King Fisher: Some thoughts about the raid at XS4ALL (00.00.0000)
King Fisher, Fri 17 Nov 2006
On tuesday, September 5th 1995, the Dutch internet-providers XS4ALL in Amsterdam were raided by a Dutch bailiff and lawyers from the Church of Scientology. The cause of this raid was that a user of XS4ALL services, Fonss, published a controversial paper, namely the Fishman affidavit, on his homepage at XS4ALL. This affidavit contains some of the best kept secrets of the Church. Furthermore, this was another crackdown in a series of hostile activities directed at various Internet operators by CoS, a chain of events that include an attack on the Penet anonymous remailer in Finland (maintained by Julf Helsingius) and several attempts to silence a Usenet conference called "alt.religion.scientology".
One of the employees at XS4ALL happens to be Mr Ammo of Triad, the only remaining, but very active, Dutch Triad member. Late at night the same day, I received an e-mail from Mr Ammo with some brief information about this raid, asking me if I had ever heard of some crazy guys called the Church of Scientology. Indeed I have.
The Church of Scientology is no normal Church. It is a combination of a cult and a trans-national corporation. The Church claims to sell "religious technology", a quasi-science established by its' founder: Lafayette Ron Hubbard. The "priests" are called "presidents" and other terms originating from firm management, and in every respect the Church of Scientology IS a company, reaffirming the complete lack of respect for humanity these huge business giants often emanate. The main reason for still holding on to the "religion" concept is that it brings advantageous taxation rates in many countries. (As you could expect from a smart company.) In some aspects this company is even a mafia, since it makes regular use of deliberate illegal methods.
L Ron Hubbard was a former pulp science fiction writer, a mediocre one, working in the same genre as his friends Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt. One of his better novels is "Return to Tomorrow" from the early 1970's. At his best, Hubbard wrote a combination of horror and science fiction with a deep human sense, and just like so many other famous writers, he was completely nuts. He abused his wife and children and was obsessed with the idea of earning more and more money. He had the psychopath-meets-artist personality of Charles Manson. (In fact, Charles Manson was a member of the Scientology cult: according to himself he had passed all the courses and acheived the highest standing within the doctrine and could thus operate on his own.) At several occasions he stated that the best way to get rich and famous would probably be to start your own religion.
Hubbard admired all great scientists and artists, notably Albert Einstein, but above all he seems to have admired the probably greatest and most famous science fiction writer this world has ever seen: Isaac Asimov. He was definatelty disturbed by the fact that some people live in other peoples' minds forever, while others are almost instantly forgotten. You know, authors like L Ron Hubbard do grow on trees. However, if you start your own religion, your followers will for eternity promote your writings, no matter the quality. Scientology was Hubbards' shortcut to immortality. Judge for yourself whether this was ingenious or just lame.
Now Hubbard is dead, but his monster religion corporation still lives, destroying the lives of thousands of enslaved souls. The Church of Scientology specialise in cult management: tracking down people going through life crises, supplying them with intense attention and care, having them end up as cult robots emotionally addicted to "clearing", a kind of ad hoc cult psychotherapy. The followers then have to buy education at ever increasing prices, learning a cult mythology which is, in fact, complete nonsense.
In case you want to know, the cult learns you that 75 billion years ago, Earth (by then known as Teegeeack) was used as a dump by the Galactic Federation (which was founded 96 billion years ago), under the command of a guy called Xenu. At that time, this Milkyway was overpopulated by some creatures called Thetans. Xenu solved this by shooting them, freezing them, and sending them to Earth where he blew them up using hydrogene-bombs. To be precise, he blew them up on Hawaii and in Las Palmas. After six years Xenu was overturn by some rebellion and sealed up in an electronic mountain trap, where he still is. However, the blown-up Thetans still exist at some sub-atomic level. Every humans' mind has at its' core a Thetan: this is the being that "thinks", thus the source of human intelligence. Our physical bodies can not think. However we are constantly attacked by other Thetans drifting around on the Globe. These group in clusters, sharing some bad experience, and when a huge such cluster attacks our poor mind we can suffer mental illnes and other horrible stuff. Thetans ouside your own are called Body-Thetans... I guess you are already fed up with this crap. Let us get on with the story.
