Scientology taken on by anon hackers

There seems to be a growing controversy with Scientology recently. Not sure why, it didn't exactly appear on the scene yesterday. Besides that most of us are supposed to believe in "freedom of religion."

Well .... I guess the word "most" doesn't necessarily mean "all?"

A lot of people seem to be harmed in the name of religion! When this occurs there seems to be a lot of disagreement on what the "word" actually is.

I try to be one of those people, who believes in freedom of religion so I'm not going to come to any conclusions in this post and merely document the phenomenon.

The most recent twist to the public focus on Scientology is that "anonymous" hackers reportedly shut down their site with a DDOS attack.

CNet (Robert Vamosi) did an interesting article about the conflict this anonymous group has with the Scientologists.

In it he writes:

A group of vigilantes--calling themselves Anonymous, or Anon--are escalating their attacks against the Church of Scientology in what they consider to be Internet censorship by issuing new video challenges.

The CNet article reference a YouTube video posted by this anon group (still up and running).

The article references a website called "Project Chanology," which appears not to be accessible at the present time. I wonder if the Scientology folks counterattacked?

Interestingly enough, I checked and the Scientology.org is up and running as of this writing.

Undaunted I did a little more digging and found a decent "Wikipedia" write-up on Project Chanology, here.

Here is a snippet from Wikipedia on the latest attack by Anon:

Calling the action by the Church of Scientology a form of Internet censorship, a series of DDoS attacks against Scientology websites, prank calls, and black faxes to Scientology centers were organized. They call for this to continue until they have "total and complete destruction of the present form of the Church of Scientology". Members of "Anonymous" were directed via a web site set up for the group to download denial of service software in order to take down the website Scientology.org.

According to the Wiki, a lot of the recent focus on this started after the unauthorized biography on Tom Cruise was published and the "Church" threatened YouTube with a lawsuit over a video showing "a manic-looking Cruise who gushes about his appreciation of Scientology."

Of course, I can remember Tom gushing on Oprah's couch over Katie in what some would consider a manic manner, also. Maybe gushing in a manic manner is part of his personality?

As a disclaimer, I know a lot of guys who have done a little manic gushing over a woman they were in love with. The difference probably is that most of them never get a chance to do it on the Oprah show.

Here is the latest YouTube video from Project Chanology: