1st member of anti-scientology group ‘Anonymous’ pleads guilty.

A teenager from New Jersey pleaded guilty to a hacking charge on Monday for his role in the distributed denial-of-service attack on the Church of Scientology website last year.

Anonymous, formed last year, is a collective of internet users who’s aim is to wage war on the church of Scientology. The group launched a denial of service attack on the Scientology.org website and has published a page on Wikipedia to recruit others to the cause. Previous targets of Anonymous have included virtual worlds, an epilepsy message board and a Neo-Nazi web-caster.

19 year old Dmitriy Guzner was charged with a felony count of unauthorized impairment of a protected computer for the distributed denial-of-service attack in January 2008. Guzner faces a maximum 10 years when sentenced August 24.

Along with a number of remarkably successful organised demonstrations outside Churches of Scientology worldwide, Anonymous also released a number of video announcements via YouTube, the first of which, “Message to Scientology, is embedded below.