The Church of Scientology is embroiled in an invisible war with an enemy hell-bent on its absolute destruction.
Invisible wars are nothing new to members of Scientology – they’ve been battling the invisible electrical impulses that make people do bad things for years. They’re also used to negative media attention, as they’ve spent the better part of their existence battling that too.
The difference is, now their enemy is human and using the Internet to mobilize its army against the church.
The declaration of war begins with Internet piracy. In late 2007, a video intended only for Scientologists was released to the public via the user-generated media site YouTube.com.
The video wasn’t anything more than a fancy recruitment video released by the Religious Technology Center featuring Tom Cruise. The Church of Scientology viewed the leak as a breach of privacy and began taking action against its aggressors – using the legal system to simply and efficiently silence its critics.
Comments on media sites featuring the film were censored.  Any negative comments toward Scientology were replaced with “This comment is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Church of Scientology International.”
It doesn’t seem like much, but this small legal action was enough to inspire Internet users across the country to unite and battle Scientology together.
They call themselves Anonymous, and they are an example of a social movement fusing cyber terrorism with classic civil disobedience.
The Internet is ubiquitous to most people, but its role within the larger social world is still not fully understood. 
Early attempts to capture the role of the Internet in socialization proved misleading. Researchers first thought the Internet would hurt the social lives of people, bringing about a new age of hermits glued to their computer screens in darkened rooms.
The Internet has done the opposite. Researchers have found the Internet is a boon to the socialization of some people.  Most Internet users actually expand their social connections through the Internet and use it to keep up with old friends for longer than they typically would. 
Anonymous corroborates recent research while revealing a new dimension – the Internet-based social movement. 
The Internet has long been a haven for socially-marginalized groups.  In its early days as a series of small groups exchanging messages, the Internet was a commune for the socially disenchanted.  It was not so much a tool as it was a means of coping with the harsh circumstances some people dealt with in their lives.
In fact, those early days are the first time that Scientology had a run-in with Internet-based opposition. Alt.religion. scientology, a usenet group dedicated to protesting Scientology, was shut down by the Church’s legal wrangling due to issues regarding the use of the word ‘scientology’ in the early 1990s. 
Alt.religion.scientology was silenced, but Anonymous takes its cause one step further and change the Internet from a passive voice for social movements into an active tool to mobilize its army of hackers. 
In a Jan. 21 press release, Anonymous asserted that The Church of Scientology made a mockery of free speech by deleting and censoring comments from Web sites such as Digg.com and YouTube.com. 
Through the use of viral marketing and some old-fashioned, real-life, grass-roots communication, Anonymous began its assault.
Anonymous’ first manifesto came in the form of a series of YouTube videos. Its goals were simple – destroy the Church of Scientology because it violated the free-speech rights of several Internet users.
The videos were seen hundreds of thousands of times, and their message struck a chord within the online community.
Motivated hackers began to attack Scientology’s online assets within days.  Web sites were blocked, prank calls were made and dates were set for “real life” protests of Scientology missions around the country. 
Web site blocking and e-mail attacks are nothing new, but Internet motivation that leads to real life physical protest is something that has not been fully explored.
Anonymous’ use of the Internet will be put to the test in the coming days – through the Internet forums and user-edited Web pages called Wiki’s, they have motivated a strong network of users. But the ability to transfer that force into the real world will be the true test of their abilities.
If Anonymous can gather its forces and make a legitimate and strong protest, then perhaps a new age of political mobilization is upon us.  
If Anonymous fails, and the protest is weak or ill-organized, it really doesn’t matter. The fallout from its protest will provide inspiration regardless, and a future generation of Internet protesters will have a new example to follow.
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Contact Skylar Gremillion at [email protected]