This thing is starting to get noticed ...

Newsweek:

Now, a loose-knit consortium of hackers and activists calling itself "Anonymous" has declared "war" on the organization. In a creepy YouTube clip addressed to the "leaders of Scientology," a robotic voice announces "with the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed." [...]

The church did not return multiple phone calls this week but did issue a statement to NEWSWEEK in which it calls Anonymous "a group of cyber-terrorists ... perpetrating religious hate crimes against Churches of Scientology and individual Scientologists for no reason other than religious bigotry."

The Economist:

Now Scientology is under attack from a group of internet activists known only as Anonymous. Organised from a Wikipedia-style website (editable by anyone) and through anonymous internet chat rooms, “Project Chanology”, as the initiative is known, presents no easy target for Scientology's lawyers. It is promoting cyberwarfare techniques normally associated with extortionists, spies and terrorists. Called “distributed denial of service attacks”, these typically involve using networks of infected computers to bombard the target's websites and servers with bogus requests for data, causing them to crash. Even governments find this troublesome.

NBC News

Sky News

I doubt very much that a bunch of hackers can "destroy" the church, but I'm amused as all get-out that they're annoying the Scientologists. And it's delicious to see a lawsuit-oriented group faced with a threat they can't sue into the ground. (It's been a long-established practice of the Church to instigate annoyance lawsuits which are meant to drain/bankrupt the opponent regardless of the merit of he suit.)

So what do the Orgahs think? Are Anonymous using terrorist techniques to annoy a legitimate church? Or are a bunch of kids with bandwidth taking on a money-grubbing cult?