Au contraire. Journalists are highly motivated to plough through the data for the scoop. ("Data scoop" is certainly an interesting development in our 21st century, btw!) I'm happy to let a highly motivated person do the ploughing, and give me the highlights, especially about a subject as marginally interesting as Scientology.
Au contraire? Respectfully, in my opinion sitting back and hoping someone else has the motivation to be inquisitive/curious is counter to the spirit of HN.
Furthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.
Nothing complex about this--it's a time-saving measure. Obviously there will be plenty of people sifting through this data, and we are free to rely on them to do so.
You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.
It has nothing to do with finding everything interesting. I was speaking about the "if there is ever something interesting, the journalists will investigate/sum it up for me" line of reasoning.
And whats with the "we are free" language, its not a cable news show. When did I ever say that anyone lacked the liberty to do something?
I think the underlying message here is that Scientology is a lot more interesting to you than it is to me! Honestly, I care about global warming a lot more and yet I didn't take much time to sift through the "Climategate" emails in detail[1]. I also care about Linux security, and yet I've not done an audit of the kernel I'm currently running. I also care about the federal tax code, and have certainly not taken the time to analyze it for inconsistencies and unfairness.
Would you say that these decisions are "counter to the spirit of HN"?
Of course, Paul Graham started HN mainly to have intelligent, on topic discussions about technology and startup issues. And in that sense, apart from my aside about "data scoops", I am probably posting contrary to the spirit of HN, since the bulk of this message and the one before it are just simple opinion expression, rather than anything more susbtantive. Heck, now that I think about it I'm tempted to delete them both!
So you're disgusted / "surprised and disappointed" at the reaction to the CRU emails, and yet you still trust other people to filter your news for you?
This is why you need to inform yourself about what's going on in the world. At least look at things with a critical eye, and not just throw up your hands and say "Oh well, the journalists will filter the important bits for me."
From your link, "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct" (concerning the "climategate" e-mails).
By hearing the cherry-picked quotes from those e-mails, you could get the impression that they're full of fraud, but now that the dust has settled and the investigations have been made, do you really think they're disgusting?
I think this example is counter to your point. The initial media reaction gave the complete wrong impression, and the later findings that the story is nonsense went completely unreported.
Actually, you're right! I read (some of) the original 'climategate' emails, and my opinion was quite contrary to virtually every independent committee. Those scientists were dirty. And clearly so.
I guess the real upshot is that "the spirit of HN" is to check original sources for stuff you really care about. It's important to do so, just in case the "experts" get it wrong.
If Scientology is important to you, then check those emails!
Good journalists should be able to plough through the data and put the information into context; referencing previous news stories or other organisations.
Unfortunately, as can be seen by the bloody awful mess they make of almost any scientific or medical or technical press release, it's unwise to rely on a journalist to provide sensible analysis.
Maybe there's some great crowd-sourcing website that could do this? (A bit like the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, but different.)
Or perhaps as a MVP someone could just write a script that turns many words into links to a wikipedia entry?
To risk being viewed as that crazy paranoid commentator: Scientology is no stranger to lawsuits. They may well discourage publishing such at risk of expensive, drawn-out legal action.
Its unfortunate that they were not distributed via bittorrent and/or a tor hidden service. The files are large enough that downloading them with the "free download" option is a terribly long wait. I do not understand how this has so many upvotes after being up for such a short time. Have that many people actually downloaded the files already?
Does anyone have any guesses about the string at the end of the announcement? Is that something Anonymous normally does?
What hurdles/risks are present in bittorrent that are not incurred when uploading to a free file hosting service? I do not think bittorrent and/or free file services provide any serious level of anonymity against a group with pockets as deep as the CoS. Let's not forget these are the people that brought down anon.penet.fi...
N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included it originally.
From the responses I have read it seems that I should have been more clear that I was also taking censorship resistance into consideration.
Just use Tor bundle and that’s it. The only way you can shoot yourself in foot is if you use flash uploader and that bypasses Tor (fortunately plugins are disabled in Tor bundle AFAIK).
Seeding via Tor? You need to configure Torrent client to use Tor, make sure it doesn’t leak anything (DNS lookups, publishing to DHT or tracker, some stuff on the protocol level was a problem as well). There’s nothing that comes working out of the box. Of course it’s not rocket science, it’s just a bit more work.
Hosting just via hidden service is actually worse than uploading to random locations on clearnet:
1) Still no way to do load balancing with hidden services
2) It’s usually slower anyway
3) If your server gets compromised you’re toasted, unless you use hacked servers, or buy your servers with Bitcoins or stolen CCs.
The best network for publishing that kind of leaks would be Freenet or I2P + Tahoe. But those are not nearly as popular (and secure) as Tor.
I was assuming someone from anonymous could handle figuring out how to setup tor to seed.
More importantly hosting via hidden service is not worse than uploading to depositfiles. Hidden services protects both the uploader's and the downloader's anonymity and it is much, much, much more resistant to censorship. I am not sure what "hosting gets breached" has to do with the discussion.
I guess it’s not a major issue when just hosting some static content, but still if someone gets access to your server sitting behind Tor, you better make sure you don’t have any activity that can tie you to that server.
This is how some people running CP sites via Tor were caught.
In order to get access to your server they need to circumvent the anonymity that tor provides. Hopefully if you go through the trouble to publish via hidden descriptors you know not to include your name/SSN/gps/cell-number in your apache headers;)
This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations? The interaction of tor/law-enforcement is something I am extremely interested in.
> In order to get access to your server they need to circumvent the anonymity that tor provides.
