To share its acquired expertise in using the Freedom of Information Act, in 1979 and again in 1989 in the United States, the Church prepared a complete guide to understanding and using the Act, which has been distributed as a public service to tens of thousands of individuals and groups, followed by a similar publication in France. In Britain, Scientologists helped produce a FOIA advocacy booklet as early as 1980.

Having a FOI (Freedom of Information) law is of limited use unless citizens are made aware of it, encouraged to use it and alerted to potential threats to undermine the democratic principles of open government. In November 1998, a French member of Parliament manoeuvred the National Assembly (by presenting his proposal at a late hour to avoid debate) into passing a measure permitting tax authorities to use individuals’ social security numbers and to crosscheck their tax records with social security records, which could result in potential violations of privacy law.

The amendment quickly aroused fierce opposition: The president of the French League of Human Rights declared it “a serious attack upon freedom” and an invasion of privacy; the president of the French Data Protection Agency characterised the amendment as “a violation of liberties”; and the trade unions’ representative for tax agencies and several human rights organisations signed a document denouncing it as “a measure that opens the door to the creation of a gigantic inter-administrative file on the private lives of citizens.”

On another privacy-related front, the French police have created a filing system known as the Système de Traitement des Infractions constatées (STIC — System for Treatment of Stated Crimes), which as of 1 July 2002, had amassed the names of 4.5 million people under investigation — an increase of 2 million since 1999.

The purported aim of this database is to assist the police in the search for criminals, but there are major problems: STIC records do not distinguish the names of suspects and witnesses. In other words, the names of the beaten wife, the cheated trader, and the witness of a crime are side by side with the names of thieves, serial killers and rapists.

One does not need to consult much history to know that such commingling of names and information can easily be put to unethical use and result in grave injustices. The potential for abuse is enormous: In 2003, the French Data Protection Agency reported that 25% of the files maintained by STIC in 2001 and 37% in 2002 were “false or obviously not justified.” For example, the name of a 7-year-old was filed because he threw stones at a car; the witness to a rape was recorded as the rapist; the victim of an armed robbery was misidentified in the files as the perpetrator; and even worse, an innocent person had been wrongly labelled a murderer. To compound the danger to law-abiding individuals, there is no procedure in place to remove a name after it has been entered. No wonder, then, that the French Magistrates Union early denounced the “monstrous STIC file” as “violating the most basic principles of our law.”

These mounting governmental dossier systems present a very real threat to personal liberties. Thus, to encourage use of the FOIA in France, and to provide citizens with a tool they could use to negotiate the sometimes difficult path of filing requests, in 2003 the Church of Scientology in Paris published Freedom of Access to Administrative Documents — How to Use the Law, a layman’s guide on the use of FOI law. Many thousands of copies have been distributed to members of the National Assembly, senators, associations, lawyers and other prominent citizens.

The guide has received high praise: The editor of an international magazine devoted to freedom of conscience described the work as “of great interest” and “genuine usefulness.” And soon after it was released, a French senator used the information in the booklet to call for specific improvements to strengthen France’s FOI law.