🚀 go-pugleaf

Greg Merideth a.k.a Greg Merideth (mtech@ibm.net) wrote:
: There's a nice story in TIME magazine about the "busting" of penet.fi.  According
: to the story, scientologists only talked to the police and the police issued the search
: warrent, only one of 200,000 names on the server were comprimised, and that was
: due in part to the so called "illegal" posting of a file on the alt.scientologists
: (assholes) news group.

: The whole board was not comprimised, what was done (and this is only from what
: i've read in new york times and the TIME magazine) was would have been done
: if it was an obscene phone call, an anonymous letter mailed, the police tracked
: it down and found out who it was.  Posting anonymous is great, hell, i use it all
: the time, but if DUMB ASSHOLES start using it MORE AND MORE (can't say I haven't
: used it for other than great purposes myself) to POST and DO ILLEGAL SHIT....
: Then anon.penet.fi will NOT be around much longer.  Back in the days when we
: could get tone dialers from radio shack and use them on pay phones, then
: everybody got the idea, now we can't buy them at all now...........some people
: just don't realize a good thing.

Hopefully, this will get out before you get mercilessly flamed.  Let's just
say that TIME, if this is what they printed, got the facts just a little
skewed (how's that for understatement?).

A few points that TIME forgot to mention:

1.  Julf (the admin of anon.penet.fi) has a pretty good abuse reporting
system.  If you abuse the server by doing nasty things, you can E-mail him
and (if you can show that it was really abuse) he will impose sanctions on
that particular person.  The Scientologists didn't even complain, as far as
I've heard; they just went straight for the jugular.

2.  Initially, the court order was for seizure of the ENTIRE machine,
including 200,000 anonymous IDs.  Julf's lawyer had to negotiate the deal
that allowed him to reveal only the ID in question.

3.  The material posted was certainly not illegal, in that it violated any
criminal law.  The claim made by the Church is that copyrighted material
was posted through it; this is a civil claim, not a criminal one.  Last I
heard, you couldn't get search and seizure types of orders for civil suits.

4.  The material posted is thought by many to have been well within "fair
use" provisions in the copyright statute.  Scientology is trying to claim
that they do not allow quoting AT ALL of their material, a claim that seems
patently absurd.

5.  Scientology apparently used that ID to convince a judge to grant a
highly suspect search and seizure of the person involved.  Scientology
personnel and "rent-a-cops" (no state or federal officials were involved at
all) were allowed to break in to his place and copy anything they wanted. 
They also deleted stuff wholesale on his computer, making it inoperable.

6.  Finally, a lot of the venom directed at Scientology is not just for
this incident.  They have had a history of attempting to harass net users
in highly unusual ways by doing such things as trying to rmgroup newsgroups
and "auto-cancelling" all posts made by people they don't like.

--
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Jeff Licquia (lame .sig, huh?)   |   Finger for PGP 2.6 public key
jalicqui@prairienet.org          |   Me?  Speak for whom?  You've got
licquia@cei.com (work)           |     to be kidding!