When insider information started to appear in droves, the organization identified and focused on several key players, had their premises raided, and filed lawsuits against them.

It set the fledgling internet on fire and activists began appearing from all over, vowing to destroy scientology and end its assault on 'free speech'.

RTC launched a new — and virtual — assault that scientology has never recovered from: legal threats, lawsuits, and attempted criminal prosecutions proved to be no match for the anonymous worldwide information dissemination vehicle that was the ever-expanding internet.

... we soon understood that we were under siege ... [our lawyers] sent out threats to every person who posted the materials, to the [ISPs], and even to the phone companies that gave access to the internet.

A former high-ranking official in the Scientology organization who had been personally affiliated with L. Ron Hubbard, he caused a number of regular participants in the newsgroup to sit up and take notice.

Included among these postings was OT III (Operating Thetan Level Three), which gave L. Ron Hubbard's description of the "Xenu story".

On January 11, 1995, Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to shut down the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology by sending a control message instructing Usenet servers to delete the group on the grounds that: (1) It was started with a forged message; (2) not discussed on alt.config; (3) it has the name "scientology" in its title which is a trademark and is misleading, as a.r.s.

is mainly used for flamers to attack the Scientology religion; (4) it has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices.

Shortly after the initial legal announcements and rmgroup attempt, representatives of Scientology followed through with a series of lawsuits against various participants on the newsgroup, including Dennis Erlich, in Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc.

Raids took place against Arnaldo Lerma in Virginia,[19] Lawrence A. Wollersheim and Robert Penny of FACTNet in Colorado, and Dennis Erlich in California.

[10]: 153 In addition to filing lawsuits against individuals, Scientology also sued the Washington Post for reprinting one paragraph of the OT writings in a newspaper article, as well as several Internet service providers, including Netcom, Tom Klemesrud, and XS4ALL.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation provided legal assistance to defendant Tom Klemesrud and his attorney Richard Horning helped find Dennis Erlich pro bono defense.

Lawyers representing the Church of Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, groups associated with Scientology employed a similar strategy to make finding websites critical of the organization more difficult.

[28] After the advent of modern search engines, this problem was solved by the innovation of clustering responses from the same Web server, so that no more than two results from any one site were shown.

The organization has been accused of employing not only legal pressure, but also blackmail and character assassination in an attempt to win many of the court cases in which it involves itself.

Since no updates have been reported since 1998 (and the original filter program only worked with Windows 95), the package is unlikely to be in use with recent operating systems and browsers due to software rot.

Goldberg responded by stating that the "claims are completely groundless and I'm not removing anything," adding to the members of the site, "it should only be a matter of time before we're sued out of existence."

[32] In May 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee decided to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists.

[33][34] The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties".

On January 14, 2008, a video produced by the Church of Scientology featuring an interview with Tom Cruise was leaked to the Internet and uploaded to YouTube.

[55][56][57] Many protesters wore Guy Fawkes masks inspired by the character V from V for Vendetta, or otherwise disguised their identities, in part to protect themselves from reprisals from the organization.

[58][59] Anonymous held a second wave of protests on March 15, 2008, in cities all over the world, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, and Dublin.

[62] WikiLeaks refused to remove the material, and its operator released a statement saying that Scientology was a "cult" that "aids and abets a general climate of Western media self-censorship.

"[62] A Church of Scientology International spokeswoman, writing to FOXNews.com, said: "I can only assume that religious bigotry and prejudice is driving their activity, as there is no altruistic value in posting our copyrighted scriptures, despite WikiLeaks' statements to the contrary.