52 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
EVERYTHING
WORTH
KNOWING
52 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
A ONE-MINUTE DOWNLOAD is all you
need to access the internet’s subconscious:
the dark web. It’s a faceless network where
pedophiles, murderers and other ne’er-do-
wells shake hands in shadow.
But in that shadow, good also thrives.
The dark web hosts book clubs, treatises
on freedom, the Bible — all life-
threatening material in certain countries.
Whistleblowers leak documents to
journalists. FBI agents dismantle sex
trafficking networks.
Still, even in a network thriving on a
promise of anonymity, the breadcrumbs
of identity can leave a trail.
What you can do in the shadows.
BY CARL ENGELKING
The Dark Web
Who Created the Dark Web?
Onion routing, a technique that conceals
data in layers of encryption, was
originally created by the U.S. Naval
Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s
to keep intelligence agents anonymous
while collecting information online.
But to truly anonymize their identities,
the network needed to be bigger — the
more computers, or nodes, relaying data,
the more points the network has to
generate random pathways for data to
travel through. So, the Navy made the
technology public through the Tor Project.
(Tor is an acronym for The Onion Router.)
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Surface Web
Represents websites
indexed and
discoverable by
search engines or
by entering a “www”
address into your
browser.Deep Web
Sites that aren’t
indexed by a
search engine.
These include
your company’s
intranet, digital
medical records,
email services, bank
accounts and other
sites that require a
password and login
ID to access.Dark Web
Accessible only with
special software or
browsers that make
users anonymous.
Data is encrypted,
or scrambled, into a
mess that only the
right digital key can
decipher.