Meanwhile, on August 19, "Vorlon" suddenly reappeared...but this may not have been the same Vorlon who initially posted the NOTs material. This Vorlon posted a message to alt.religion.scientology, stating that NOTs would be re-posted to the Internet. The next day, he did just that. This posting of NOTs was PGP-encrypted...however, the password was very easy to guess. NOTs was again available on alt.religion.scientology...but this Vorlon did not use an anonymous remailer. The headers of his messages showed that he was posting from XS4ALL in the Netherlands...the same Internet service provider that had been raided by Scientology in 1995. (See Ron Newman's page, Scientology raid on XS4ALL , for more details.)
Scientology immediately lodged a complaint with XS4ALL and demanded that the identity of this person be revealed. At their insistence and after consideration, XS4ALL cancelled the NOTs postings. In this message to alt.religion.scientology, Karin Spaink explains the hunt for Vorlon and why XS4ALL had to reveal his identity. XS4ALL temporarily closed the offending account.
On Wednesday, August 29, a message appeared on alt.religion.scientology from XS4ALL user Johan Wevers (johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl) , in which Johan claimed to be the person who had posted NOTs. A meeting was planned with legal representatives of Scientology to discuss these actions and presumably avoid legal action over the issue, but those meetings were postponed twice. (At this time the affair in Sweden over Zenon Penoussis and NOTs was taking place, and this may have been the reason for the delay.)
Progress in this case seemed to come to a halt. On Saturday, September 7, another announcement of NOTs distribution from Vorlon was posted to alt.religion.scientology, though the next day another message said that this announcement was an attempt to get things going again and encourage Scientology to settle on a meeting date.
Things came to a head once more on September 15, when Vorlon announced his intent to post NOTs once again, apparently as a response to the unending dumping of spam onto alt.religion.scientology. A series of PGP-encrypted messages was then posted, though at this time it is unsure whether these messages did indeed contain the NOTs documents.
In spite of all this, the distribution of NOTs on alt.religion.scientology continued. On Tuesday, September 17, NOTs was reposted to alt.religion.scientology yet again, but this time an entirely different anonymous remailer was used. Thus, it is currently impossible to tell just who reposted NOTs this time. These NOTs used a very simple form of encryption called ROT-13, which is easy to break. Helena Kobrin immediately sent this email message to the Cajones remailer administrator, asking him to cancel the messages containing NOTs. The administrator sent this reply, in which he refused to do so and stated that he did not have any logs of traffic through his remailer...thus, he could not identify the person who had sent NOTs through it.
Johan finally met with representatives of Scientology on September 18. In this message, he gives a summary of what happened.
However, after the meeting took place, the password for the PGP-encrypted NOTs messages was posted to alt.religion.scientology (on September 20). This message was promptly cancelled. Because of the high volume of traffic on alt.religion.scientology, the PGP messages had already disappeared from some servers (and repeated legal threats from Scientology had made some Usenet archive services, such as Alta Vista, loath to carry the newsgroup for long periods of time). It is unknown at this time what effect the revelation of the password would have on Johan's case.
However, events became very quiet after this. Johan's account remained open, and no noteworthy events happened for a few weeks. On Thursday, October 10, Johan announced that he had placed a copy of Judge Brinkema's written judgement against Arnie Lerma onto his home page for everyone to see...despite the fact that this judgement had been sealed by the court in the United States. Little else was known about the events surrounding his case other than this.
In spite of Scientology's frantic efforts to keep NOTs from being spread across the Internet, the doucuments were posted to alt.religion.scientology and nl.scientology yet again, this time on October 12. The NOTs documents were once again ROT-13 encrypted and posted through the Cajones remailer. Once again, Helena Kobrin contacted the remailer administrator, and once again he replied to her that the remailer does not keep any logs of its users.
But Johan spoke out again on October 14, posting a message that apparently contained a repost of one of the ROT-13 encrypted NOTs messages -- specifically, it was NOTs 34: The Sequence For Handling a Physical Condition. As usual, this message was promptly cancelled. Johan noted the forged cancel message and re-posted the ROT-13 NOTs document yet again on October 16. In this message, Johan states that Scientology called him and his lawyer, stating that they would go to court if Johan did not cancel his message. This is a sudden change of face for Scientology: it is the first time they have demanded that a user cancel his own message. Up until this point, messages claimed by Scientology to violate copyright had been illegally cancelled by the famous Cancelbunny.
Why the sudden change? It may have to do with the RICO charges filed against Scientology by Grady Ward on October 7, 1996, in which Grady claims that the hundreds of forged cancels are one part of a Scientology campaign to prevent discussion of Scientology on the Internet. (RICO stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization under the laws of the United States.)
Johan Wevers also has his own Web page, called The Scientology sect vs. Internet. This page is written in English.
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