Not necessarily, the CP sites were hacked using PHP vulnerabilities or something similar, not to mention your hosting provider could just get interested in your network activity for whatever reason.
> This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations?
Because uploading it to a free file hosting service can easily be done via a compromised machine and/or tor (don't know how well uploading large files over tor works though) - maybe even a library/public computer, making it quite hard to trace (though when using a public computer you need to take other precautions, like avoiding surveillance cameras). Also since nothing is made public instantly you have time to erase any traces.
With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
And when the hosting service receives the inevitable take down notice from CoS? CoS lawyers brought down anon.penet.fi I am sure they can convince depositfiles that they do not want to go to court.
> With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
Don't most clients support web seeding[1] these days?
Well, would that be easier to do than just seed it yourself? (with the added risks mentioned above)
I'm guessing that few hosting companies make that easy to do, since you often have to go through some form of queue to even get the ticket needed to download it.
That’s actually pretty good way to bootstrap torrent anonymously. The issue is just keeping webseeds alive long enough, which can be tricky if the upload is fairly big.
If you've ever met or known anyone into Scientology then you'd get why it has so many up votes this quick. I up voted before reading the emails because I know as I'm sure others do how important it is to expose their acts. But yeah, a torrent wouldve been nice but oh well.
That's what I would have assumed, but many of them are actually written in (mostly hilariously bad) English for some reason. They also seem to be using quite a lot of jargon, which seems to consist entirely of English words or phrases.
E.g. Jehovah’s witnesses call their religion “the Truth” in their everyday conversations. Any kind of critical thought is equivalent then to “rejecting the Truth,” which automatically substitutes critical thinking with an emotional response.
Am I the only one who doesn't find this all that positive? I already think scientology is bad/evil/dangerous, and I think that illegally getting access to their secrets might make the opposition (us) look worse in the public eye. Everybody has dirty secrets, both sides, and it's a bit low to go after the other side's private emails. It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks. We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.
Idk, am I alone here? Am I wrong? I'm open to contrary opinions.
I think the post you were responding to was just nit-picking the logic that illegal == immoral (or wrong). I don't see anything in that post that states what you are railing against here.
No, definitely not everyone. For starters, it should be obvious the GP would exclude "those who believe gay marriage is morally wrong".
But in particular, I am especially wary of the "personal morals and ethics" of people making broad generalizations like you just did.
Fortunately, I know somebody who's perfectly entitled to enforce his personal morals right back at you. And yeah, I am aware that you could do the same thing, but you also appear to believe that to do so would make you a bad person. So it's your choice, really: Submit, Be Good, or Be Bad.
I doubt you're alone in that, and I don't think you're wrong. I can't help but feel a little glee at this and the dirty laundry that undoubtedly will be uncovered in the next couple of days. But it's a guilty pleasure. Behaviour like this just conflicts with the categorical imperative.
However I might change my tone if something really serious is uncovered here. I think whistle blowing is a good thing, and this seems like the next best equivalent. Of course, that is a ridiculous position to take, essentially giving any random hacker the license to read through random personal email and blow the whistle on demand.[0] So I guess that position isn't tenable, either. But I know it'd be hard to be critical of a hypothetical hack that revealed or delivered proof about illegal activities by certain groups, be it Scientology, large-scale financial stuff or neo-nazis.
A more responsible release would probably only include incriminating or otherwise extraordinary emails, preserving (sort of) the privacy of most people. But arguably that's so difficult and personally dangerous in case of large data hacks or leaks that it's equivalent of saying a responsible release isn't viable.
[0] As determined by them, but that problem applies to all kinds of whistle blowing.
Shedding a bit more light on the ethics of the action of leaking this data, the reason why a lot of people feel conflicted about the right- or wrongness of the action, is because it is perfectly acceptable from a Virtue Ethics point of view: The fact that leaking private data would be wrong in the vast majority of cases is inconsequential because the data being that of a (generally agreed upon to be) evil organisation ascertains the moral character of the actor (in some sense).
A strict moral code like the C.I. is pretty dangerous when it forces you to disclose you're hiding Jews in your attic (sorry for the "Godwin", but that's the counterexample I was taught). It's even worse if done half-assed "well obviously you don't need to take it that strict if it leads to bad things" because then you can argue your way around everything--without even having to consider "does this make me a good person?".
And from that point of view, for me, the real question to ask: Would this person (or persons) have done the same thing if the emails did not belong to Scientology or neo-nazis or similar?
> and it's a bit low to go after the other side's private emails.
I think that calling them "private" is a bit misleading here. As far as I can see, they all seem to be about Scientology business / logistics. That by itself obviously does not excuse leaking them, but (again, as far as I can see) the emails do not contain much personal information.
> It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks.
I would probably agree with you if this was about any other organisation, but the CoS has a long, long history of suppressing information about them by any means, both legally and illegally. People who leave the church are routinely harassed and threatened to prevent them from talking about it. Judging from the past, they also do a lot of dirty business that, in my opinion, needs be be widely known.
Considering this, I think this might be a good thing. At the very least, I find it hard to blame the person leaking this.
> We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.
Even though US law probably doesn't apply here, you're almost certainly right about the legality of this. But, honestly, I'm not sure why we should care, we're not the part of the Austrian judicial system. I'm still somewhat ambivalent about the ethical status of this, but I think we should not conflate legality and morality here.
> I think that calling them "private" is a bit misleading here. As far as I can see, they all seem to be about Scientology business / logistics.
That doesn't make them not-private. My email is private no matter what the subject is.
More to the point - you seem to be saying that it's okay to read someone's email, and then just release the parts that don't contain much personal information. That is clearly shady.
