 The project was publicly launched in the form of a video posted to YouTube , " Message to Scientology " , on January 21 , 2008 . The video states that Anonymous views Scientology 's actions as Internet censorship , and asserts the group 's intent to " expel the church from the Internet " . This was followed by distributed denial @-@ of @-@ service attacks ( DDoS ) , and soon after , black <unk> , prank calls , and other measures intended to disrupt the Church of Scientology 's operations . In February 2008 , the focus of the protest shifted to legal methods , including nonviolent protests and an attempt to get the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Church of Scientology 's tax exempt status in the United States . 
