Some background on the dirt post of yesterday; yesterday I logged into the email account associated with this blog and found an e-mail from a person who didn't give their name (they just identified themselves as a "friend of RWP"), and said that they had come across some dirt I might be interested in....then they had my home address and the names of my husband and children. The e-mail address was of the canonically-completely-obscure hotmail type.
My first reaction was
- shock that someone had my home address and the names of my husband and kids,
- puzzlement as to what in the hell the person meant by ''dirt'' I might be interested in,
- and further puzzlement as to who in the hell RWP is.
I Googled the hotmail e-mail address and nothing came up. So then I checked the list of recent referring URL's to the blog and found a whole slew of hits coming from an internet chat site (see http://forum.darwincentral.org/search.php and search for my name). Checking out the chat site revealed that "RWP" had posted an item saying that he was intending to "have all the dirt I can drag up on her" (referring to me). It turns out RWP is the pseudonym of the person who has recently been declaring me a lunatic far and wide.
This is scary...the tone is hostile of the various people participating on that chat site. I did some Googling and couldn't find my address and the names of my husband and kids posted in tidy format anywhere on the web. The "friend of RWP" might have gotten them from one of the many news articles written about my lawsuit. And my address doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first problem I've had with people who claim to be "friends" of the man behind the RWP pseudonym (it might in fact probably be just one person). Several months ago I had a spate of e-mails sent again from canonically-completely-obscure hotmail accounts (different from the hotmail account of yesterday). What was rather unique was that someone (or someones...but I kind of suspect it is likely just one person even though multiple accounts were involved) had taken the time to set up a cron job to send e-mails every few hours. And they weren't nice e-mails. So I tightened my e-mail filter, but soon after the person changed the name of the hotmail account to a different equally obscure one, and the automated nasty e-mails started again. More tightening of the filter eventually made the person give up.
What is unsettling is that someone actually took the time to set up a cron job to do this; I know what is involved in doing such a thing, and it is non-trivial. It was no ordinary knee-jerk-reaction-whacko who set up the cron jobs. It is somewhat less non-trivial to do it from a Unix based platform, but given that the e-mails appeared to be coming from hotmail accounts, that probably rules out Unix. And I say "appeared to be coming from hotmail accounts" because it is actually not that hard to make an e-mail appear to come from a particular address when it actually isn't. If the e-mails had gone to my university account instead of the hotmail account associated with this blog, the university would be able to verify the true source of the e-mail. And since the university has strict guidelines they follow in cyber-harassment cases, they would actually investigate the problem on my behalf. The person who wrote me yesterday was smart enough to send the email to my blog hotmail account rather than my university account. Unless a direct threat is involved, there is no grounds for me to get anyone to trace the real name behind the hotmail address that sent the mail to the blog hotmail account. But the somewhat-less-than-subtle threat of yesterday would probably have the university contacting the police if it had been sent to my university account instead.
I kept all the cron job e-mails, and the one from yesterday (update April 30th: and another one today), and another from RWP himself where he said that he pities me because he thinks I'm "vulnerable". I also made a copy of the html of the chat comment thread that apparently inspired the message of yesterday. And I also made a copy of the other comment thread on that chat site where RWP promises to buy anyone a drink for every instance in which anyone can "piss [insert my name here] off", and that he'd like to go bankrupt doing so. I wonder what he buys people when they scare the bejeezus out of me by threatening my kids? Or does that fall under his category of merely pissing me off?
So far it appears the "friend" person did not post the ''dirt'' they had found on the internet chat site, nor did I find it anywhere else on the web. I'll be checking regularly for a while though because posting of such information, especially in the format given in the e-mail, and especially if it is on a web-site where people are talking about me with open hostility, tickles the line of felony. Any reasonable person would have cause to fear for their kids in the situation I am now finding myself.
I don't know if the "friend" of RWP is in fact RWP himself. Part of me suspects not actually...I suspect the "friend" who sent the e-mail yesterday is the same "friend" who set up the cron jobs several months ago, and the computing savvy needed to set up cron jobs like that is beyond the capabilities of the average senior professor in the sciences (except maybe computer science). But maybe I'm wrong. Either way, the man and the people he apparently associates with are now scaring the hell out of me. This is no ordinary bunch of whackos.
I was actually braced for the cron job person to return to his antics (and yes, I assume it was a "him") after the Nature article ran, and I was somewhat worried that my university e-mail account would be targeted (it wouldn't be hard to make an account I use for work quickly inoperable if cyber-dump-truck-loads of automated e-mail was coming in). And I was braced for a spate of nasty e-mail to all my various e-mail accounts from whomever, not just RWP and his associates. But actually all the e-mail I have gotten so far is overwhelmingly supportive. This one e-mail is the only bad one yet.
But that one e-mail alone is more than equal to the weight of ten thousand generically-nasty emails.
