Scientology vs the Internet

Scientology vs the Internet

Case 4

One of the reoccuring issues found within anonimity and the internet is the struggle to control the flow of information. If anonymous sources are distributing information, it becomes ever more difficult to an individual, or organization to control the dissemination of the information, or to prevent the dissemination all together.

The Church of Scientology is a religion stemming from the 1950 self help book “Dianetics” written by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.

http://www.religionfacts.com/scientology/history.htm

Dianetics is an alternative to traditional psychology that was rejected by both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. This did not stop Hubbard from combining his science fiction-esque creation myths with his own brand of self help to create a pay by the hour religion.

Scientology became a religion with various degrees of hiarchal status. There are many works of literature written or inspired by L Ron Hubbard's writtings that are only avalible to members of the church that have achieved a lofty status within the organization and have payed a significant amount of money over a defined amount of time.

With the gaining populatiry of the internet, specifically Usenet newsgroups, more and more of these secret Scientology writtings became avalible on the internet. On December 24^th, 1994 a large collection of Scientology documents appeared online, avable for free download by anyone. The literature in question was a collection of writtings by L Ron Hubbard himself discribing the creation myth belived by the Church of Scientology. One story caught the public's eye in particular, the story of Xenu.

http://www.religionfacts.com/scientology/beliefs.htm

“Xenu

In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. These events are known as "Incident II" or "The Wall of Fire," and the traumatic memories associated with them are known as the "R6 implant." The Xenu story prompted the use of the volcano as a Scientology symbol.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan Level III in 1967, famously warning that R6 was "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it."

Much controversy between the Church of Scientology and its critics has focused on Xenu. The Church avoids making mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story's confidentiality, including legal action on both copyright and trade secrecy grounds.

Critics claim that revealing the story is in the public interest, given the high prices charged for attaining the level of OT III. “

The following year the Church's legal team attempted to shut down the Usenet group associated with the secret Scientology doctrines. Stating grounds of copywrite infringement and strade secret violations they hoped to stiffle the matter and stop the flow of their expensive secrets to the general public. After a long struggle with no sign of success in sight the Church of Scientology came up with another solution in hopes of controling the spread of its Church's doctrines.

http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/15/44/News/feature.html

Scientology feeling like they were left with no other option began flooding online groups associated with the Church's secret writtings with pro-scientology messages, fake hate mail, rediculously irrelevant comments and a large varity of various consperasy theories associated with the Church. The hopes were with these kind of tactics was to make the chat rooms and the Usenet groups very un-user friendly.

Having failed to suppress the information leak, Scientology took measures to “protect” it's members of the Church. A new religious law was passed forcing members of Scientology to install a special software package onto their computers that would in essance block the user from accessing parts of the internet that published anti-Scientology views, or distributed text for free that the church deamed must be purchased from them.

In more recent times an online group calling themselves “Anoynomous” has waged an online war against the Church of Scientology.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/612153/anonymous_scientology_and_the_story.html

Anyone can be anybody

Case 3

Anyone can be anybody

My space and identity theft

With the evergrowing popularity of social networking sites, more and more people are planting their flag on some digital realestate on sites like myspace and facebook. With messenging services that far serpas traditional email, more and more people are switching to social networking for most of their electronic communications.

Some of the advantages include using peoples names , or in some cases clicking pictures of an individuals face, as aposed to the traditional email approach of typing in some cryptic email address.

As more people switch to social networking sites, the imporance of authenticity becomes a topic of question. Take, for example,

http://dixonkinser.blogspot.com/2006/08/myspace.html

Dixon Kinser. Dixon Kinser was a somewhat tech savy upstanding member of socioty. One day Dixon received a message from a friend giving positive feedback on a photo of Dixon with her daughter Quinn. "she told me she'd seen my myspace page, thought it was funny, thought my daughter looked beautiful and wanted to reconnect." Dixon stated.

What makes this story interesting is that Dixon did not have a myspace page. He had never used myspace once in his life. Apone hearing this, he did some investigation and low and behold found the page in question

http://www.myspace.com/the_indie_ninja

Myspace has an interesting take on this situation in their terms of serveses.

http://www.myspace.com/Modules/Help/Pages/HelpCenter.aspx?Category=3&Question=26

Question 26, of frequently asked questions address's what to do in the situation of idenity theft and unwanted impersonations. At first its worth mentioning the alarming fact that this kind of situation warrents being listed in the top 30 frequently asked questions, showing an alarming growth in problems of this type.

According to myspace if you are the victim of a case of identy theft then you must

"

Someone is pretending to be me - what do I do?

Solution:

In order to verify your identity, please send us a "salute":

• This means we will need an image of yourself holding a handwritten sign with the word "MySpace.com" and your Friend ID (your Friend ID number appears immediately after "friendID=" in the web address/URL when viewing your profile). We can then remove the profile that uses your identity without your permission.

• Please be sure to include the web address/URL to the profile in question when you send your salute.

• If the profile is an extremely obvious attempt to be cruel/false, you may not need to send a salute. Sending a salute will help expedite things, though!

• Contact us here.

"

Fired because of Facebook

Case 2 Fired because of Facebook

Holloween can be a tricky holiday for young working college students in America. Most holidays occure on a monday or friday, and are given as a free day off both from school and work. Thanksgiving, for example is always the third thursday of the month of November. Holloween is always the same day of the year, October 31^st. This causes holloween to coinside with many obnoxious days of the week, mainly, workdays.