Maybe you can make the case that the CoS is so evil that the normal rules for what you should/shouldn't do with someone's email account don't apply here. But you certainly can't pretend that this is anything other than leaking private information.
Calling them private is certainly technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the term is sufficiently overloaded that I thought it would be worth pointing out that they don't seem to contain personal information (e.g. people talking about their children or their marriage trouble).
I don't think that this is the result of someone reading all their emails and releasing the ones without personal information (which I don't think would be okay, I'm not sure how you got that impression), but a result of everyone using @scientology.co.at email addresses.
As I said above, I do not think that the lack of personal information by itself makes releasing them okay, but I do think that the combination of the CoS being secretive and "evil" gives this particular hack some (moral, not legal) legitimacy, because it is difficult to get this information using less dodgy methods.
Slight assumption but I bet you're for having a police force, justice system and prisons. Consider that the police use oppression to fight oppression. The justice system uses professional liars to decide on people's life paths. Prisons are essentially cages for human beings. You likely already support fighting fire with fire.
I think you're right to be concerned. I think that in general it's not right to illegally access and distribute the secrets of "the other side", even if you're totally convinced of your own moral superiority to them. I don't think it's right for Democrats to hack into Republicans' emails, nor vice versa, and I don't think it's even okay when it's a group that most people find detestable (e.g. the British National Party, who got their emails hacked recently).
On the other hand, in this particular case I'm inclined to say "Fuck it, they're Scientology". But I'm aware that I'm on pretty darn thin ice, ethically speaking.
You're not the only one. The "hacktivism" trend is not going to work out the way Internet activists want it to; instead, it's just going to associate legitimate advocacy with criminality (and, for what it's worth: advocating against a criminal conspiracy wearing the garb of a religion is a legit target for adversary).
What exactly is gained by targeting an organization already famously good at playing the victim game with pointlessly malicious Internet pranks? Nothing.
I just think it was a waste of time. I guess they had to find an easy target, and they probably did it for the lulz (which is a douche move, but it's their MO).
Strange? Someone's got a couple hundred of Euros in credit at the CoS bookstore, but should already own his full set of encyclopedias, considering that he's a Level 60 Warlock. So they're asking if he can donate that for some "charity" event about their popular "psychiatry is eeeevil" line of thought.
This should be brought to public attention but the public don't want to have to download 2.8 gb of data and filter through it. Someone has to do that first and make it easily digestible, highlighting the worst or most 'dangerous' emails.
I would day almost every religion has dirty secrets, because with power over people comes evil actions. Scientology in particular has a bad reputation of engaging in particularly dubious activity though, as even a cursory inspection of their history will reveal.
What does this have to do with HN? We'd flag off posts about Scientology as irrelevant. So basically, this is at the top of the page as a celebration of hacking organizations nerds don't like. It's how we nerds do bullying.
And I think Scientology is probably a criminal organization.
Scientology is not regarded a religion everywhere. In Germany it is considered a cult instead and it is even on a government watchlist. As students we were warned about it in school.
EDIT: I was just looking at Scientology's (English) Wikipedia page and came across this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scientology_warning_leafle... . I though it would illustrate my point. Those are three government-issued leaflets with the title "Protect Our Democracy". One is on organized crime, one on Islamic terrorism and one on Scientology.
In America here, it's a state recognized religion with a Church of their own. Hell, Tom Cruise is a Scientologist. That cult is a money hoarding organization. I wish this hack attack happened in America.
Oh for pete's sake. Go read up on Lisa McPherson and Operation Snow White. There are plenty of legitimate and documented reasons to hate Scientology, not one of which is because they hoard money.
> In America here, it's a state recognized religion with a Church of their own.
So what? There a lots of state recognized religions, and it doesn't mean much. (The state of CA recognizes weddings performed by folks who bought their "ministership" from an advert in Rolling Stone.)
The point is still moot if we're talking about Austria (just like the reference of Germany was useless so is the US one).
To add some real data: Over there it seems that this organization is tax-exempt, but not recognized as a church or religion. [1, found as reference on Wikipedia]:
Sensitivity to and fears of Scientology in the country remains an issue.
The Church of Scientology reported problems obtaining credit cards,
and individual Scientologists experienced discrimination in hiring.
However, Scientology leaders also noted that the Vienna Provincial
Tax Authority granted them tax-exempt, non-profit status.
Well.. Now this is a nice US centric view here that probably _is_ based on this stuff being a religion in the US after all. Scientology members being discriminated, a paragraph between a reports about Muslims and Jews. Hilarious.
That's very interesting, thanks. It seems to treat the classifications as a timeline of a religion (from birth/cult to establishment/religion), and not by control or whatnot...
You can also think of it in terms of 1 Corinthians 13:11. Maturity, and the turning of generations, does something to an organization. Christianity began as an apocalypse cult, after all, promising hope of the afterlife for the downtrodden; it wasn't until Constantine was converted that it started to learn how to be a state religion; and not until Martin Luther and Henry VII did it learn to be just a religion. (The exile into Babylon and the dissolution of the Caliphate had similar effects on Judaism and Islam.)
In other words, they were forced to let go of their control simply because of historical circumstance. Straight through World War 2, the Vatican continued to exert a very strong influence on European nations... because the Pope was everyone's ambassador, even if he could no longer threaten excommunication with meaningful clout.
Scientology has not had these experiences. It is young and not officially descended from any known religion, so "sect" would be an incorrect term except in cases where you consider the entire whole of Judaism or Christianity a sect. It is dominated by personality cults, from the original of L. Ron Hubbard to its scheme of hooking celebrities to be spokespersons.
