I think that calling them "private" is a bit misleading here. As far as I can see, they all seem to be about Scientology business / logistics. That by itself obviously does not excuse leaking them, but (again, as far as I can see) the emails do not contain much personal information.

> It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough, without having to resort to intrusive attacks.

I would probably agree with you if this was about any other organisation, but the CoS has a long, long history of suppressing information about them by any means, both legally and illegally. People who leave the church are routinely harassed and threatened to prevent them from talking about it. Judging from the past, they also do a lot of dirty business that, in my opinion, needs be be widely known.

Considering this, I think this might be a good thing. At the very least, I find it hard to blame the person leaking this.

> We have the warrant system in the states for a reason, and if this were to happen in court the evidence would just get tossed right out.

Even though US law probably doesn't apply here, you're almost certainly right about the legality of this. But, honestly, I'm not sure why we should care, we're not the part of the Austrian judicial system. I'm still somewhat ambivalent about the ethical status of this, but I think we should not conflate legality and morality here.

That doesn't make them not-private. My email is private no matter what the subject is.

More to the point - you seem to be saying that it's okay to read someone's email, and then just release the parts that don't contain much personal information. That is clearly shady.

Maybe you can make the case that the CoS is so evil that the normal rules for what you should/shouldn't do with someone's email account don't apply here. But you certainly can't pretend that this is anything other than leaking private information.

I don't think that this is the result of someone reading all their emails and releasing the ones without personal information (which I don't think would be okay, I'm not sure how you got that impression), but a result of everyone using @scientology.co.at email addresses.

As I said above, I do not think that the lack of personal information by itself makes releasing them okay, but I do think that the combination of the CoS being secretive and "evil" gives this particular hack some (moral, not legal) legitimacy, because it is difficult to get this information using less dodgy methods.

However I might change my tone if something really serious is uncovered here. I think whistle blowing is a good thing, and this seems like the next best equivalent. Of course, that is a ridiculous position to take, essentially giving any random hacker the license to read through random personal email and blow the whistle on demand.[0] So I guess that position isn't tenable, either. But I know it'd be hard to be critical of a hypothetical hack that revealed or delivered proof about illegal activities by certain groups, be it Scientology, large-scale financial stuff or neo-nazis.

A more responsible release would probably only include incriminating or otherwise extraordinary emails, preserving (sort of) the privacy of most people. But arguably that's so difficult and personally dangerous in case of large data hacks or leaks that it's equivalent of saying a responsible release isn't viable.

[0] As determined by them, but that problem applies to all kinds of whistle blowing.

Shedding a bit more light on the ethics of the action of leaking this data, the reason why a lot of people feel conflicted about the right- or wrongness of the action, is because it is perfectly acceptable from a Virtue Ethics point of view: The fact that leaking private data would be wrong in the vast majority of cases is inconsequential because the data being that of a (generally agreed upon to be) evil organisation ascertains the moral character of the actor (in some sense).

A strict moral code like the C.I. is pretty dangerous when it forces you to disclose you're hiding Jews in your attic (sorry for the "Godwin", but that's the counterexample I was taught). It's even worse if done half-assed "well obviously you don't need to take it that strict if it leads to bad things" because then you can argue your way around everything--without even having to consider "does this make me a good person?".

And from that point of view, for me, the real question to ask: Would this person (or persons) have done the same thing if the emails did not belong to Scientology or neo-nazis or similar?

What exactly is gained by targeting an organization already famously good at playing the victim game with pointlessly malicious Internet pranks? Nothing.

Who cares? The question is whether it's wrong.

Good plan. What could possibly go wrong with it? After all, everyone capable of coercing us of anything must share our morals and ethics.

But in particular, I am especially wary of the "personal morals and ethics" of people making broad generalizations like you just did.

Fortunately, I know somebody who's perfectly entitled to enforce his personal morals right back at you. And yeah, I am aware that you could do the same thing, but you also appear to believe that to do so would make you a bad person. So it's your choice, really: Submit, Be Good, or Be Bad.

This kind of hacking is a serious felony in all OECD Annex-1 countries. That's a very different thing.

On the other hand, in this particular case I'm inclined to say "Fuck it, they're Scientology". But I'm aware that I'm on pretty darn thin ice, ethically speaking.