The Cost of Namefagging

It is true and has been proved that when the Church of Scientology attacks its critics it makes more critics. I, personally, began reading and writing about the Church as a response to their rather desperate Panorama: Exposed film. My resolve quickened as I read about other people, such as Paulette Cooper, who had been treated in a similar way or worse. My commitment solidified as I learnt about the very real victims of the Church.
Anonymous poses a problem to the Church simply by virtue of that anonymity. CoS can't directly attack the critics if they don't know who the critics are. Sadly, rather than this resulting in CoS channelling their energies into engaging with the criticism itself, they become ever more desperate to identify the masked protestors.
But Anonymous is a force of over 9,000. The Church cannot hope to identify all of the members, so lets look at what they have done to individual people they have identified, rightly or wrongly, as being part of Anonymous.
In the run up to the March demonstrations, the Church had the identities of various people, some of whom were active protestors, and some who were just passers by. On these people they served court orders, claiming that those that they had identified were the ever elusive (and non-existent) leaders of Anonymous. Leaving aside that this would be rather a coincidence, and leaving aside the methods that the Church used to identify people (much talk of traced number plates, PIs, etc.) they decided that they could use the namefagged to exert leverage over the group as a whole. Put simply they had someone they could take to court. CoS attempted to place a court order on the named, to prevent them from demonstrating, using legislation that is actually designed for individuals to get rid of stalkers. This attempt failed twice. The judges recognised that members of Anonymous have every right to protest, and every right to do so anonymously. The irony is that this is covered in the First Amendment, the same Amendment that the Church clings to when it claims Anonymous to be a group of ignorant bigots attacking individuals religious beliefs, rather than a well-read bunch of concerned citizens demonstrating against the abuses and crimes of the Church itself.
The second thing they tried to do was to coerce the named into "dropping out" of the movement. In letters from aged lawyers they cited the usually list of allegations; of bomb threats, nuisance phone calles and the now infamous YouTube video of which the Church mysteriously has the master copy. The trouble here, of course, is that this is grossly unethical behaviour for a lawyer. The CoS insinuated that they had evidence against Anonymous members perpetrating these attacks, and that if the letters' recipients did not cease and decist from exercising their rights, CoS would supply this information to the police. That's right; the "most ethical organisation on the planet" were stating that they were withholding evidence from the police in order to sway a civil matter.
What CoS seems to have missed though, is this.
Anonymous consists of a worldwide network of about 10,000 people. Whereas within clusters individuals may know their colleagues names, across the network as a whole, no-one knows who anyone else is. Beyond the friends that I already had that also attend the London demonstrations, and members of the old guard for whom anonymity is a horse longsince bolted, I know no-one's names at all. Despite this, the network is strong and powerful. Despite this. Anonymity has in a sense been forced on us by the policy of the Church. This is a slight simplification, inasmuch as Anonymous as a group have a "best fit" to protest against the Church, but their Anonymity predates the protests. Anonymity has clear benefits in evading fairgaming and other ad hominem attacks, but it comes at a price. On the lowest level, it takes energy and expense to keep up that anonymity. It's something that requires thought. It's something to worry about.
Added to that, we live in a named society. Our identities are our names, so if we remove our names from the picture, it makes it more difficult to do things, at the very least without putting our trust in the data security of other agencies. This becomes an issue if one wants to communicate by mail with companies, politicians, etc. What is more, the leaderless collective becomes a more difficult thing for the press to communicate with - a sea of nameless masked faces. When journalists encounter this wall of Guys they have a perfectly understandable tendancy to head for the nearest unmasked face. Happily this will most often be a member of the Old Guard. And how often have we heard a masked protestor say at the beginning of an interview "I can't speak for everyone here, only myself," avoiding the Anonymous taboo of making yourself a more important part of the organisation.
The Church's current tactic, having seen genuine losses in numbers as a result of the ongoing actions, is to tell staff members that Anonymous is being paid by Big Pharma and the Psychs. Ironically they are sending out to their parishioners a "follow the money" message; the same message that Anonymous is trying to communicate to parishioners about their own organisation. Tory Christman and Jason Beghe have stated that, without namefagging oneself, there needs to be a clearer communication of who Anonymous are, on an individual level, to try and dispell this bit of propoganda. The irony here is that actually namefagging oneself would be the ideal way of doing this, were it not to come at such a price.
But sometimes protestors don't have a choice. Sometimes the Church does the namefagging. In this sea of masks, certain members are picked out and identified, and here is the irony that escapes CoS. There is nothing that the church can do, legally, to those it namefags. It will harrass, perhaps, and write legal cheques it's incapable of cashing, but beyond that, nothing. And to the namefagged, as long as they are the named few in a sea of masks, become stronger and more powerful. They become martyrs to the cause; they become living reminders about the importance of anonymity; they become a solid node in the network; they become something not only that can be identified, but can be identified with, a hook on which the media can hang a story. Like so many retaliative moves designed in part or in whole by a man dead twenty-two years, it serves to strengthen the opposition; it serves to weaken further the Church it was designed to protect.