Even though they would hardly admit it in public, many skilled company managements admire the ingenious market idea of Scientology. This "religious technology" has its' own niche, with other cults as its' only competitors. In fact, there is next to no competition at all, as the market is overly big. Governments can do very little to limit the powers of Scientlogy, as most countries have cleared freedom of religion acts.
So what enemies could such a cult possibly have? Well, the answer sounds like some old cliché: individualism, knowledge and information. Journalists and free individuals seeking the truth, revealing the Church for what it is. Over the years, many such people have attacked this cult; always from a weak position, and whenever they succeeded, they have been tracked down and harassed by "market maintainers" from the Church.
But now, things have changed. An international network of information sharing built on a firm core of individualism threatens to seriously weaken this so-called "religion".
Now, let me tell you what kind of people these guys at XS4ALL in fact are, and why they dare work against this Church.
XS4ALL is a middle-sized firm situated in Amsterdam, Holland. Among the other European countries, Holland is known as a very liberal country. Notably it is perfectly legal to smoke pot in Holland if you like to. This does not mean that the Dutch authorities in any way encourage you to do that, but that they encourage you to make your own decisions about this and a great deal of other things as well.
Throughout the Dutch constitution goes a strong belief in individual responsibility. You are indeed VERY free, as long as you take on responsibility for your acts. This also means it was until April 1993 LEGAL to hack into computers in Holland, as long as you did not cause any harm, steal or destroy anything. These restrictions are also known as the golden rules of net-hacking, known widely througout the digital underground. So until early 1993 Holland had one of Europes most liberal computer acts and was thus the nerve centre for the entire European digital underground.
From a standard old-fashioned conservative view, this would mean that all Dutch people are pot-smoking cyberpunks, hacking into computers worldwide, trashing up the international economy completely. However this prejudice fails. In fact, the Dutch are one of Europes' more mature people, and the only known drug-addicted information stealers from Europe came from Berlin, Germany. (Pengo and Hagbard, described in books like "The Cuckoos' Egg" by Clifford Stoll and "Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner & John Markoff.) Germany has had a constitution which is in many respects the opposite of the Dutch; you will almost have to ask permission for breathing. (German police have also busted lot of C64-freaks on very weak foundations, but note: this is changing at the moment!)
Of course this Dutch view of individualism is also different from the standard American liberalism, which is instead based on ownership. In America it is sometimes legal to shoot a person who intrudes on your property. Thus some American fundamentalists think people hacking into computers ought to be shot, since they see no difference in intruding on someones' land and intruding on someones' "virtual" or "intellectual" property: mine is mine and yours is yours to put it short. Almost all huge companies adhere American management systems and also share this view. The Church of Scientology is no exception.
A normal middle-sized firm getting raided by a huge cult corporation would instantly feel the cold draft and try to solve the problem in the easiest and most painless way possible. They might even allow it to cost money. A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.
Felipe Roudriquez, Rop Gonggrijp and the other system-maintainers at XS4ALL instantly realized there was something very wrong going on in their corner of the Internet. Dutch media also realized there was something not quite right about this event. Firms and corporations raid each other every day for the strangest reasons, but this case was indeed different. The point is not only that the raid at XS4ALL was very un-hackerlike, since hackers believe in a free flow of information, but it was also EXTREMELY UN-DUTCH, in that CoS attacked the Internet-providers XS4ALL instead of the person that published the document on his homepage. As I have previously told you, Dutch constitution stress the individuals' own responsibility of hers/his actions.
Hell broke loose. The hackers at XS4ALL had lots of friends among Dutch media representatives and had always been eager to run an open media policy. After some massive media noise, everyone brave enough started to put the affidavit at their homepages. The information was instantly available to anyone at a dozen computers throughout Holland, and spread to other European countries too. A Dutch liberal politician, Oussama Cherribi, even put the text at his homepage. Some people printed the affidavit on paper and put it on public billboards in Amsterdam for everyone to read.
