The Darkest Place on the Internet Isn’t Just for Criminals

Illustration: Edel Rodriguez

Clive Thompson | Wired

Pedophiles and hit men have figured out something vital when it comes to communicating. They use a Darknet.

These are networks of secretive websites that can’t be viewed on the “regular” Internet.

  • Darknet sites are hosted on regular servers, but to access them you need special software, usually something that encrypts all users’ traffic and allows them relative anonymity. Get set up with the right technology and presto: You can see a second, parallel Internet.

  • Right now it’s full of nasty (or, at the very least, illegal) activity like illicit drug or arms sales, or pedophile rings. The Darknet is populated by precisely who you’d expect to be skulking in the darkest corners of the online world. They have something to hide.

  • The Darknet, by itself, isn’t evil. And now that all of us have, in a sense, something to hide—the details of our humdrum, legal, everyday lives—

It’s time to put the Darknet to good use.

The regular Internet is a hotbed of surveillance. Depending on how you’re reading this article, someone is probably watching you read it.

  • We should probably just start calling the web the Spynet.

  • We need a space to start fresh—building applications that are decentralized and encrypted from the get-go so they allow us a greater degree of privacy.

  • We need a new terrain. That’s the Darknet.

  • Legitimate, nonshady organizations have migrated onto the Darknet to make sure their doings stay away from prying eyes.

  • Dissidents around the world use Darknet services to avoid authoritarian forces. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-minded search engine, also runs a Tor-hidden service so users can search the web in complete anonymity.

  • Even the US military gets the need for a place to do everyday things in secret, apparently: Tor’s creation was sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory.

  • Other alternative Internets are emerging, and they work quite differently from the Darknet’s anonymous drug dens.

  • Programmer Caleb James DeLisle launched Hyperboria, an encrypted network made up of people connecting to one another in a peer-to-peer fashion. Nobody can intercept or alter a connection

Read the whole story at Wired