A brief explanation of the Dark Side of the Internet

This is kind of a support material for my TW speech

I’m sure by now everyone has heard about the Dark Web, commonly known as the epicenter of illegal and illicit online activity.

Lets start from the beginning.

The Origin of the Internet

In 1969 a couple of university students sent the world’s first computer-to-computer message. It was sent over ARPANET, an early ancestor of the internet. The concept of a network or a possible means of communication between two computers was the radical idea that set into motion the early stages of what we now call the internet.

As the internet continued to grow in the mid-to-late 1990s it would come to transform society on a global scale. The biggest change came in the form of instant communication. As long as you had an internet connection you could talk to anyone on earth, assuming, of course, they were also connected to the internet.

The thing is, the internet was not designed with things like anonymity and privacy in mind so everything you do and say online can and, in many cases, will be tracked, recorded, and traceable back to you. Some people are very concerned about their privacy and in the mid 1990s one such group of people was the United States federal government.

The Invention of TOR

A team of computer scientists and mathematicians working for a branch of the US Navy known as the Naval Research Laboratory, abbreviated as NRL, began development of a new technology known as onion routing. Onion routing would allow for anonymous bi-directional communication where the source and destination cannot be determined by a mid-point.

This is accomplish by creating something known as an overlay network.

An overlay network is simply a network that is built on top of another network, in this case the internet. So instead of using the normal unencrypted internet, also known as the surface web, your traffic goes trough an overlay network.

However, the people over at NRL soon realized a major limitation.

The United States government can’t simply run an anonymity system for everybody and then use it themselves only because then every time a connection came from it people would say “Oh, it’s another CIA agent looking at my website!” if those are the only people using the network. So you need to have other people using the network so that they blend together.

ROGER DINGLEDINE (Co-Founder and Director of THE TOR PROJECT, speaking at a conference in 2004 )

So what he’s saying is that for the network to be truly anonymous it has to be available to everyone and not just the US government. So the NRL was forced to release their onion routing technology to the public.

The technology was eventually released under an open source license and became TOR. TOR stands for The Onion Router and is the software you need to download to be able to access this network of onion routers.

Today, millions of people across the globe use TOR for a multitude of purposes. Everything from innocent daily browsing to criminal activities.

And while it is the most popular, TOR is but one among numerous darknets. Together they all make up the dark web. Subsequently, the dark web forms a small part of the deep web.

The deep web is everything on the web that can not be indexed by search engines. It’s nothing like the dark web as most of us use the deep web all the time.

The difference between DARK WEB and DEEP WEB

The deep web is content that can not be indexed by search engines. And the dark web is a fraction of the deep web consisting of numerous darknets which require specific software and/or authorization to access.

For example, if you make your Facebook profile private, search engines will not be able to find your profile. Even Facebook’s account search engine wont show your account as a result.

As you can imagine, the deep web has a lot more content than the surface web. How much more? Well, we don’t know because by its very nature it’s near-impossible to determine.

A paper from 2001 estimated that the deep web is 500 times the size of the surface web but, then again, that estimation is almost over 2 decades old. According to a more recent study, only 4% of the internet can be indexed by any search engines.
All we can say for certain is that deep web content accounts for the vast majority of the content on the world wide web.

Dark Web is just that small portion of deepweb which has extra security and is intentionally hidden from search engines.

Case Study - Silk Road

Anonymity attracts a vast variety of people and can be used for both licit and illicit purposes.

Ever since the birth of the internet, people have used it for illegeal online activity. Infact one of the first E-Commerce transcations was a drug deal which was done in between two students at MIT Stanford in 1970.

In October of 2013, the FBI took down the online drug marketplace known as Silk Road.

The website had been in operation since the beginning of 2011 with a total revenue estimated at $1.2 billion. News about the Silk Road website brought the dark web out of the dark and right into public eye.

Only a few months after Silk Road had been taken down ex-administrators of the site launched Silk Road 2.0.

However, in late 2014, the FBI arrested the admins and the second marketplace was taken down as well.

A few hours after that, Silk Road 3.0 was launched and the seemingly endless spiral continues. And keep in mind that Silk Road was just one website among many.

You can find numerous others just like it, selling every illegal drug you can imagine and more.

The FBI also claimed that the owner of the Silk Road website had attempted to have six people killed by using deep web murder-for-hire services. While the assassinations themselves are unlikely to have occurred, these websites can definitely be found on the dark web.

. . .

Well yep I haven’t explained some stuff, especially how TOR works, I’m gonna explain that in another post that I’m working on right now and will upload soon.