Youth Speaks To Tory: Anonymous Vs. Scientology's Abuses

Youth Speaks To Tory: Anonymous Vs. Scientology's Abuses

This was e-mailed to me yesterday and I found it to be one of the best descriptions of Anonymous, so I thought I'd share it with you. Here ya go:

first of all: I watched your presentation videos on Xenu TV and thought they were awesome. You have an extremely natural speaking and presenting style, while your openness and honesty is admirable. I was absolutely captivated from the first second and didn't stop watching until I reached the end.

I would like to share with you my view on Anonymous' actions, as a young person who grew up with the internet. I think more than the people before us, we have a rather irreverent world view, exactly because we grew up with free and in-depth access to loads of information from a young age: very little can still surprise us, and we have very few taboos.

Now, what I wanted to say is that taking down websites *may* be illegal, but, it is seen by most young people as just a relatively harmless prank. The way the attack was done involves nothing more than a bunch of people accessing the site all at once: imagine a group of people rushing onto a bus, thus blocking the door and making it hard for legitimate travelers to get on. It is exactly like that, because the individual act ('getting on a bus', or 'accessing a website') is in fact trivial to do and completely legal in a normal context. It also makes it quite hard to distinguish attackers from just random passer-by's, meaning it is harder for Scientology to point the finger.

I don't think any significant portion of Anonymous would consider their attacks a serious strategy either: it is more about catching scientology with their pants down and making them look bad ('they can't even keep their website up'), which is also ironic because Scientology is known to be menacing and ruthless. You mentioned in your talk that the internet has allowed people to speak up and be heard about Scientology, but I think until now, it's always still been individuals fighting the fight: individuals who can still be targeted and smeared by the church.

Essentially, I think Anonymous' actions should be seen as an act of massive, collective civil disobedience, which empowered people in a very effective way; people who would otherwise not have cared or who would be afraid of speaking up. They got a chance to walk right up to the proverbial sleeping dragon and smack it in the face along with hundreds if not thousands of others.

I read your own response about how the media spinned it as "hackers blocking free speech", but frankly, young people pay very little attention to mainstream media these days. We make our own news online, in smaller communities of trust, through social media like YouTube or Wikipedia. So I think the negative aspects of being portrayed as hackers in the news are nothing compared to the positive attention it funneled towards scientology critics like yourself.

Thankfully, the mischievous aspect of Anonymous' action was phased out rapidly in favor of more legal actions, but personally, I think a fully legal protest would never have gotten the same amount of attention. The reality is that Scientology has been skirting or abusing the law, using the letter of the law against the spirit of the law. When that happens, I think one can argue that it is justified to step into illegal territory, as long as it is a temporary measure and restricted only to a very narrow domain/target. I'm sure I don't need to remind you that the very people that got you your "freedom of speech" were considered terrorists by the ruling authorities at the time.

In any case, I don't want to downplay the actions of people like yourself or Mark Bunker, and I'm glad people are trumpeting the legal horn. But the little bit of anarchist in me wanted to type up this email and send it off to you ;).

Thanks for reading in any case,
XXX (Name withheld to protect the innocent)

For thinking and speaking my mind, Scientology declared me a "Suppressive Person" (SP 6 ^Cumulative Cluster :) & Expelled me from The Church of $cientology :)

Free at LAST!

http://www.xenu.net (What Scientology Doesn't want you to know)
http://www.xenutv.com (Excellent videos)
http://www.torymagoo.org (My writings about Scientology from ARS)
http://www.lermanet.com/cos/toryonosa.htm (Top Secret Int Mafia) or Type in Scientology in Google

(Read, Look, Listen, Make up your own Mind)

magoo44@charter.net
Burbank, CA
(818) 588-3044

"They, who give up essential liberty
to purchase a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin