A certain amount of mystery still surroundswhat has become known as the dark web.
The very name evokes images of an underworld,a kind of catacomb where scoundrels hide out and human depravity awaits us around eachcorner.
But research has shown that the dark web isperhaps not as dark as many of us imagine.
Yes, one can certainly go to this place andacquire a handful of illegal substances, and yes, if a person so chooses they can scourthe dark web and find images
that most of the world would find repellent, but let’sjust say you won’t find hitmen for hire all over the dark web nor as much video violencethan we might have
The question is though, who on Earth cameup with this idea in the first place?
We’ve been through this in other shows sowe’ll make it short, and we are talking about what the dark web actually is.
You see, the internet as most of us know it,the bit you are using right now, is only a small part of the web.
Sources don’t agree on how much, but it’ssaid the part of the web that we can access using ordinary browsers is only about 10 percentof the entire thing.
You can also find sources that say it’sfour percent, or even one percent.
Still, it’s thought there are about 1.8billion active websites on the net, although, again, you can find sources that give a differentnumber – much higher sometimes.
This doesn’t of course mean that the restof the web is the dark web and full of dark marketplaces, otherwise we might have causefor concern.
What it means is that the rest of the web,which we call the deep web, is used by private companies, governments, etc.
Well, it is if you can’t hack into it orare not actively, legally, using it.
Think about your email, online banking, companyservers, these aren’t exactly searchable on the web.
So of course the deep web is way bigger thanthe navigable web.
Well, this is a place within the deep webthat is also hidden but can be accessed using something called the Tor browser.
You can use this browser along with a VPN(virtual private network) to access the dark web.
You might do this if you are an activist andwant anonymity, such as people that criticize governments whose modus operandi shows nomercy for political dissidents.
But you might also enter the dark web so youcan access what are sometimes called “Darksites.” Here is where you might find someone sellingserotonin-enhancing pills by the bagful or
ounces of white powder; where you might findhackers for hire or someone to chat with you about your strange predilection for drinkingyour own blood by the wine glass.
As we said, the dark web might not be as demonicas movies or some politicians depict, but you can read stories in the British pressabout how the young generation
now buy their illicit substances there more than in thestreet these days, or how some people were arrested by the FBI for distributing imagesthat 99.9 percent of viewers would find
Ok, you get the picture, but now you mustbe thinking, if this stuff goes on why would anyone in their right mind have created itin the first place?
Well, to answer that we must look to the U.S.military.
Let’s remember that the Internet itselfwas a by-product of military technologies, as was much of the technology we take forgranted today.
It was in the mid-1990s that the U.S.
wantedtheir intelligence operatives to have a place, a virtual place, where they could communicatewith total anonymity.
They started working on something called TOR,an acronym that stands for The Onion Router.
According to the BBC the military did thisbecause if more people were using it then it would be harder to spot the activity ofoperatives among all the other noise.
Foreign Policy dives even deeper into thehistory of the dark web, and here we will summarize.
In 1969 a student at the University of Californiasent a message between computers connected by ARPANET.
This was the beginning of the web as we knowit, and it was developed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This might not sound like much to you, butit was a breakthrough in secret communications.
Then we see the Internet explode in the ensuingdecades, only part of this Internet is a haven for illegal activity.
In the 1990s we saw a lot of illegal filesharing, and we are told this set off a tsunami of darknet activity.
The people sharing the files were using datahavens that couldn’t be shut down by the authorities.
So even before the dark web as we know ittoday, there was still a hidden part of the Internet.
Then in March 2000, we saw the release ofsomething called Freenet.
This was a place you could access with anonymityand get your hands on files, legal or illegal. You see, it wasn’t all about sharing anddistributing dodgy content, but some people felt that there should be a place in the Internetfree from censorship and the prying eyes
What we are trying to say is that long beforeTor, people were trying to create room in the internet where people could operate withoutbeing surveilled.
Then in 2002 we got Tor to protect those Americanoperatives, but it only took a few years for sites accessible through Tor to become filledwith copyrighted material from Hollywood
It became a trading ground for illicit material,and people loved it because they could go there with the assurance that they wouldn’tget arrested.
Imagine buying stolen goods on the streetsbut having the super power to become invisible!
Things heated up in 2009 when a guy that calledhimself Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin, a virtual currency that was untraceable.
Now you can launder cash, spend your Bitcoin,inside the dark net.
In 2011 we saw the first modern dark net marketplacein the Silk Road, named after ancient trading routes in Asia.
There you could find an array of legal andillegal goods and services, but it only lasted short of two years and the creator was eventuallysentenced to life in prison
But as Wired pointed out in 2015, it’s notas if everyone using Tor is accessing the dark web.
In fact, the number is quite small, and thoughyou can find illegal things there, you can also find them on the regular web.
Most people sharing illegal images or videosuse the normal web, not the dark web.
According to Wired, whose writer researchedthe dark web for a number of years, yes you can find depravity there, but it’s alsofull of doctors giving advice they might not
It’s a place where people can talk and notworry about their careers, where others can talk about a disease they have that they darenot talk about out in the
open, and as we said, it’s used by a lot of people who needto discuss issues in a country that would likely lock them up for discussing those issues.
This includes some people inside the USA whowould rather not have their words watched.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden famouslysaid that the government was working hard to anonymize Tor users, but it wasn’t alwayssuccessful.
We also know that the FBI has had some successfinding criminal activity there, but these are usually sting operations, not just pin-pointinga person after a share or sale.
We say this because some of you might be askingwhy the government hasn’t gone to greater lengths to close this all down.
There are many reasons, but one is that itis still useful in terms of the greater good.
Two is that the governments of the world haveshown that when things get murky in the dark web then authorities will swoop. At the same time, it’s not easy to takedown a decentralized network.
This network is spread across the globe andprotected by strong cryptography.
It’s almost like ether, or a living, breathingentity whose plexus of veins are threaded throughout the world.
You might also ask yourself what would happenif somehow Tor wasn’t available, if somehow part of the dark web was blacked out?
The government has shut down dark net sites,and righty so, but more will just pop up.
The government could try and get rid of theTor browser, but as we said, it has no reason for doing this.
China actually has been successful in blockingthe Tor browser, but other governments have failed.
This is what Motherboard says about blockingthe browser, “Governments can block access to VPN services by blocking access from IPaddresses linked to VPN providers.
Blocking Tor is more complex, and requiresidentifying and blocking the destination nodes traffic travels through rather than the URLor IP address.” Most other governments that allow, more orless, free
speech, agree that of the 2.5 million Tor users very few of them are doing nefariousthings in the dark web.
Believe it or not, sellers in the dark webagreed in 2018 to stop selling the powerful and deadly opioid Fentanyl.
Many operators agreed that it was just toodangerous, and perhaps they also knew that it would no doubt bring unwanted attentionto their market places.
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