This case was indeed interesting. The affidavit is an official document. Such documents are not illegal to redistribute. The hook is that the document in itself contains claimed copyrighted material. The border between "common" and "copyrighted" information gets blurred. People who make a living from information, like journalists and authors hold their breath and dare not even speak on these matters. Libertarian politicians who stress BOTH private ownership of information AND the freedom of speech and press, are extremely confused, as they have to choose between the two. If a Dutch court was to decide whether the document should be free or not, that decision would be a precedent for the whole European community, and thus the whole world, as you can not disconnect yourself from the free flow of information through the Internet.
Since the Church sued XS4ALL and a number of other Dutch Internet-providers plus Karin Spaink, a Dutch journalist who also published the document on the Net, a trial was scheduled in Holland on the 14th of December which would be of major importance for the whole Internet community. What happened?
Well, Steven Fishman, the man who wrote the affidavit in the first place, came over to Holland to give his testimony before the Dutch court. CoS probably asked their legal advisory board for help on how to deal with this new situation and then withdrew their claims a few days before the trial was to take place, saying they "compared the documents in the affidavit to their own a second time". The new CoS strategy is to claim that these documents - papers the Church already fought several legal cases to keep secret - are forgeries. CoS have probably lost their "intellectual property" included in the Fishman affidavit for all time!
Huge software firms, soon to be the very engines of our post-industrial society, already had to give up the possibility of having their intellectual domains protected by "patents" and instead had to turn to copyright, renaming themselves "software publishers". They are of course scared of this turn in the development of Internet. By cancelling the trial CoS and many other "intellectual property" holders could postpone a decision which sooner or later has to be made - where shall we draw the border between "owned" and "common" information?
But I, along with all other information-anarchists worldwide, can damn well speak out, because we have absolutely nothing to loose. I tell you what: The freedom of speech, the right to express your own opinion and learn about the world we live in from any sources you like, was with mankind before "ownership" was even invented. Before people invented trade and economy, there was politics. If one of these have to stand back, it must be the obsolete system of ownership we invented for ourselves, because this system reflects nothing but patterns of power throughout society, inviting parasites like the Church of Scientology to feed from the system.
The alternative is: "Shut it all down, and lock them all up."
Sincerely:
King Fisher / Triad aka
Linus Walleij
this content item is from BitFellas
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King Fisher, Fri 17 Nov 2006
Some thoughts about the raid at XS4ALL
by King Fisher
by King Fisher
On tuesday, September 5th 1995, the Dutch internet-providers XS4ALL in Amsterdam were raided by a Dutch bailiff and lawyers from the Church of Scientology. The cause of this raid was that a user of XS4ALL services, Fonss, published a controversial paper, namely the Fishman affidavit, on his homepage at XS4ALL. This affidavit contains some of the best kept secrets of the Church. Furthermore, this was another crackdown in a series of hostile activities directed at various Internet operators by CoS, a chain of events that include an attack on the Penet anonymous remailer in Finland (maintained by Julf Helsingius) and several attempts to silence a Usenet conference called "alt.religion.scientology".
One of the employees at XS4ALL happens to be Mr Ammo of Triad, the only remaining, but very active, Dutch Triad member. Late at night the same day, I received an e-mail from Mr Ammo with some brief information about this raid, asking me if I had ever heard of some crazy guys called the Church of Scientology. Indeed I have.
The Church of Scientology is no normal Church. It is a combination of a cult and a trans-national corporation. The Church claims to sell "religious technology", a quasi-science established by its' founder: Lafayette Ron Hubbard. The "priests" are called "presidents" and other terms originating from firm management, and in every respect the Church of Scientology IS a company, reaffirming the complete lack of respect for humanity these huge business giants often emanate. The main reason for still holding on to the "religion" concept is that it brings advantageous taxation rates in many countries. (As you could expect from a smart company.) In some aspects this company is even a mafia, since it makes regular use of deliberate illegal methods.
L Ron Hubbard was a former pulp science fiction writer, a mediocre one, working in the same genre as his friends Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt. One of his better novels is "Return to Tomorrow" from the early 1970's. At his best, Hubbard wrote a combination of horror and science fiction with a deep human sense, and just like so many other famous writers, he was completely nuts. He abused his wife and children and was obsessed with the idea of earning more and more money. He had the psychopath-meets-artist personality of Charles Manson. (In fact, Charles Manson was a member of the Scientology cult: according to himself he had passed all the courses and acheived the highest standing within the doctrine and could thus operate on his own.) At several occasions he stated that the best way to get rich and famous would probably be to start your own religion.
