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There is a big fuss going on in intertube land recently. Anonymous had declared war on Scientology. I know some people are wondering what the hell that all means. If you don’t already know, Scientology is a religion created by L. Ron Hubbard, who was a science fiction author who wrote a self-help book. If you want to know more just Wikipedia it, warning though, if Wikipedia didn’t lock it, I suspect it will be under a lot of vandalism. So take what you see with a grain of salt.

To know more about what/who Anonymous is. You need a little history. Anonymous as a force originated in Japan on 2chan which is a public forum where people can post anonymously, about almost anything you can think of. Anime people/Japanophiles* saw this and recreated it. I don’t want to say which of the chans where first, but the one with the biggest visual impact seems to be 4chan.
There are several others: 7chan, 12chan, wakachan, 420chan, etc… The list goes on and on. They all share similar basis: Anime, Shock images, and internet memes. The key thing being posting completely anonymously, with that mentality you have no idea if the 50 posts in the thread are done by 50 people or just 1-3 people tooting there own horn. Also because you are anonymous there is no recourse for your actions. You cant tie a name with a post, so if your decided to just post shock images over and over no one is quite sure if is just you, others following your lead, or if your just following someone else’s lead. That’s how internet memes are most of the time born. What you get is a giant organic body of ideas and actions that you can’t trace or predict, but can be moved by the actions of 1 or 2 people. I digress; let us get back to the topic.

4chan, arguably the most powerful and popular of the chans is the birth place of most internet memes and often after an argument either with how the site is run or the people on it. The people on it will splinter forming new chans. Now I am not 100% on this at all, but I believe to be a close guess as to what is how /i/ got formed. 4chan’s /b/ (random images and threads) thread used to do (some times still does) invasions of peoples MySpace. Once in a while they would DOS* attack some site they didn’t like. This splintered the group; some people where for it and others against it. The people against it for the most part won and everyone for it moved to 7chan’s /i/ (invasion board). Where this kind of thing was ok, fast forward a couple of years of shutting down sites and stealing idiots passwords and hacking everything from there emails, MySpaces, and their phone numbers. Anonymous using /i/ as a hub had some lulz and was labeled an “Internet hate machine” by fox news.

Now on to the attacks, if there is one thing most people don’t like on the internet it is Scientology (well, almost all of religion extremist). I think people engrossed in internet culture (is there a word for them? Internet Civilian, I coined it right now) just see though the BS. There have been potshots at Scientology from time to time. It big fuss started when some Internet Civilian leaked an internal video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The “Church” freaked out and sent out “We’re going to sue you” to every site they could, But on the internet 30 seconds is too much time. It was everywhere, outraged by the censorship on the internet the “Church” was trying, Anonymous started to organize and they released the now famous press release and following video. Dubbing them self Project Changeology, The “war” started. They hit hard DOSing every Scientology site they could find. As it stands (as of 1-25-08) they have been doing a good job at it. They have also supposedly (I only say supposedly, because we have no concrete info that they are real) released inner documents from high ranking Scientologists. And they have a YouTube Channel where they have posted several, of what seem to be, internal propaganda videos. They clam there is even more internal stuff coming.

There goal on paper is to out the horrible things Scientology does to people and how it is a brain washing cult. Either it is though the media outlet on the internet or, if possible, the major media (TV, newspaper, magazines, etc… what non Internet Civilians read). If you understand Anonymous you can see they are just waiting for a public response from Scientology. The goal is that they respond to a bunch of people on the internet, not only does it make them look stupid. (“Can’t you even stop some internet punks?”) But it gives Anonymous the media attention and 15 min of fame they want. How it works, you attack someone then get a rise out of them, then feeding from that. You can just use that to piss them off more and more. Just like in real life when people fight. The internet is no different.

My take: There a couple of things that could happen:

1. Anonymous gets no response and in a week (maybe 2) gets bored and moves on to better (read, people who will get pissy) targets.
2. Anonymous leaks something major but it flies under the mainstream radar. So in 2 years it won’t even matter. Internet Civilians will think Scientology is even more of a joke.
3. Scientology response the media notice Anonymous.
   1. People from Anonymous start going to jail for hacking/General mayhem
   2. Mass media notice and start to also do stories on how Scientology is a crazy money hungry cult.
   3. US Mass media defends Scientology, because in the US you’re allowed to worship what ever the hell you want.
4. Some nut takes it too far and does something major thus giving the mass media a great story to create fear of the internet cultures and how it is corrupting our youth.*

I don’t think just a bunch of people can bring down Scientology, not with out some serious help from mass media turning the publics option of it all. Hell, I bet at lest 70% of people have very little idea what a Scientologists is other then there favorite actor is one. I think if Anonymous would want to “win” they would need to focus on outing internal files and Scientologists legal team. There legal team is there strongest force. They can sue and track down all kinds of dirt on you and just drag you and your reputation though the mud. They know how to play the public news fear game. If anything find a way to out what the legal team knows or somehow stop them from there jobs, I don’t mean killing or harming. I mean hacking there mail server there internal documents etc… (not condoning it, just guessing as to what could happen) I am sure if Anonymous switches focus they can think of something clever.

So why does any of this matter? It could be an important time in Internet Culture history and could be looked back upon for a very long time. Or it could frizzle out and be forgotten in a 6 months. The point is Scientology is pretty crazy, no matter what your religious beliefs, I think we can agree on that. And Anonymous, as off beat as there tactics may be, are trying to bring some public light on that crazy. If they succeed we could be talking about his for the next 10 years, and it will show the public that the internet is a powerful force when organized.

*this is quite a large group of people. Anime people are everyone from people who watch anime once in a while, to people who have lost all touch with reality and try to act or live there lives like there favorite anime characters. Japanophiles are people who be come so obsessed with Japan they try to mimic there culture (most of the time poorly), or learn key phrases in Japanese (poorly as well) and repeat them over and over, with there inner circle jerk of other Japanophiles. I lump them together because one if often the other and vice versa. I need to do an article on them at some time.
*Denial of service, where you overload the server with as much traffic as you can. Effetely shutting it down, because only so much information can go back and forth from a server, you‘re blocking outgoing traffic by your incoming traffic.
*I am not saying it doesn’t. I strongly believe it is, just not in a way that mass media says it is. I’ll leave that for another time.

[update] 2nd video address