Path: sn.no!news-feed.ifi.uio.no!recycled.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.he.net!Supernews60!supernews.com!Supernews69!news From: grady@tidepool.com (Grady Ward) Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology,misc.legal,comp.org.eff.org,alt.censorship Subject: a BIG WIN for gertie: an account of intimidation Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 05:36:08 GMT Organization: +1 707 826 7712 Lines: 137 Message-ID: <3446e9f3.8973780@news.supernews.com> Reply-To: grady@tidepool.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.155.177.70 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.5/32.451 Xref: sn.no alt.religion.scientology:385120 misc.legal:161666 alt.censorship:170302 Due to the help of Deana (mirele@xmission.com), I now have a new home on the net. The older I get the less I can do without my friends. I am amazed at what the net will do to help a relative stranger. Thank you. This is an account of what happened today between me and tidepool.com. tidepool.com is a small ISP that has, as most of the small ISPs in my rural neck of northern California, been purchased by a group of investors called Internet Ventures, Inc. of Los Angeles. The president of that company is Don(ald) Jenky, the head of investor relations is Tim McGrath at (800) 701-7020. In fact that company is planning an Initial Public Offering in November and reportedly have just received permission from the SEC to go into their "quiet period." The first inkling I had of a problem was at noon today, October 16, 1997 when I attempted to log on as usual but got a message that my password was incorrect. I called Jim at tidepool in Arcata. He told me that "he had been trying to reach me" (I guess at someone else's phone number.) but I had had my account terminated because "an administrator at Supernews" had complain about my apparently "slanderous" posting to alt.religion.scientology. He said that a "wgert@ritchie.loop.com" was the complaining administrator. (Jim had been a co-owner of tidepool before it was bought out by Internet Ventures, Inc..) Jim said that one Eric Wright was the person at Internet Ventures, Inc. who made the decision to terminate. Eric Wright is the administrator both at tidepool.com and for northcoast.com. Jim did not disclose to me which term of service I violated, nor did he offer to repay my prepaid 6 month contract, nor did he quote from the supposed communication that I had made which was "slanderous" (sic). As I was finishing up with Jim, Eric Wright apparently came in the door at tidepool.com and I spoke with him. He said specifically that I was terminated because "I made the company (tidepool.com) look bad." I responded that "looking bad" was not a term of service that I had agreed to and that tidepool's TOS supposedly has specific guarantees of no content censorship, but just the general AUP guidelines so as no spam, illegal acts, etc. I also told him that I did not post through tidepool anyway but through Supernews, a Usenet provider located in San Jose. Eric was adamant that what I had allegedly posted was "slanderous" and "disgusting." (Although he still was not sharing with me what the alleged posting was..) I next spoke with Eric Wright's supervisor, one Carol Servé at 707 443 8696. She apparently directly reports to Don Jenky, president of Internet Ventures. She was surprised to learn that I only posted through Supernews -- never through tidepool but reiterated that I had "slandered" someone. Although again she did not mention *who* nor the content of the alleged "slander". I tried to fill her in on the scientology tactic and what I was doing, and, more importantly that I had NOT violated the terms of service that I had signed up under. She responded that this was changing as we spoke and that *new* terms of service were being uploaded to the tidepool and northcoast web site that made posts of explicit sexual nature against the TOS. I told her that it was fine that they changed the TOS to whatever they wanted to but that I had signed up under the older less restrictive TOS and those were in effect when my account was terminated. I asked her to reinstate my account immediately and to write a letter of apology for breach of contract. She hung up on me. I then called up Tim McGrath who is the chief of Investor Relations of Internet Ventures in Los Angeles at 800 701 7020. While Don tried to make me happy by agreeing that scientologists were detestable and so on, he just did not have the facts. But he agreed that if the facts were as I stated them that there might have been a contract breach by tidepool.com. In any event it seemed to me that they could have at least sent me a "warning" or let me know ahead of time of the change in TOS so I could make backups, find another ISP, make alias files, etc. He promised to "work down the chain of command". He promised to get back to me today. However at 5:20pm pdt my account was still locked (although I asked Keith to relay the problem to a.r.s so that people would not vainly send me e-mail I could not pick up). So I called Tim McGrath once again. He returned the call on his cellphone about 5:30pm and said that he had spoken to the president, Don Jenky and a subordinate at Northcoast.com (likely to be Carol Servé). He still did not have "enough facts" and said that he would contact me tomorrow. I said that I thought it was odd that a company imminently going public would cause such a storm. Investors might question the quality of management and rethink investment plans. He agreed. However, at about 8pm pdt Ron Newman called me (thanks Ron) and told me that my web site at http://www.tidepool.com/grady had just disappeared. So, despite Tim McGrath's assurances that "it was being looked into" the harassment and my exclusion from the internet for called Helena K. Kobrin a shit-vagina and legal whore (among many other things) was continuing. While through the grace of Deana Holmes and company I now have another ISP, I am saddened that yet another ISP falls victim to the harassment of the criminal cult of scientology and that their intimidation can even lead to breaches of contract. While I am *not* a litigious sort of person, it may require the intervention of the court to make sure that my situation with tidepool is clarified and that a clear message is sent to ISPs that they ought to obey their contract responsibilities, as of course each customer to the ISP ought to. I also plan to relate a concise account of this matter to the appropriate investor newsgroups and mailing lists so that they have more facts on a prospective investment. Don't get me wrong. I think that an ISP can pretty much set up whatever terms of service it wants to. There is enough competition that once can simply look to another provider. But to get terminated for some ex post facto TOS especially originating from a jerk like wgert (who wasn't even the target of my rant), despite never having actually posting *from* tidepool.com, was simply wrong. Of course the lie that scientology "fully supports free speech and only sues when it had to protect its property rights" and such baloney is once again clearly seen *as* a lie. As if the original Helena K. Kobrin, shit-vagina 'ho's unlawful RMGROUP in Jan. 1995 was enought to convince any of us. However, as you can see, wgert's BIG WIN was short-lived and I shall now think of something appropriate to do to celebrate it. Again, thanks to all my friends who have shown that, by supporting a person despite whose methods they deeply disagree with, they have a million times the real moral sense than any scientologist would ever hope to have while a member of the criminal cult. Thank you, Mirele and Joey. Keep bending over and spreading them, criminal cult of scientologists, MORE TO COME! -- Grady Ward grady@tidepool.com +1 707 826 7712 http://www.tidepool.com/grady C168 0477 7302 C208 F3AC B8D2 33C5 7FCC 0D52 F028