Hubbard admired all great scientists and artists, notably Albert Einstein, but above all he seems to have admired the probably greatest and most famous science fiction writer this world has ever seen: Isaac Asimov. He was definatelty disturbed by the fact that some people live in other peoples' minds forever, while others are almost instantly forgotten. You know, authors like L Ron Hubbard do grow on trees. However, if you start your own religion, your followers will for eternity promote your writings, no matter the quality. Scientology was Hubbards' shortcut to immortality. Judge for yourself whether this was ingenious or just lame.
Now Hubbard is dead, but his monster religion corporation still lives, destroying the lives of thousands of enslaved souls. The Church of Scientology specialise in cult management: tracking down people going through life crises, supplying them with intense attention and care, having them end up as cult robots emotionally addicted to "clearing", a kind of ad hoc cult psychotherapy. The followers then have to buy education at ever increasing prices, learning a cult mythology which is, in fact, complete nonsense.
In case you want to know, the cult learns you that 75 billion years ago, Earth (by then known as Teegeeack) was used as a dump by the Galactic Federation (which was founded 96 billion years ago), under the command of a guy called Xenu. At that time, this Milkyway was overpopulated by some creatures called Thetans. Xenu solved this by shooting them, freezing them, and sending them to Earth where he blew them up using hydrogene-bombs. To be precise, he blew them up on Hawaii and in Las Palmas. After six years Xenu was overturn by some rebellion and sealed up in an electronic mountain trap, where he still is. However, the blown-up Thetans still exist at some sub-atomic level. Every humans' mind has at its' core a Thetan: this is the being that "thinks", thus the source of human intelligence. Our physical bodies can not think. However we are constantly attacked by other Thetans drifting around on the Globe. These group in clusters, sharing some bad experience, and when a huge such cluster attacks our poor mind we can suffer mental illnes and other horrible stuff. Thetans ouside your own are called Body-Thetans... I guess you are already fed up with this crap. Let us get on with the story.
Even though they would hardly admit it in public, many skilled company managements admire the ingenious market idea of Scientology. This "religious technology" has its' own niche, with other cults as its' only competitors. In fact, there is next to no competition at all, as the market is overly big. Governments can do very little to limit the powers of Scientlogy, as most countries have cleared freedom of religion acts.
So what enemies could such a cult possibly have? Well, the answer sounds like some old cliché: individualism, knowledge and information. Journalists and free individuals seeking the truth, revealing the Church for what it is. Over the years, many such people have attacked this cult; always from a weak position, and whenever they succeeded, they have been tracked down and harassed by "market maintainers" from the Church.
But now, things have changed. An international network of information sharing built on a firm core of individualism threatens to seriously weaken this so-called "religion".
Now, let me tell you what kind of people these guys at XS4ALL in fact are, and why they dare work against this Church.
XS4ALL is a middle-sized firm situated in Amsterdam, Holland. Among the other European countries, Holland is known as a very liberal country. Notably it is perfectly legal to smoke pot in Holland if you like to. This does not mean that the Dutch authorities in any way encourage you to do that, but that they encourage you to make your own decisions about this and a great deal of other things as well.
Throughout the Dutch constitution goes a strong belief in individual responsibility. You are indeed VERY free, as long as you take on responsibility for your acts. This also means it was until April 1993 LEGAL to hack into computers in Holland, as long as you did not cause any harm, steal or destroy anything. These restrictions are also known as the golden rules of net-hacking, known widely througout the digital underground. So until early 1993 Holland had one of Europes most liberal computer acts and was thus the nerve centre for the entire European digital underground.
From a standard old-fashioned conservative view, this would mean that all Dutch people are pot-smoking cyberpunks, hacking into computers worldwide, trashing up the international economy completely. However this prejudice fails. In fact, the Dutch are one of Europes' more mature people, and the only known drug-addicted information stealers from Europe came from Berlin, Germany. (Pengo and Hagbard, described in books like "The Cuckoos' Egg" by Clifford Stoll and "Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner & John Markoff.) Germany has had a constitution which is in many respects the opposite of the Dutch; you will almost have to ask permission for breathing. (German police have also busted lot of C64-freaks on very weak foundations, but note: this is changing at the moment!)
