‘SDAnon’ hit with lawsuit

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An Australian “theological detective” with a team of hired hackers stole thousands of digitized pages of unpublished documents belonging to the estate of the co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a federal lawsuit alleges.

The Silver Spring-based Ellen G. White Estate Inc. filed the action against Brendan P. Knudson and up to 20 “John Doe” hackers last week in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt. The estate is seeking an injunction and accounting of what was sold on three websites Knudson operated.

White, who died in 1915, had more than 2,000 visions over the course of her life and current church members consider her a prophet. Her writings are believed to be divinely inspired, and a secondary authority to the scriptures.

The allegedly purloined works consist of 8,300 documents — roughly 50,000 pages worth of letters, articles, diaries and sermons penned between 1845 and 1915. The main copies reside at the estate’s headquarters but photocopies are housed in Adventist research centers across the globe and were digitized and stored in an online, protected database.

According to the estate, White was a prolific writer who published more than 5,000 articles and 40 books in her lifetime, with compilations after her death bringing the total number of books to more than 100.

Knudson, an Australian who claims on his Facebook page to live now in Yerevan, Armenia, describes himself as a “Private Detective, specialising in Theological and Historical Investigations.” According to court records, Knudson started seeking access to the works at the estate’s archive in Australia. The estate claims that for the next five years Knudson would not sign the research agreement and instead made further demands for access to the material.

In January, the estate claims, Knudson started trawling hacker forums and websites using the alias “GirdedSword.” From there, Knudson allegedly started recruiting hackers and collecting tools he needed to crack the estate’s protected database. According to the estate, Knudson and his team of up to 20 hackers were able to breach the estate’s cybersecurity and gain access to the database.

Knudson then bought three domain names with variations on “Ellen White” and her manuscripts. He uploaded the unpublished works to the sites, opened an online payment account and conducted transactions for an as-yet undetermined amount.

The websites in question claimed to be the work of “SD Anonymous” a play on the “SDA” acronym for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The sites have been taken down, but a cached copy of one home page, www.unpublishedellenwhite.com, claims the documents were collected by interested parties trying to get the materials in front of a larger audience, a la Wikileaks.

“Researchers can access the writings in vaults at more than 20 Research Centers located at SDA Tertiary institutes around the world, under the close eye of the custodians of these Centers,” the cached site read. “The unpublished writings are even digitized and searchable, but the privilege of viewing these writings is limited to about two dozen people in the world. Here, for the first time ever, these writings are being released to anyone through the combined efforts of anonymous laypeople from around the world.”

The estate claims also that in addition to stealing the documents, Knudson hacked an email database and advertised the sale of the materials in an email blast to about 1,000 people.

Jerry A. Moon, who heads the church history department at Andrews University, an Adventist institution in Berrien Springs, Mich., said there has been a demand over the years for the unpublished materials that give a greater glimpse into the personal life of White and other church leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“There’s been a lot of speculation since those ads started appearing about who was behind all of this,” said Jerry A. Moon. “I received some of the ads myself, but I decided to wait and see who was behind it.”

The hacking scandal is not the first controversy surrounding White’s works.

Claims that White plagiarized material from her contemporaries were featured in a 1976 book, “Prophetess of health: A study of Ellen G. White,” by Ronald L. Numbers, a former professor at an Adventist-affiliated university and current professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The estate maintained, then and now, that “literary borrowing” was common among writers of the time and that, while White had read others’ works, her visions inspired her writings.

“There’s no question she used other writers in her writing and would recommend those authors in her writing,” Tim Poirier, vice director of the Ellen G. White Estate, said Wednesday. “These were written more than 100 years ago, and it’s a case of applying today’s scholarly footnoting [standards] to 19th-century writing.”

Poirier also said that, even without Knudsen’s sites, anyone interested in the materials has the opportunity to look at them.

“It’s not a matter of access, people can come and read what she has written anytime,” he said. “It’s not like anything is being hidden.”