What information can people see about me when I'm in a newsgroup?

While legal battles were being fought in the courts, an equally intense and aggressive campaign was waged online. The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology found itself at the center of an electronic maelstrom of information and disinformation, as the newsgroup itself was attacked both literally and figuratively. Tens of thousands of junk messages were spammed onto the newsgroup, rendering it nearly unreadable at times when the message "floods" were at their peaks. Over one million (1,000,000+) sporgery articles were injected into the newsgroup, apparently by Scientology management and staff. Hacking methods were used to wipe out messages from news servers carrying the newsgroup. Lawyers representing Scientology made public appeals to Internet service providers to remove the newsgroup completely from their news servers. When these requests were repeatedly rejected, one of their lawyers unilaterally issued a rmgroup command to the Usenet server network to cause the group to be removed, an action which was quickly undone by the news server administrators. Furthermore, anonymous participants in the newsgroup kept up a steady stream of flame wars and off-topic arguments. Participants on the newsgroup accused Scientology of orchestrating these electronic attacks, though the organization consistently denied any wrongdoing.