It's absolutely a grey line. Keep in mind that branches of mainstream religions sometimes go off in cultish directions -- often focusing on a charismatic figure.
Religions exert as much control as they can. Christianity used to be much more powerful in the West and controlled everything, as Islam does in some countries. Churches don't give up control willingly, it's taken away from them by external factors..
As someone who is building a religion in his spare time, I must say that I don't see something intrinsic to religion which says "they must exert as much control as they can" and "they don't give up control willingly," just as I don't see something intrinsic to government which says "they must form sprawling bureaucracies."
With that said, there may be a feedback-theory reason why these things often connect. In the case of governments, for example, bureaucracy allows you to marshal much vaster quantities of resources, especially for your military: so as we look for a positive feedback loop, the most successful governments were probably bureaucracies. (Yes, I would also classify evolution by natural selection as a feedback theory.)
It may therefore be the case that there is a competition for a limited believership and the religions which control their believers most tend to grow themselves in this competition. If you want an interesting perspective on what Anonymous is doing, it is trying to increase the cost of religious control, to the point where the feedback goes from positive to negative. If each exertion of control (however that is defined) tends to lose believers rather than gain them, then religions will either have to adapt to a policy of less-control, or else will naturally die out due to negative feedback.
Not to mention the fact that Scientology (the study of science?) is chock full of ridiculOus BS. Hell, at least some of the mainstream religions have a bit of history to back them up (i.e., Jesus did actually exist, whether or not you believe him to be the son of God).
They're both ridiculous to non-believers. We're just more used to one than the other. I'm sure if Scientology were to be a mainstream thing for a couple of hundreds of years, people would be willing to talk about Hubbard's space DC10s the same way we talk about the virgin birth or the splitting of the sea, with a sort of benign incredulity at what kinds of silly magics people believe in.
And whether they use that control to induce their members to perform illegal acts or provide personally-harmfully large amounts of money to the church.
I'm not going to break down the semantics, but I'd say there's a bit of a gap between, say, The Methodist Church and the Branch Davidians or the Peoples Temple.
Objections to Scientology are not (for the most part) based on their religious beliefs, but their practices and behaviors. They have a history of being aggressively litigious, similar to patent trolls[1], and have used frivolous lawsuits to harass critics into giving up the fight. There are also some indications that they're emotionally abusive to their members, and encourage them to cut off all contact to non-Scientologist friends and family. These allegations are difficult to substantiate, in part because the Church is so aggressive about quelling criticism.
In general, the Intarwebs regard Scientology as an organization that invests substantial financial and legal resources in limiting free speech on the internet. This is generally unpopular, regardless of who is doing it. The Church's status as a religious institution is largely immaterial to this perception.
[1] Very similar, actually. They claim copyright on their religious writings, and use that to sue people who release them.
> There are also some indications that they're emotionally abusive to their members, and encourage them to cut off all contact to non-Scientologist friends and family. These allegations are difficult to substantiate, in part because the Church is so aggressive about quelling criticism.
curious, why aren't the testimonials of ex-members adequate substantiation ? While it was extremely difficult to get access to information critical to Scientology prior to the late 1990s, there is a tremendous amount of critical information and ex-member testimonials available today.
There is a free book online by an ex member called A Piece of Blue Sky. Once I started reading I couldn't stop.. it a very compelling story and it covers a lot of history in the broader sense (not limited to this specific member's experience). Definitely worth the read if this is something you are interested in:
Fear and mistrust of Scientology has nothing to do with their beliefs. They are a secretive organization that seeks to protect itself at the expense of everyone else. They are the perpetrators of the largest infiltration of the US government [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White]. And while their actions today may be legal they are nonetheless still dangerous.
Here's a writeup from an ex-member, who was pretty high up in the org at one point and saw most of what can be seen, describing his experiences since having left. Sure, the whole organisation is unlikely to be "evil", but most religious sects gave up this stuff a while ago. Try to imagine any vaguely normal religion doing this. In a time when people give Google or Microsoft a hard time for being evil, this redefines the term.
The issue people have with Scientology is not that it's "weird". It's that they are an organization created expressly as a kind of pyramid scheme designed to funnel money from its clueless members to its corrupt leaders, and that they will go great (and highly immoral) lengths to safeguard the structure of the organization.
All the weirdness -- the bogus science, the alien mythology, the extreme secrecy and protectiveness, the level hierarchy, etc. -- is merely a side effect of that goal. The mythology, for example, is the carrot, and the secrecy is the stick; they need the mythology because they need to feed some new knowledge (even if bogus) at each level, and they need the secrecy to make that knowledge desirable in the first place, both to members and to non-members.
Sure, all religions are "weird". But most religious organizations -- generally speaking -- genuinely have their members' best interests at heart. Scientology has no such concerns.
"But most religiour organization -- generally speaking -- genuinely have their members' best interests at heart."
I think that's highly dependent on whether you believe what's being preached. There's countless examples of mainstream religions exploiting their power for financial and organizational gain at the expense of individual followers. From a financial standpoint, just take a look at the Vatican City as an example of how much money has been funneled from their followers.
Apparently you missed my point. Most religious organizations have elements of corruption, sure, but Scientology as an organization is built to exploit its members by design.
I got your point. But again ... it depends what you believe. For argument's sake, let's assume there's no such thing as God -- then the entire basis for every religion is fraudulent and perpetuates falsehoods resulting in the manipulation of a community of people to think, act, tithe, and multiply according to the rules of that church. If all faiths happen to be incorrect, then aren't they guilty of the same sin ... perpetuating a fictional promise and manipulating a community (whether they know they're doing it or not) in an exploitive way? Or is it less bad because there's potentially a perceived positive effect on the individuals and the community?
