By now, anyone who is even remotely interested in Tom Cruise (arguably a fairly large group) and specifically his interest in Scientology has probably seen the video clip of the popular Hollywood actor talking about his beliefs -- how the religion developed by failed science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard is the answer to most (if not all) of the world's problems, how Scientologists are "experts on the human mind" and so on. If you haven't seen the video yet, you can watch a version of it here -- at least until the church has it removed (as they have most of the YouTube versions). If that link doesn't work, you can try this one, or this one, or this one.
One of the fascinating things about the video is that Cruise is so earnest and talks so passionately, with his piercing gaze and chiseled features, as though he was playing a role -- but he's not. When he says that he believes he's the only one who really needs to stop at a car accident, because he's the only one who can really help, he's not acting. He's completely serious. More than one person has compared Cruise in the video to the character he played in the movie Magnolia, a twisted and yet extremely charismatic motivational speaker.
But almost as interesting is watching the church try to remove the video from the Internet. It's another small skirmish in a war that Scientology has been waging for almost 15 years, since the early days of newsgroups such as alt.religion.scientology, which posted internal church documents in 1994. Lawsuits have been filed, mailing lists have been shut down, homes of discussion group participants have been raided and their computers seized -- an all-out war.
When it comes to the Cruise video, it's easy enough to get YouTube to take the clip down, because the company is already extra-sensitive to claims of copyright infringement (Scientology says the video is copyrighted content meant for internal church use) as a result of being sued for $1-billion by Viacom, and so it essentially pulls videos down as soon as it gets a letter from someone who looks like a lawyer. Other websites aren't so easily cowed, however.
Gawker Media, a blog network run by former Financial Times journalist Nick Denton, has sworn to keep the video up no matter what happens. Doing so seems to be a freedom of speech issue in part, but Gawker is also likely motivated by the millions of eyeballs the video has brought to the site: at last count, the post with the video clip embedded in it had gotten almost 1.5-million views (most Gawker posts get anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand views).
The bottom line is that Cruise and the church seem to be suffering from something known as "The Streisand Effect," a kind of Catch-22 in which, by trying to keep certain information from becoming public, you wind up making that information even more public. The name refers to an incident in which singer Barbra Streisand sued a photographer to have a photo of her house removed from a collection of photos of the California coast -- but the publicity about the lawsuit caused more people to search out and look at the photo than ever would have seen it otherwise.
So far, it's the Internet: 1, Scientology: 0. But it's a long game.
''Wikinews'' has learned that according to an Internet posting made just over 24 hours ago, the Church of Scientology's website is being attacked by hackers, causing the site to shut down.

The attack was launched on Wednesday by a user labelled "Anonymous", on the website "Insurgency Wiki", a spinoff of 4chan.  The "History" section of the site explains, in a satirical fashion, that the incident was prompted by the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube.  Though YouTube is complying with the Church of Scientology's requests to take down the video, other sites such as Gawker.com have stated that they will keep hosting the video.  

Writing in a blog post, Matthew Ingram of ''The Globe and Mail'' dubbed the ongoing conflict involving the Church of Scientology's attempts to remove the Cruise video from the Internet: "Scientology vs. the Internet, part XVII".  He characterized the conflict between the Church of Scientology and anonymous posters of the Cruise video as "another small skirmish in a war that Scientology has been waging for almost 15 years, since the early days of newsgroups such as alt.religion.scientology, which posted internal church documents in 1994. Lawsuits have been filed, mailing lists have been shut down, homes of discussion group participants have been raided and their computers seized -- an all-out war."


One poster admitted to being a part of the effort, writing in a blog post "I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres ''sic'' something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these 'events' every now and again."  The poster wrote that "Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology."

"Someone emailed me earlier today talking about a tool a group’s been using to attack the scientology website. It’s an interesting tool, created to overload/create malformed strings and crash a website’s database," said the post by an unknown author on ''pigmy.''

The Church's website is currently unreachable. Some individuals reported that when they are able to reach the site, all they get is a message stating, ''"The word scientology means search for truth..."''. As of 15:11 GMT the site was accessible again, but only loads at relatively slow speeds, and by the end of the day Saturday the site was not loading at all. 

Posts on the message board for the Scientology-critic site Operation Clambake from Friday theorized that a denial-of-service attack had occurred, and wrote that as of Friday the Scientology.org site was either not loading at all, or loading very slowly.  Critics of Scientology at the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology were critical of the attacks to the Church of Scientology website, with one poster writing "How can people look at both sides if one side is gone?"

Traffic to the Scientology website had already increased 18-fold prior to the attack, following increased attention after the Tom Cruise video appeared on the Internet.  At that time, one in three visits to the site came from ''BBC News'', and the website increased to number 3 in the company Hitwise UK's Lifestyle-Religion category.