Welcome to the Dark Side

By Hayden Hilgenhold

The internet.  A place where you can do almost anything as long as you have the knowhow and a good connection.  However, you’re usually exposed.  Out in the open where the world can see you, so crime can usually be cracked down on with relative ease.  However, there is a place in the internet where crime runs rampant, and it is completely anonymous.  The Deep Web, little known to the general public, is the dark desolate ghetto of the beautiful Utopia of the internet, where the law doesn’t have a leg to stand on, unable to make a dent in the corruption.

The Deep Web, made by the government as a tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, and anyone else who would need to conduct their online affairs privately and/or anonymously.  However, like many things that are made for the greater good, such as dynamite or nuclear power, it had limitless dark potential that became easily exploited.  Now it is used as a bazaar for many vendors of illegal and questionable items and services such as, drugs, weapons, fake passports, counterfeit money, hired thieves and thugs, and even assassins.  

So how does it work? How do you keep complete anonymity over the internet?  Well not through any normal web browser.  First you have to have a special browser known as Tor.  Using Tor your data is completely encrypted, and then passed through several relays, running it through any other computer using Tor, bouncing you around the globe making you near impossible to trace.  Not only that but most of the sites that are selling illegal items are only available through Tor, and are hosted on private servers owned by Tor.  To break it down for you the indexed, easy to find and search internet is about 19 terabytes, or about 3,800,000 songs.  That’s a lot, right? But when you consider the non-indexed part of the internet is 7500 terabytes or 1,500,000,000 songs, it shows you just how much of the internet is relatively hard for the law to get a grip on, and with programs such as Tor it is even harder to find the culprits.  

So why doesn’t the government stop Tor in its tracks? Shut down its servers and wipe them of all these illegal sites? Well, you have to remember, Tor has become vital to many intelligence and law and enforcement agencies.  Since it is so vital, it would endanger a lot of our own law enforcement.  So Tor is here to stay, dark side and all.