I

magine you live in a highly repressive regime that closely

watches your every move and restricts what you can say

and do online. In such a context, trying to engage in

public life via a normal internet connection can lead to

your abuse, arrest or worse – even at the hands of your

own government.

The “dark web” presents an alternative. It can keep you safe

from the abuses of governments that want to spy on you, censor

what you can say and do online and restrict the very vibrancy

of public life that can lead to democratic change.

Imagine instead that you have criminal intent in your heart.

Maybe you want to pay a professional to have someone beaten,

crippled, raped or murdered. Maybe you want to have someone’s

computer hacked, their reputation ruined or their private

moments exposed to the world. Maybe you want to buy illegal

drugs, guns or view child abuse imagery.

Doing any of these things via a normal internet connection

would swiftly bring the long arm of the law down upon you. But

the dark web again presents an alternative. It can protect you

from the righteous fury of law enforcement, even as they

endeavour to keep society safe from abuse, theft, drugs and

child molestation.

The dark web is a person’s saving grace in both scenarios.

The dark web is basically a tool that allows people to surf

the web anonymously. What motivates people to use the dark

web and what people do with the anonymity that it provides

depends upon the person and the situation within which they

ind themselves.

The dark web is based upon a global network of volunteered

computers. The largest and most popular way to access the

dark web is via the Tor browser. Tor has around 2 million users

each day and that number is generally increasing over time.

Other methods of accessing the dark web exist, such as I2P,

but they are far less popular.

Tor works in a different way

to a typical internet connection.

When a person connects to the

internet from their home, oice

or mobile device, they typically

ire up a web browser such as

Google’s Chrome or Apple’s

Safari to search the web. With a

few strikes of the keys, the typical web-browsing process is set

into motion. Their internet service provider sends their request

to view some content around the world to the server hosting

the information that they want to access, which gets the infor-

mation and sends it back. That information could be a funny

video, a news story, or a cat meme. In the end, it does not really

matter, as the typical process always works in more or less the

same way. The connection is a fairly transparent and direct

one, and this allows law enforcers, website operators and internet

service providers to see what you are doing online.

The Tor browser is different. It provides its users with

anonymity by breaking up that direct connection. Rather than

having your request sent directly to a site you want to visit by

your internet service provider, Tor encrypts your request and

then relays your query to the desired destination via a series of

three computers that could be located pretty well anywhere in

the world.

You could think of it like a technologically intense version

of the children’s game of Telephone, except that the order of

people in the line keeps changing. What basically happens is

you whisper your request to the irst person in the series, who

whispers it to the second person, who whispers it to the third

person, who then gets what you are after and then returns it to

you via the same process. By encrypting your request, randomly

shuling the series of relay computers through which you traic

lows and breaking up the signal, the Tor browser makes users

12 | JUNE 2016

The Dark Web

Dilemma

ERIC JARDINE

The dark web can hide the activities of organised crime and child abusers

but it can also enable people in repressive regimes to communicate with

the wider world.

adimas/adobe