Look, I realize debating religion online is pretty futile, and I'm no fan of Scientology or any other religion for that matter. I do get what your saying. I also have no idea what your religious views are ... but I've had a ton of debates where people seem to be blinded by how they were brought up and can only see outward from the religious views they hold as the truth. I suppose somebody could probably make that same case for my perspective on things. Personally, I think religion is introduced way before most people have the mental capacity to comprehend what's being thrust upon them, and I wonder what the religious landscape would look like if it were the kind of thing people first-experienced later on in life.
Leaders of pentacostal/evangelical churches, perhaps? Are they knowingly fraudulent?
There's no way to tell if most religious leaders truly believe, unless you catch one in an incontrovertible statement of disbelief. Even someone like the Pope could be going along with it for the prestige, or simply not knowing what he'd do with his life outside of the Church.
From a non-religious perspective, either someone is brainwashed, or they are fraudulent. That distinction matters in law, but it doesn't have any bearing on the value of the religious institution.
Sure, all religions are "weird". But most religious organizations -- generally speaking -- genuinely have their members' best interests at heart. Scientology has no such concerns.
I very much do not believe that is the case at all. I find it fairly absurd to believe it possible to accurately generalize about the members of any large organization in that manner. There are doubtless some very good people and some very bad people who are members of nearly any group, including religions.
The difference is that the heads of Scientology know that their religion is not only completely made up, but was designed from the ground up to serve as a money-making machine for the organization's leaders. While the history of the Roman Catholic church is rife with corruption, its structure, dogma and so forth are all focused on faith, not wealth. With the Catholic church, corruption is a side effect; with Scientology it is the raison d'être.
How can you assert something like that? It's really quite preposterous.
All religious organizations have a strong need to fundraise in order to continue to exist. Many churches I've visited are lined around the entire periphery with money receptacles that have candles on top. You pay a donation and then you may light a candle and access God, etc.
The idea that faith motivates anyone (from clergy members to suicide bombers) is absurd. No matter how religious a person is, it's well known that faith is a goal and not a reality. Humans suffer from tremendous doubt. Angels, on the other hand, are faith robots which do not doubt... which is a consequence of their lack of free will.
Humans are mostly the same. A sampling of San Francisco residents is likely to be just as prejudiced as a sampling of Alabama residents. Similarly, a sampling of Scientologists are just as likely to be corrupt as Catholics or Buddhists.
As an even more general rule, all organizations tend toward corruption. What prevents corruption is not the virtue of individual members but things like transparency, competition, accountability, focus on results, etc.
Religious organizations (and to a lesser extent political and corporate ones) have evolved and continue to evolve clever ways to avoid accountability, to avoid transparency, etc. Secular organizations suffer a big comparative disadvantage in that the results they claim to have delivered are typically expected to be observable by humans.
"Sure, all religions are "weird". But most religious organizations -- generally speaking -- genuinely have their members' best interests at heart. Scientology has no such concerns.
"
That argument kinda breaks down when you take a look at one of the oldest and largest existing religions: Catholicism. Should anyone be surprised that powerful Catholic countries in Europe are totally against Scientology? It's not so much that Scientology is significantly worse (even if it is), it's because they don't like competition.
It's illegal to distribute confidential information of another group. This isn't about democrats or republicans. We're not talking about a group of people here. We're talking about a religion. If a religion has "secrets" which cannot be shared among believers and non-believers than it's not a religion - it's a sect.
Can someone alert the relevant authorities of Germany. Yes, they may have already noticed this. But: Kann ein deutscher Sprecher mitteilen, Bundesnachrichtendienst und BfV.
I still don't understand why they use this one click hoster, which have a waiting time and limited download rate instead of bittorrent. The files are large enough and I think enough people would seed it. Decentralization is an important point for such data leaks as well.
Well, anonymity over bittorrent is hard(er, at least), and that is probably the reason why the hackers didnt distribute the data in that way. But for us who didnt do the hack, distributing the files is not as bad to be caught doing.
So while the hackers release the data in an anonymus manner, we can easily create a torrent. I would be surprised if one didnt already exist, actually.
He writes also that he has a positive opinion on Scientology. The guy is a cop, so he should know that Scientology is a criminal "organization" and shouldn't support them with money. The whole system Scientology is a huge fraud.
He also write her with his work mail account, which should be another reason to fire him.
The various tacts and arguments taken by Scientology apologists in this discussion makes for interesting reading. But I suspect that Hacker News has more than it's fair share of Devil's Advocates and contrarians - and I'm sure Scientology's official social media 'shepherds' are focussing their attentions on much bigger news and social media sites than this.
I used to find it quite interesting to map the rigour, rhetoric and "set plays" demonstrated by a number of pro-china/anti-Dalai Lama redditors who I'm sure were tasked by the People's Liberation Army to do that for a living... Now THAT would make for an engaging AMA! They were actually quite effective at gently nudging the hive mind sometimes - I found the only way to cancel out their influence was via what amounted to incessant trolling and arguing semantics. This usually meant they were too caught up in my tomfoolery to properly engage in the more substantial conversation; it was an interesting experiment, but I don't really have the time or energy for all that these days.
I find it beautifully ironic - the statement "2.They are evil. They are dangerous. Everyone must know." from people who invaded privacy under the misguided belief they are fighting the good fight...
Two wrongs don't make a right. Grow the f*ck up - stand up instead of skulking in the shadows.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadFurthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.
