's first copyright-wielding nemesis.