October 31^st, 2007 was the date of a holloween party in Worcester, New York. Kevin Colin was a young employee of Anglo Irish Bank. He also was invited to attend the previously mentioned party.
Unfortunatly he would not be able to attend the party due to his work schedual. Being struck with this delema, Kevin came up with a brilliant scheem, allowing him to both keep his job and make it to one of the greatest parties of the year.

His wonderfull idea was to fake a family emergency. Family emergencies are vauge enough to keep people from asking questions and revealing the lie. Less clever excuses include things such as “my grandmother passed away” which has the tendency to backfire when, lets say, your grandmother really does die and you need to take off work for the funeral. Family emergencies, is also a great way to play the “its a sensitive topic, I dont want to talk about it” card that helps keeps the lie afloat.

Here is a copy of the letter Kevin wrote to his boss:

“

Paul/Jill-

I just wanted to let you know that I will not be able to come into work tomorrow. Something came up at home and I had to go to New York this morning for the next couple of days. I apologize for the delayed notice.

Kind regards,

Kevin

“

Kevin left for New York with the rightfully erned “Smartest Man In America” award. He arrived at the party, dressed in his highly creative Faery costume and had a great time. Kevin like most young American's is the owner of a digital camera, which he remember to bring with him to the party. A few times through the night he used his cammera to take pictures of the revelry, and to have pictures of himself taken. This act in of itself is no cause for alarm. Kevin returned home after the party and soon after uploaded these pictures, with the incriminating evidence, onto his facebook account.

Facebook is an online community, made mostly of college students, that allows you to communicate and share photos and videos. It provides each of its users with a customizable blog and homepage, and an every growing amount of 3^rd party applications to fill every online need one could ever have, from playing board games to buying movie tickets.

When Kevin posted pictures of himself onto his facebook account, he had the option of making the photos private, viewable to only a select few. He determined that the liklyhood of his boss stumbling across the pictures was quite small, and decided it would be more fun to have the pictures be public, ie viewable by anyone regardless of if they were a part of his facebook circle, or even more so a facebook member.

Soon after Kevin posted, his manager, Paul Davis, did a quick search on the internet to see if any evindence would be found to grant suspicion that Kevins story was not entirely true. With the highspeed internet connection that so many of us take forgranted now adays, Paul Davis was easily able to find Kevin's facebook page, complete with the photos from the recent party Kevin had attended.

Paul took matters into his own hands at this point and sent a reply email to Kevin, including in this email, a picture that Paul had downloaded from Kevin's facebook page. The picture included featured Kevin dressed as a fairy, holding a beer and a wand, smiling into the camera.

The letter read as follows:

“

Kevin,

Thanks for letting us know—hope everything is ok in New York. (cool wand)

Cheers,

PCD (Paul Davis)

“

Paul then included this email in a forward to all members of the bank.

http://valleywag.com/tech/your-privacy-is-an-illusion/bank-intern-busted-by-facebook-321802.php

http://internetducttape.com/2007/03/08/how-to-use-facebook-without-losing-your-job-over-it/

Dont tase me bro

What you do can be seen by everyone: Dirty Laundry exposed

viral videos

Case 1 Andrew Meyer, the student who begged: 'Don’t Tase me bro!', becomes internet star

In september of 2007 a new slogan apeared on the internet resulting from a question and answer session gone terribly wrong. Former US Presidential canidate, John Kerry, while visiting a Florida university gave a question and answer session. Durring this session a student by the name of Andrew Meyer jumped in line and begain shouting out questions deemed “contriversal” to Kerry. When Meyer's microphone was cut off by the administration and police were asked to escort him out of the building Meyers begain flailing his arms about and screaming to the audience to intervine. This lead to more police securing him, and placing him under arrest. While in handcuffs a police officer warned him that if he continued to resist arrest he would be “tased.” Tased is a term related to a small non-lethal device called a taser that emits an electric shock on its recipient, temperarily disabling them. Soon after this warning one of the officers tased Meyer as he screamed “dont tase me bro!!” and cryed for help from the audience. This situation was not the first time police have used non-lethal weapons to enforce their will, but this was the first time such an event was videotaped and became viral on youtube.

Within hours of the videos upload the situation became a national topic.

Google reported http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/09/dont-tase-me-br.html

the term “dont tase me bro” became the 9^th most searched for term on their popular internet search engine. The video recived over 2.6 million views and almost 40,000 comments soon after being posted.

It has been suggested that the insident was a publicity stunt by Meyer. The video released online was recorded with his own camera and he also preficed the incident by checking that camera was in fact recording.

Many responses voiced about this event sway from one side to the other. Questions involving police brutality, freedom of speech, and common decency have been raised. Because of the widespread news of the incident via the internet many people have been allowed to participate in a discusion that, had this been a few years ago may have stayed on a single collage campus. One thing the internet does not allow however, is for this situation to “blow over.”

Tee shirts, bumper stickers, ringtones, music videos, cut and paste remixes of the various footage posted online (known as mash-ups) are all avalible online as everyone on the internet attempts to recive some glow of this situations lime light.

Due partialy to the large voice of the masses via the internet, the school has been forced to suspend the police officer responsible for the tasing and an internal investigation is on way. With everyone carrying a camera equiped cellphone and a high speed internet connection, it becomes more and more difficult for people in contriversial situations to keep out of the spotlight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3FFnpS-eYA