Operation Clambake, also referred to by its domain name, xenu.net, is a website and Norway-based non-profit organization, launched in 1996, founded by Andreas Heldal-Lund, that publishes criticism of the Church of Scientology.

Shortly thereafter, the Church of Scientology attempted to get this material removed from Operation Clambake, and other internet sites, through letters written by counsel and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[21] In November 2002, Xtended Internet's upstream provider, Cignal Global Communications received a letter from Church of Scientology counsel alleging copyright and trademark infringement involved with Xenu.net.

[31] Google received criticism for its actions, and The Guardian reported that Operation Clambake suspected the Church of Scientology was mainly concerned about secret documents where "L Ron Hubbard is said to describe how an alien galactic ruler called Xenu is the root of all human woe".

[5] Reflecting on the controversy in a February 2003 interview in The Boston Globe Magazine, Google founder Sergey Brin stated: "Ultimately where we ended up was the right conclusion, but we didn't initially handle it correctly.

[46][48] Helena Kobrin, lawyer for the Church of Scientology, stated she took offense at the name of the Web site, saying: "It implies that the First Amendment gives people some special right to infringe copyrights.

"[49] Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both questioned on Google's response to the Church of Scientology's complaints in a 2004 interview in Playboy Magazine, and they appreciated Chilling Effects as a "nice compromise".

Operation Clambake is included as part of the Library of Congress "September 11 Web Archive,"[53] and in Spring 2002 www.xenu.net was listed as required reading for the course "Computers in Principle and Practice" at New York University, under a section on "Copyright and Censorship".

[58] On June 16, 1998, Dateline NBC aired an investigative journalism piece on Scientology, and Operation Clambake was referenced on-screen as a resource to learn about "Xenu and the exploded souls".

"[66] More recently, news media have consulted Operation Clambake and its proprietor when seeking out information for background on stories involving Church of Scientology and related organizations.

[67] The Daily Reveille consulted Operation Clambake resources for an article on the "Second Chance" program, specifically for background on the Scientology doctrine known as the "Purification Rundown".

[20] The incident between Google and the Church of Scientology involving the Web site was also discussed in an annual meeting of The State Bar of California and cited as part of the caselaw for "Domestic Copyright Law in Cyberspace.

"[28] Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raised free speech concerns in the Xenu.net case, stating: "The danger is that people will attempt to silence critics under the guise of copyright infringement.

"[72] In an interview on the Xenu.net controversy, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain predicted that more conflicts involving the Church of Scientology were likely to occur in the future.

[73] Douglas E. Cowan, writing in Religion Online (2004), characterizes Operation Clambake as an example of a "surfeit of sites dedicated to so-called watchdog organizations or […] home pages of disgruntled ex-members.

[10] Cowan notes that most of the content presented by the site is not the result of original research by the owner but rather a collection of hyperlinks to media reports, scholarly and popular articles, court documents and out-of-print books.

Complemented by links to like-minded sites hosting essentially the same information, the result is thought by Cowan to be inflation of the apparent quantity of anti-Scientology material available.

"[10] Cowan compares the site to a propaganda effort and writes that a message is presented repeatedly, consistently to a target audience that already has some affinity with it, leading to a somewhat self-limiting construction of reality.