Of course this Dutch view of individualism is also different from the standard American liberalism, which is instead based on ownership. In America it is sometimes legal to shoot a person who intrudes on your property. Thus some American fundamentalists think people hacking into computers ought to be shot, since they see no difference in intruding on someones' land and intruding on someones' "virtual" or "intellectual" property: mine is mine and yours is yours to put it short. Almost all huge companies adhere American management systems and also share this view. The Church of Scientology is no exception.
A normal middle-sized firm getting raided by a huge cult corporation would instantly feel the cold draft and try to solve the problem in the easiest and most painless way possible. They might even allow it to cost money. A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.
Felipe Roudriquez, Rop Gonggrijp and the other system-maintainers at XS4ALL instantly realized there was something very wrong going on in their corner of the Internet. Dutch media also realized there was something not quite right about this event. Firms and corporations raid each other every day for the strangest reasons, but this case was indeed different. The point is not only that the raid at XS4ALL was very un-hackerlike, since hackers believe in a free flow of information, but it was also EXTREMELY UN-DUTCH, in that CoS attacked the Internet-providers XS4ALL instead of the person that published the document on his homepage. As I have previously told you, Dutch constitution stress the individuals' own responsibility of hers/his actions.
Hell broke loose. The hackers at XS4ALL had lots of friends among Dutch media representatives and had always been eager to run an open media policy. After some massive media noise, everyone brave enough started to put the affidavit at their homepages. The information was instantly available to anyone at a dozen computers throughout Holland, and spread to other European countries too. A Dutch liberal politician, Oussama Cherribi, even put the text at his homepage. Some people printed the affidavit on paper and put it on public billboards in Amsterdam for everyone to read.
This case was indeed interesting. The affidavit is an official document. Such documents are not illegal to redistribute. The hook is that the document in itself contains claimed copyrighted material. The border between "common" and "copyrighted" information gets blurred. People who make a living from information, like journalists and authors hold their breath and dare not even speak on these matters. Libertarian politicians who stress BOTH private ownership of information AND the freedom of speech and press, are extremely confused, as they have to choose between the two. If a Dutch court was to decide whether the document should be free or not, that decision would be a precedent for the whole European community, and thus the whole world, as you can not disconnect yourself from the free flow of information through the Internet.
Since the Church sued XS4ALL and a number of other Dutch Internet-providers plus Karin Spaink, a Dutch journalist who also published the document on the Net, a trial was scheduled in Holland on the 14th of December which would be of major importance for the whole Internet community. What happened?
Well, Steven Fishman, the man who wrote the affidavit in the first place, came over to Holland to give his testimony before the Dutch court. CoS probably asked their legal advisory board for help on how to deal with this new situation and then withdrew their claims a few days before the trial was to take place, saying they "compared the documents in the affidavit to their own a second time". The new CoS strategy is to claim that these documents - papers the Church already fought several legal cases to keep secret - are forgeries. CoS have probably lost their "intellectual property" included in the Fishman affidavit for all time!
Huge software firms, soon to be the very engines of our post-industrial society, already had to give up the possibility of having their intellectual domains protected by "patents" and instead had to turn to copyright, renaming themselves "software publishers". They are of course scared of this turn in the development of Internet. By cancelling the trial CoS and many other "intellectual property" holders could postpone a decision which sooner or later has to be made - where shall we draw the border between "owned" and "common" information?
But I, along with all other information-anarchists worldwide, can damn well speak out, because we have absolutely nothing to loose. I tell you what: The freedom of speech, the right to express your own opinion and learn about the world we live in from any sources you like, was with mankind before "ownership" was even invented. Before people invented trade and economy, there was politics. If one of these have to stand back, it must be the obsolete system of ownership we invented for ourselves, because this system reflects nothing but patterns of power throughout society, inviting parasites like the Church of Scientology to feed from the system.
The alternative is: "Shut it all down, and lock them all up."
Sincerely:
King Fisher / Triad aka
Linus Walleij
this content item is from BitFellas
( http://www.bitfellas.org/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.29 )