Still another newcomer to alt.religion.scientology, Andreas Heldal-Lund (heldal@online.no), announced his presence on November 7 with the declaration that he had put the text of NOTs on his Web page. As with Zenon, no one on the newsgroup had heard of this person before, and his defiance of Scientology was as surprising to the members of the newsgroup as it was to Scientology. Helena Kobrin immediately emailed a legal warning to Andreas, but his reply suggested that he would not be moved by an email threat. He mentioned that he did have a lawyer, and thus he was apparently preparing for a possible raid by Scientology.
Events in Norway moved with amazing speed. Less than a day after his announcement, Andreas was apparently interviewed by a newspaper in Denmark called Berlingsk Tidende. He stated that his site was already being mirrored by other Internet users, though he did not specify which other sites had the documents in question.
On Sunday, November 10, Andreas was visited in person by two people. These people apparently claimed to represent Scientology, though they did not have any written authorization or documentation to support their claims. Presumably, by visiting Andreas in person and notifying him of the actions of Scientology, this may have cleared the way for a raid.
Would Andreas be raided?
On November 11, Andreas' Internet provider, Telenor Online, was contacted by a representative of Scientology, who pointed out the pages with NOTs and presumably ordered them to be taken down. The ISP then contacted Andreas, and stated that according to their Terms of Service they were justified in taking the page down. He posted the letter from Telenor Online to alt.religion.scientology.
On November 12, Andreas suddenly did an about-face: he removed the NOTs documents from his Web page. The reason, he stated, was that his Internet service provider had been given proof of the copyright claims of Scientology, and thus they ordered him to remove the documents or else his account would be close. But, he said, his other material about Scientology will remain online.
This wasn't the end of Andreas' involvement on alt.religion.scientology, however. On November 13, he posted a parody of NOTs to the newsgroup, while he also mentioned a report of distribution of the NOTs documents taking place in Denmark. The details of this are unknown. Andreas then sent a copy of this message to Helena Kobrin and many regular participants on the newsgroup.
Andreas has been tweaking the nose of Scientology in other ways. In this message, he allegedly states that he had temporarily put up a Web page with a different Internet company, but that page was taken down shortly after receiving a torrent of faxes and phone calls.
Andreas also placed copies of the NOTs parodies on his Web page. These documents were parodied by being modified with two forms of alteration that are very popular on the Internet: "jive" and "encheferation" (which makes a text file read as if it was spoken by the Swedish Chef from the Muppets). Helena Kobrin contacted Andreas' Internet service provider once again, presumably asking for the removal of these parodies of NOTs. Andreas posted another message to alt.religion.scientology describing the response to Kobrin's message.
It was becoming obvious that Andreas was playing a game here: as soon as Scientology contacted an ISP about his Web page, he would take it down. That page would then re-appear somewhere else, and the process would begin again. On November 23, yet another message from Helena Kobrin about Andreas' NOTs page was posted to alt.religion.scientology. Also on that same day, Andreas posted an altered parody of NOTs ("borkified") to the newsgroup.
On November 25, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published an article about Andreas and Scientology's efforts to remove NOTs from the Internet.
Andreas stated that his page had been up for one month, but because he had not been contacted during that time, it seemed likely that Scientology did not consider the contents of his page to be actual copyright violations. Still, his activities in encouraging the spread of NOTs across the Internet -- and presumably the NOTs documents are still copyrighted by Scientology -- were cause for concern.
Andreas referred to his campaign as "Operation Clambake." He apparently kept in close contact with a number of Internet users opposing Scientology (though the operator of this Web site prefers to reain neutral, refraining from extensive private email contact). Here is his report from December 1, in which he claims that Scientology is allegedly objecting to Web links to his page.
Meanwhile, another mirror of Andreas pages' appeared at a Nordic Internet site called Realtime. Helena Kobrin wrote email asking that the "infringing materials" on these pages be taken down on December 5, and again on December 10. Strangely, her writing style did not appear to be as insistent and demanding as the standard emails that have been sent to most ISPs.
On December 13, Andreas posting a message suggesting that lawsuits were being prepared, but it appears that this was merely a rumour. Andreas posted a brief bulletin on December 22 stating that he still had not been sued and his NOTs links were still active.
For nearly two months, there was silence. Andreas posted regular bulletins announcing his "Operation Clambake" page to alt.religion.scientology, and he attracted a great many people to his Guestbook. On February 2, 1997, he announced that new materials had been added to his Web site. Still no response.
Then suddenly, something happened. Apparently, the reason for the silence over Andreas' Web site was because the NOTs and OT documents had become inaccessible to Web browsers...so on February 4, he fixed this problem. The next day, February 5, his web site was suddenly removed by his Internet service provider.
However, a mirror site for Andreas' Web site appeared online almost immediately, hosted by Ingar Holst in Norway. This mirror site lasted nearly a week, before it was shut down on Valentine's Day, February 14.
On February 16, Andreas posted a message to alt.religion.scientology summarizing the aftermath of the shutdown of his Web site.
But Andreas insisted that the battle was far from over...and he proved it on February 19, when his "Operation Clambake" Web pages were put up yet again. He followed this up a week later, on February 25, when he posted a summary of the materials available via his Web site. Several members of the newsgroup expressed amazement that Andreas still hadn't been sued, and one explanation of why was offered by Zenon Panoussis, in this message to alt.religion.scientology.
Despite an insistence presence by Andreas on alt.religion.scientology, the situation remained stable...still no response from Scientology to his Web site. But then Andreas received an unexpected promotion, from no less than the Wall Street Journal. On March 25, the newspaper published an editorial concerning Scientology that seemed to be a response or follow-up to the front-page story and editorial that had appeared in the New York Times a week earlier. However, the Journal editorial specifically mentioned the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup, and it singled out "Operation Clambake" in particular. This resulted in a flurry of new activity on Andreas' Web page.
And still the NOTs documents kept appearing on various Web pages, while Andreas gleefully received reports of their occurence. On April 1, he posted a message describing yet another message from Helena Kobrin to a person with a Web page, threatening legal action unless the NOTs documents were removed. By this time, NOTs had been freely available on the Net for five months.
Everyone was astounded that there had still been no move against Zenon after all this time, even when the newspaper Klassekampen published an article on the Internet struggle, and Andreas received still more media coverage. He even tried to up the ante on April 17, by posting a public invitation to all Scientologists on the Internet to look at his Web page and offer their opinions.
But then, on May 2, things started jumping and Andreas quickly moved to place himself in the midst of the fray. Zenon Panoussis had posted the text of the NOTs and OT documents to alt.religion.scientology once again, and a response immediately came when the postings were cancelled. Andreas promptly re-posted several of Zenon's NOTs postings, thus marking the first time he had posted the actual text of NOTs to alt.religion.scientology. This finally prompted the response Andreas had been looking for: He received an email apparently from Helena Kobrin, making the usual demands that he stop his present course of action. Andreas replied via email...and the denizens of alt.religion.scientology looked to see what would happen next.
The address of Andreas' Web page is http://home.sol.no/heldal/CoS/.
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