You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.
And whats with the "we are free" language, its not a cable news show. When did I ever say that anyone lacked the liberty to do something?
up until they overthrow the government and appoint L. Ron's disembodied head as ruler for life.
Would you say that these decisions are "counter to the spirit of HN"?
Of course, Paul Graham started HN mainly to have intelligent, on topic discussions about technology and startup issues. And in that sense, apart from my aside about "data scoops", I am probably posting contrary to the spirit of HN, since the bulk of this message and the one before it are just simple opinion expression, rather than anything more susbtantive. Heck, now that I think about it I'm tempted to delete them both!
[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_... And for the record, those emails are pretty disgusting and I'm surprised and disappointed at the reaction.
This is why you need to inform yourself about what's going on in the world. At least look at things with a critical eye, and not just throw up your hands and say "Oh well, the journalists will filter the important bits for me."
By hearing the cherry-picked quotes from those e-mails, you could get the impression that they're full of fraud, but now that the dust has settled and the investigations have been made, do you really think they're disgusting?
I think this example is counter to your point. The initial media reaction gave the complete wrong impression, and the later findings that the story is nonsense went completely unreported.
Actually, you're right! I read (some of) the original 'climategate' emails, and my opinion was quite contrary to virtually every independent committee. Those scientists were dirty. And clearly so.
I guess the real upshot is that "the spirit of HN" is to check original sources for stuff you really care about. It's important to do so, just in case the "experts" get it wrong.
If Scientology is important to you, then check those emails!
Extracting the MIME attachments is pretty straight forward:
Unfortunately, as can be seen by the bloody awful mess they make of almost any scientific or medical or technical press release, it's unwise to rely on a journalist to provide sensible analysis.
Maybe there's some great crowd-sourcing website that could do this? (A bit like the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, but different.)
Or perhaps as a MVP someone could just write a script that turns many words into links to a wikipedia entry?
Does anyone have any guesses about the string at the end of the announcement? Is that something Anonymous normally does?
N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included it originally.
From the responses I have read it seems that I should have been more clear that I was also taking censorship resistance into consideration.
Seeding via Tor? You need to configure Torrent client to use Tor, make sure it doesn’t leak anything (DNS lookups, publishing to DHT or tracker, some stuff on the protocol level was a problem as well). There’s nothing that comes working out of the box. Of course it’s not rocket science, it’s just a bit more work.
Hosting just via hidden service is actually worse than uploading to random locations on clearnet:
1) Still no way to do load balancing with hidden services
2) It’s usually slower anyway
3) If your server gets compromised you’re toasted, unless you use hacked servers, or buy your servers with Bitcoins or stolen CCs.
The best network for publishing that kind of leaks would be Freenet or I2P + Tahoe. But those are not nearly as popular (and secure) as Tor.
More importantly hosting via hidden service is not worse than uploading to depositfiles. Hidden services protects both the uploader's and the downloader's anonymity and it is much, much, much more resistant to censorship. I am not sure what "hosting gets breached" has to do with the discussion.
This is how some people running CP sites via Tor were caught.
This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations? The interaction of tor/law-enforcement is something I am extremely interested in.
Not necessarily, the CP sites were hacked using PHP vulnerabilities or something similar, not to mention your hosting provider could just get interested in your network activity for whatever reason.
> This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations?
Nothing I have bookmarked, sorry.
With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Web_seed...
I'm guessing that few hosting companies make that easy to do, since you often have to go through some form of queue to even get the ticket needed to download it.
Do you have to actually _wait_ for them to download?
[1] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/
[2] http://pic.pwny.biz/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.at/
[3] http://blog.esowatch.com/?p=8247
(in German, of course)
http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/buchladen_at_scientology.co.a...
http://pic.pwny.biz.nyud.net/x/ed_at_scientology.co.at/
That's what I would have assumed, but many of them are actually written in (mostly hilariously bad) English for some reason. They also seem to be using quite a lot of jargon, which seems to consist entirely of English words or phrases.
First time reading CoS material? Anything in particular? LRH was an american so it is not surprising that the domain specific jargon is english...
ಠ_ಠ
E.g. Jehovah’s witnesses call their religion “the Truth” in their everyday conversations. Any kind of critical thought is equivalent then to “rejecting the Truth,” which automatically substitutes critical thinking with an emotional response.
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/sekten/mind1.html
Idk, am I alone here? Am I wrong? I'm open to contrary opinions.
Who cares? The question is whether it's wrong.
Good plan. What could possibly go wrong with it? After all, everyone capable of coercing us of anything must share our morals and ethics.
But in particular, I am especially wary of the "personal morals and ethics" of people making broad generalizations like you just did.
Fortunately, I know somebody who's perfectly entitled to enforce his personal morals right back at you. And yeah, I am aware that you could do the same thing, but you also appear to believe that to do so would make you a bad person. So it's your choice, really: Submit, Be Good, or Be Bad.
This kind of hacking is a serious felony in all OECD Annex-1 countries. That's a very different thing.
However I might change my tone if something really serious is uncovered here. I think whistle blowing is a good thing, and this seems like the next best equivalent. Of course, that is a ridiculous position to take, essentially giving any random hacker the license to read through random personal email and blow the whistle on demand.[0] So I guess that position isn't tenable, either. But I know it'd be hard to be critical of a hypothetical hack that revealed or delivered proof about illegal activities by certain groups, be it Scientology, large-scale financial stuff or neo-nazis.
A more responsible release would probably only include incriminating or otherwise extraordinary emails, preserving (sort of) the privacy of most people. But arguably that's so difficult and personally dangerous in case of large data hacks or leaks that it's equivalent of saying a responsible release isn't viable.
