Fair Game: Zenon Panoussis's first posting on Fair Game raid by Scientology

Zenon Panoussis <oracle@xs4all.nl>:

Half an hour ago a team of copyright infringement investigators and computer experts, four in total, left Karin's place after finishing scientology's latest raid against me and the very first one against Karin. They had arrived two and a half hours earlier in the company of two policemen, with a search warrant signed by the public prosecutor.

The cause: scientology's repeated and persistent complaints that we are spreading OTs, NOTs and god knows what nots. The"evidence": http://search.freewinds.nl/skriptures.html. Yes, indeed, a webpage saying "you won't find any OTs and NOTs here" is clear evidence that the OTs and NOTs are being spread from that site. If you don't get the logic, you haven't been a scientologist long enough and you need to work harder on your bridge.

Anyway, we had the choice between co-operating and not co-operating. If we did co-operate, we would be voluntarily subjecting ourselves to an invasion of privacy, but get the whole thing done and over with for both parties. If we did not co-operate, they would be left empty-handed (encrypted drives, as one should have expected), but we would be left equally empty-handed while they took the computers for a year-long futile investigation. We decided to co-operate and gave them full access, with the agreement that they wouldn't nose closely on what obviously, at their own judgement, was not what they were looking for.

Fine. They found nothing. There was nothing to find. Our own private copies of the OTs and NOTs, of course, but those are part of the evidence in our respective lawsuits and several courts have already ruled that even if we may not spread them, we may possess them. So those copies don't count.

To make the search complete and avoid having to go through the same procedure once again, I offered the search team to search on the freewinds webserver too. They gladly accepted and arrived at the same results: nothing illegal there. The net result is that I now have an official statement from the authorities that there is nothing illegal on the server, which I can use when the CoS complains to domain registries and search engines and upstream providers about that same server.

As for the intimidation and harassment value of the search, we are thinking about a suitable revenge. A few pickets, better organised and more spectacular than what we have done so far, seems appropriate. Better ideas are welcome by e-mail.

Z