Keith Bennett


April 11, 1997: Keith Bennett puts NOTs on his Web page

The ready availability of NOTs from Andreas Heldal-Lund's Operation Clambake Web site put a damper on the appearance of NOTs at other Web sites for a while. Andreas had made NOTs available for over five months, and still he hadn't been sued... and for a while, his page became the easiest way for anyone to look at the NOTs documents. But in April 1997, the revelation that NOTs might not be owned by Religious Technology Center brought a new focus to the appearance of NOTs on the Internet. Keith Bennett announced on April 11, 1997 that he had placed NOTs on his Web page, making one of the few appearances of NOTs on a Web site in the United States.

The next day, April 12, Keith followed up his NOTs announcement by posting segments of NOTs to alt.religion.scientology. He, in turn, was replied to by Neil Woods, who reposted his message, in the belief that it had been illegally cancelled.

To no one's surprise, Keith received an email message from Helena Kobrin. He posted a scathing reply to Kobrin's letter to alt.religion.scientology. It seemed odd that he received an email warning, but David Gerard (who had also recently posted NOTs) had not.

On Sunday, April 13, Keith posting a message suggesting that he wanted to be sued by Scientology. Since he had described himself on the newsgroup as unemployed, presumably this meant that if he was indeed sued, he would defend himself in the same manner as Grady Ward and Keith Henson.Following the initial cancellation of his NOTs postings, Keith followed up over the weekend of April 13 to April 14, as he made several more postings of NOTs to alt.religion.scientology. One of his postings was then re-posted by Neil Woods, after it had been cancelled again. However, by this time it seemed that the cancel wars involving Scientology had had a noticeable affect on the Internet: many Internet sites were not accepting the cancel messages, and Keith's NOTs postings were not disappearing as fast as Scientology would have liked.

But on April 15, Net users found themselves unable to access Keith's NOTs page. The message given by Web browsers said: Url '/~dkeith/nots/' is owned by a secured user, which suggested that access to the page had been restricted by his Internet access provider.

Keith reported on April 17 that he had received a notice from his Internet service provider: remove the NOTs materials, or else. Keith acquiesced to their request, though he apparently wasn't satisfied with his actions thus far. His message of May 1 suggested that he was looking for new ways to continue his opposition to Scientology. The denizens of the Internet watched and waited for further confrontations.


The address of Keith's Web site is http://www.best.com/~dkeith/.


Click here to return to the NOTs on the Net main page.

Send email to Modemac
First Online Church of "Bob" Home Page