[0] As determined by them, but that problem applies to all kinds of whistle blowing.
Shedding a bit more light on the ethics of the action of leaking this data, the reason why a lot of people feel conflicted about the right- or wrongness of the action, is because it is perfectly acceptable from a Virtue Ethics point of view: The fact that leaking private data would be wrong in the vast majority of cases is inconsequential because the data being that of a (generally agreed upon to be) evil organisation ascertains the moral character of the actor (in some sense).
A strict moral code like the C.I. is pretty dangerous when it forces you to disclose you're hiding Jews in your attic (sorry for the "Godwin", but that's the counterexample I was taught). It's even worse if done half-assed "well obviously you don't need to take it that strict if it leads to bad things" because then you can argue your way around everything--without even having to consider "does this make me a good person?".
And from that point of view, for me, the real question to ask: Would this person (or persons) have done the same thing if the emails did not belong to Scientology or neo-nazis or similar?
I think that calling them "private" is a bit misleading here. As far as I can see, they all seem to be about Scientology business / logistics. That by itself obviously does not excuse leaking them, but (again, as far as I can see) the emails do not contain much personal information.
> It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks.
I would probably agree with you if this was about any other organisation, but the CoS has a long, long history of suppressing information about them by any means, both legally and illegally. People who leave the church are routinely harassed and threatened to prevent them from talking about it. Judging from the past, they also do a lot of dirty business that, in my opinion, needs be be widely known.
Considering this, I think this might be a good thing. At the very least, I find it hard to blame the person leaking this.
> We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.
Even though US law probably doesn't apply here, you're almost certainly right about the legality of this. But, honestly, I'm not sure why we should care, we're not the part of the Austrian judicial system. I'm still somewhat ambivalent about the ethical status of this, but I think we should not conflate legality and morality here.
That doesn't make them not-private. My email is private no matter what the subject is.
More to the point - you seem to be saying that it's okay to read someone's email, and then just release the parts that don't contain much personal information. That is clearly shady.
Maybe you can make the case that the CoS is so evil that the normal rules for what you should/shouldn't do with someone's email account don't apply here. But you certainly can't pretend that this is anything other than leaking private information.
I don't think that this is the result of someone reading all their emails and releasing the ones without personal information (which I don't think would be okay, I'm not sure how you got that impression), but a result of everyone using @scientology.co.at email addresses.
As I said above, I do not think that the lack of personal information by itself makes releasing them okay, but I do think that the combination of the CoS being secretive and "evil" gives this particular hack some (moral, not legal) legitimacy, because it is difficult to get this information using less dodgy methods.
On the other hand, in this particular case I'm inclined to say "Fuck it, they're Scientology". But I'm aware that I'm on pretty darn thin ice, ethically speaking.
What exactly is gained by targeting an organization already famously good at playing the victim game with pointlessly malicious Internet pranks? Nothing.
This is one strange email...
I am not defending religion or Scientology.
What does this have to do with HN? We'd flag off posts about Scientology as irrelevant. So basically, this is at the top of the page as a celebration of hacking organizations nerds don't like. It's how we nerds do bullying.
And I think Scientology is probably a criminal organization.
And I don't have any evidence that Scientology is "evil" nor do I have any interest in pursuing such knowledge.
EDIT: I was just looking at Scientology's (English) Wikipedia page and came across this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scientology_warning_leafle... . I though it would illustrate my point. Those are three government-issued leaflets with the title "Protect Our Democracy". One is on organized crime, one on Islamic terrorism and one on Scientology.
Oh for pete's sake. Go read up on Lisa McPherson and Operation Snow White. There are plenty of legitimate and documented reasons to hate Scientology, not one of which is because they hoard money.
So what? There a lots of state recognized religions, and it doesn't mean much. (The state of CA recognizes weddings performed by folks who bought their "ministership" from an advert in Rolling Stone.)
> Hell, Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.
Again - so what?
To add some real data: Over there it seems that this organization is tax-exempt, but not recognized as a church or religion. [1, found as reference on Wikipedia]:
Well.. Now this is a nice US centric view here that probably _is_ based on this stuff being a religion in the US after all. Scientology members being discriminated, a paragraph between a reports about Muslims and Jews. Hilarious.1: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Austria http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27825.htm
Again, so what? The French like Jerry Lewis. The Germans like David Hasselhoff.
There are lots of facts, but few are actually "points".
I'm not defending Scientology, but the line between "cult" and "religion" seems a bit blurry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociological_classifications_of...
You can also think of it in terms of 1 Corinthians 13:11. Maturity, and the turning of generations, does something to an organization. Christianity began as an apocalypse cult, after all, promising hope of the afterlife for the downtrodden; it wasn't until Constantine was converted that it started to learn how to be a state religion; and not until Martin Luther and Henry VII did it learn to be just a religion. (The exile into Babylon and the dissolution of the Caliphate had similar effects on Judaism and Islam.)
In other words, they were forced to let go of their control simply because of historical circumstance. Straight through World War 2, the Vatican continued to exert a very strong influence on European nations... because the Pope was everyone's ambassador, even if he could no longer threaten excommunication with meaningful clout.
Scientology has not had these experiences. It is young and not officially descended from any known religion, so "sect" would be an incorrect term except in cases where you consider the entire whole of Judaism or Christianity a sect. It is dominated by personality cults, from the original of L. Ron Hubbard to its scheme of hooking celebrities to be spokespersons.
