The Passion of ‘Anonymous’

These are unfriendly times to be a Scientologist. In December, Germany's Interior Ministry moved to ban the organization, which has tax-exempt religious status in the United States. In January, St. Martin's Press published Andrew Morton's salacious unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise, which describes the star as its de facto second in command. The church responded with a 15-page statement, calling the book "a bigoted, defamatory assault replete with lies" and saying Cruise "is a Scientology parishioner and holds no official or unofficial position in the Church hierarchy." Jenna Hill Miscavige, a niece of church leader David Miscavige who left the fold in 2005, this week came out in support of Morton and slammed the organization for, among other things, its practice of "disconnection--essentially severing contact with family members seen as hostile to the group.

Now, a loose-knit consortium of hackers and activists calling itself "Anonymous" has declared "war" on the organization. In a creepy YouTube clip addressed to the "leaders of Scientology," a robotic voice announces "with the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed." (The clip has been viewed more than 2 million times since it was posted Jan. 21.)

The attack, says Anonymous, was spurred at least in part by what they consider to be the latest example of the church's secretive and litigious nature. Earlier this year, an internal 2004 church interview with Tom Cruise was leaked online. The actor, who called being a Scientologist a "blast," was seen railing against the practice of psychiatry and boasting, among other things, "we are the authorities of the mind ... we can bring peace and unite communities." The church attempted to have the videos taken down from the gossip site Gawker, claiming the material was copyrighted, selectively edited and that Cruise's performance was meant for private consumption. It's an argument that does have legal merit. "As I understand it, Scientology has a lot of internal documents and when people try to publish them, Scientology seeks to stop them under copyright law," Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law tells NEWSWEEK. "The fact is under American law they're entitled to take their unpublished works and use copyright law to protect them."

Now Anonymous has launched Project Chanology, a plan detailed on a wiki-style Web site (that anyone can edit), which claims to have so far employed tactics more likely to annoy than destroy: phone, fax and e-mail spamming, "Google bombing" (rigging searches so the church's official site is the first result on a search for, say, "dangerous cult"), flooding the news aggregator Digg.com with anti-Scientology articles and launching "distributed denial of service attacks"--the illegal practice of using networks of computers to bombard the church's various Web sites and servers with bogus requests for data, causing them to crash. Going forward,  Anonymous hopes to deconvert members and "infiltrate" the group by joining and posing as sincere Scientologists. And on Feb. 10, Anonymous--which one member estimates to comprise 9,000 people--plans protests at Scientology sites worldwide and has won some approval from former church members. A previous Anonymous protest in Orlando, Fla., drew around 150 people.

The church did not return multiple phone calls this week but did issue a statement to NEWSWEEK in which it calls Anonymous "a group of cyber-terrorists ... perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry."

Scientology was founded in the mid-1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, the pulp and science-fiction writer and author of "Dianetics." His new creed promised to improve the condition of the impure immortal spirit, or "thetan," through "auditing"--an ongoing process for which Scientologists must pay a fee to the church. Thetans were supposedly released into the atmosphere nearly 100 million years ago, when a galactic tyrant named Xenu exiled billions of beings to Earth's volcanoes and had them vaporized by bombs. All of this is according to Scientology's origin myth, which church officials have previously struggled to keep private and now no longer claim to espouse. "If you wanted to spread the word of your faith, for example, the way Christian groups do with the Bible," says UCLA's Volokh, "you might not have secrets only the initiates get to see."