Private investigations!

I'm not sure precisely what I did to piss them off this time; I was actually not being all that active on the anti-Scientology front. Perhaps it was all the Xemu leaflets I was distributing. (You can get copies from my home page on Thingy - MS Word 6 .DOC files, about 120K each.)

• Tue 16 Jul 1997, 11pm: A call to Proff (Julian Assange) at Suburbia - on his unlisted line, no less - from someone claiming to be a Scientology-hired PI called David Middleton, who gave his phone number as 9725 0705 (Croydon area) - wanting information on me, my activities and my Suburbia usage patterns.

• Fri 26 Jul 1997, 11am: A call to Frank Copeland at Thingy from someone also claiming to be a Scientology-hired PI, wanting information to help with alleged "copyright violations". This guy gave his name as "David Middleton" at the start of the call, but changed it to "Roger Middleton" when Frank got a pen and asked him again in order to write it down.

• All this is 100% standard procedure for a Noisy Investigation: "When we need somebody haunted we investigate ... When we investigate we do so noisily always. And usually mere investigation damps out the trouble even when we discover no really pertinent facts." (This is of course a highly religious activity.)
  • See also the OSA Points Calculator for how the CoS figures out who's a worthy target.

• I went fishing through online phone books and found no R Middleton in Croydon, one D Middleton with a different phone number and one Croydon detective agency.

• Tony McClelland details his experiences with CoS agents and PIs: Grant Mackay (PI, Brisbane), Roger Milton (PI, Melbourne - could that be "Roger Middleton"?), Mark Hanna (CoS, Sydney - a.k.a. 'Neil Silk') and Nigel Hunter (PI, Auckland, New Zealand).

• Frank Copeland: "I think it's quite significant that after finally being forced to take on David Gerard directly with real threats from real lawyers, and failing to get anywhere with that, they are reduced once more to sniffing around with PIs and trying to intimidate his ISPs."