With that said, there may be a feedback-theory reason why these things often connect. In the case of governments, for example, bureaucracy allows you to marshal much vaster quantities of resources, especially for your military: so as we look for a positive feedback loop, the most successful governments were probably bureaucracies. (Yes, I would also classify evolution by natural selection as a feedback theory.)
It may therefore be the case that there is a competition for a limited believership and the religions which control their believers most tend to grow themselves in this competition. If you want an interesting perspective on what Anonymous is doing, it is trying to increase the cost of religious control, to the point where the feedback goes from positive to negative. If each exertion of control (however that is defined) tends to lose believers rather than gain them, then religions will either have to adapt to a policy of less-control, or else will naturally die out due to negative feedback.
In general, the Intarwebs regard Scientology as an organization that invests substantial financial and legal resources in limiting free speech on the internet. This is generally unpopular, regardless of who is doing it. The Church's status as a religious institution is largely immaterial to this perception.
[1] Very similar, actually. They claim copyright on their religious writings, and use that to sue people who release them.
curious, why aren't the testimonials of ex-members adequate substantiation ? While it was extremely difficult to get access to information critical to Scientology prior to the late 1990s, there is a tremendous amount of critical information and ex-member testimonials available today.
http://www.xenu.net/, http://www.freedomofmind.com/Info/infoDet.php?id=230, are good places to start.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/atack/
http://www.forum.exscn.net/showwiki.php?title=Gerry+Armstron...
All the weirdness -- the bogus science, the alien mythology, the extreme secrecy and protectiveness, the level hierarchy, etc. -- is merely a side effect of that goal. The mythology, for example, is the carrot, and the secrecy is the stick; they need the mythology because they need to feed some new knowledge (even if bogus) at each level, and they need the secrecy to make that knowledge desirable in the first place, both to members and to non-members.
Sure, all religions are "weird". But most religious organizations -- generally speaking -- genuinely have their members' best interests at heart. Scientology has no such concerns.
I think that's highly dependent on whether you believe what's being preached. There's countless examples of mainstream religions exploiting their power for financial and organizational gain at the expense of individual followers. From a financial standpoint, just take a look at the Vatican City as an example of how much money has been funneled from their followers.
Look, I realize debating religion online is pretty futile, and I'm no fan of Scientology or any other religion for that matter. I do get what your saying. I also have no idea what your religious views are ... but I've had a ton of debates where people seem to be blinded by how they were brought up and can only see outward from the religious views they hold as the truth. I suppose somebody could probably make that same case for my perspective on things. Personally, I think religion is introduced way before most people have the mental capacity to comprehend what's being thrust upon them, and I wonder what the religious landscape would look like if it were the kind of thing people first-experienced later on in life.
but it's not -knowingly- fraudulent, which is the major test for culpability.
There's no way to tell if most religious leaders truly believe, unless you catch one in an incontrovertible statement of disbelief. Even someone like the Pope could be going along with it for the prestige, or simply not knowing what he'd do with his life outside of the Church.
From a non-religious perspective, either someone is brainwashed, or they are fraudulent. That distinction matters in law, but it doesn't have any bearing on the value of the religious institution.
I very much do not believe that is the case at all. I find it fairly absurd to believe it possible to accurately generalize about the members of any large organization in that manner. There are doubtless some very good people and some very bad people who are members of nearly any group, including religions.
How can you assert something like that? It's really quite preposterous.
All religious organizations have a strong need to fundraise in order to continue to exist. Many churches I've visited are lined around the entire periphery with money receptacles that have candles on top. You pay a donation and then you may light a candle and access God, etc.
The idea that faith motivates anyone (from clergy members to suicide bombers) is absurd. No matter how religious a person is, it's well known that faith is a goal and not a reality. Humans suffer from tremendous doubt. Angels, on the other hand, are faith robots which do not doubt... which is a consequence of their lack of free will.
Humans are mostly the same. A sampling of San Francisco residents is likely to be just as prejudiced as a sampling of Alabama residents. Similarly, a sampling of Scientologists are just as likely to be corrupt as Catholics or Buddhists.
As an even more general rule, all organizations tend toward corruption. What prevents corruption is not the virtue of individual members but things like transparency, competition, accountability, focus on results, etc.
Religious organizations (and to a lesser extent political and corporate ones) have evolved and continue to evolve clever ways to avoid accountability, to avoid transparency, etc. Secular organizations suffer a big comparative disadvantage in that the results they claim to have delivered are typically expected to be observable by humans.
That argument kinda breaks down when you take a look at one of the oldest and largest existing religions: Catholicism. Should anyone be surprised that powerful Catholic countries in Europe are totally against Scientology? It's not so much that Scientology is significantly worse (even if it is), it's because they don't like competition.
http://www.bnd.bund.de/EN/__Home/Startseite/startseite__node...
http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/index_en.html
A least one country takes the threat seriously.
So while the hackers release the data in an anonymus manner, we can easily create a torrent. I would be surprised if one didnt already exist, actually.
He also write her with his work mail account, which should be another reason to fire him.
I used to find it quite interesting to map the rigour, rhetoric and "set plays" demonstrated by a number of pro-china/anti-Dalai Lama redditors who I'm sure were tasked by the People's Liberation Army to do that for a living... Now THAT would make for an engaging AMA! They were actually quite effective at gently nudging the hive mind sometimes - I found the only way to cancel out their influence was via what amounted to incessant trolling and arguing semantics. This usually meant they were too caught up in my tomfoolery to properly engage in the more substantial conversation; it was an interesting experiment, but I don't really have the time or energy for all that these days.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Grow the f*ck up - stand up instead of skulking in the shadows.