STALKING THE NET

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 the court file out 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 a 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 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's, Lerma was also a newly appointed member of FACTNet's board of directors.