Got a Sneaky Feeking?

By Worcester Wonderland blogger Claude Dorman, 38 Sever St. Worcester, MA aka Will WW

There’s plenty of interesting information about the anonymity issue on the Electronic Frontier Foundation site.

Seems some of you are quite surprised to find out that you’re being tracked when you visit Worcester Wonderland. Why? You all do it. Some even parade their stats like medals.

Otta tell ya I’ve got some pretty snazzy software and scripts that yield tons of technical info on visitors – goes beyond simple logging scripts, even read serial numbers. Something pretty hard to mask. I even put Hot Flash Cookies on your drive. Really pesky critters. Can’t get rid of em easily. Some stuff goes deeper. But that’s top secret. Scary eh? Not really. Imagine what the US Gov uses? Now that’s really scary.

… And please don’t go doing any meltdowns here, all your comments are stored, even if you think you deleted them yourself. They just might come back to haunt you. Wouldn’t be pretty for your precious reputations. I got some good ones from former blogging buddy aka Harry Tembenis, who did the meltdown of all meltdowns. Got all that recorded. Interesting reading.

And then there’s Brendan Melican’s meltdown – a psychopath masquerading as a sociopath. Talk about vile. Whew! All his comments were recorded. Heck of a collection. Maybe I oughta post the really vile ones.

Claude Dorman, the Wonderland blooger who writes under Will WW:

… “By 2008 it had turned personal, the writer focusing on other bloggers, politicians and those both in the public and not-so-public realm. The blogger’s bio summed up the tone of many of his postings: “This is a blog about being amused and bemused with a city of 181,042 boring people with an exaggerated sense of self-worth. It’s really too bad they don’t have a sense of humor, it would make life bearable here.”

“I’ve just never encountered anybody who has that much interest in me,” says Paul Collyer, who found his personal life and business ventures – particularly his NOLA Festival – often the target of Will W.W.’s blog posts.

“It wasn’t just the content that riled up his targets (to the point where some, including Collyer, put out a “bounty” to unmask Will W.W.’s identity in 2011), but the anonymity of it.

” “Not content with writing about others on his own page, Will W.W. began posting insulting comments on other blogs.

“ … Tembenis, for instance, still smolders over an insulting Worcester Wonderland post that used images from an article about a Rutland horseback riding trail named in honor of his son, Elias, who died at seven years old. The post generated 22 comments, mostly derogatory towards Tembenis, and including this from Will W.W.: “Thankfully Mother Nature had the wisdom to prevent his kind from propagating.”

“That in essence shows how deranged this individual is. He posts outright lies about people and also slanders and libels, too, all in the name of being able to do so ‘anonymously,’” Tembenis adds.

…

“Throughout the four and a half years of this, Will W.W. took the protection of his identity a step further than a fake name: he also scrambled his computer’s IP address – the line of numbers that can identify a computer’s location and Internet provider – making it difficult for even the most tech-savvy sleuths to figure out who or where he was.

” … Dorman, who changed his phone number after his ties to Worcester Wonderland came out, had no comment.

“Dorman has a history of targeting others anonymously, even appearing in a Worcester Magazine article in 2007 for ousting a rival member of a neighborhood association, Robert Bourassa, by using pseudonymous online threats and postings to attack his business and personal reputation (“Neighbor to Neighbor Disfavor: A grudge sparks a change of leadership in the Elm Park Association,” May 17, 2007).

” “The malicious, unwarranted and slanderous attacks on my business and personal reputation by Claude Dorman under the guise of various identities and the lies he has spread have devastated my contracting business, forcing me to close and putting me in a severe financial hardship,” Bourassa wrote in a letter to members of the Lincoln Estates – Elm Park Neighborhood Association before his final meeting. “As such, I can no longer afford to remain where I live.”

“Before stepping down, however, Bourassa filed a lawsuit against Dorman and his wife, Kunigunde Cigan, in February 2008, citing criminal harassment, stalking, attempted extortion, false use of names or organizations and violations of right to peace and privacy, among others.

” “Defendants have engaged in a now twenty month long campaign of harassment of Plaintiff and Plaintiff’s businesses,” read the complaint. “There is no question the course of action, no doubt the intent, no question the harm.”

“Elsewhere in the complaint, Bourassa provided claims that Dorman used various IP addresses to flag Bourassa’s web design and contractor business advertisements on Craigslist – 673 times for 164 ads – causing them all to be removed. He also charged Dorman for creating the elmparkneighbors.net website (to closely mimic the neighborhood association’s elmparkneighbors.org), where he posted Bourassa’s financial and personal information – some of it obtained, Bourassa charged, by intercepting his mail. Dorman used fake names to send harassing and threatening emails to Bourassa through the websites he managed and posted poor reviews of his businesses on websites and online forums.

” ” … Collyer says he and other targets of Will W.W. are entertaining the idea of a lawsuit, especially since there’s worn ground after Bourassa’s complaint.

“They’ve gone out of their way to hurt my festival,” says Collyer.

” “Dorman has really gone out of his way to financially hurt people,” Collyer says …

” … Collyer says he hasn’t crossed the same line that Dorman has.

“That thing [the alter ego Claude-Dorman website, which has since been taken down] has been up for four or five days,” he says, comparing that to four and half years of Worcester Wonderland.