THE ONLY PLACE WHERE GOOGLE CANNOT TAKE YOU Contents: Loosing my Deep Web virginity…………………………………………….....…3 Anonymous and unsafe world of the dark…………………………………….5 Story about the eBay of illegal drugs………………………………………..….9 No reasons to loose your identity………………………………………………12 Deep, anonymous, but not unlockable……………………………………..…14 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...16 2 Loosing my Deep Web virginity I always felt that curiosity might be a mood killer. Not even a mood killer, but sometimes something even stronger. It might break the ideology of the world that we had in our thoughts. That is for sure. From the moment I have entered the doors of the Deep Web I started seeing the world through my eyes fully open. All the missing people, secret terrorism attacks, unhealthy and horrific pornography or easily accessible drugs are elementary explained now. All this kind of information is just buried far down on the sites of the Hidden Internet. However, no one ever told me about this in my high school or even university. I have never read about it, until my friend told me to check it out. I felt insecure and curious to research much more. I thought that we all should know about the place, which is estimated to be 500 times the size of the Surface Web. Deep Web, Invisible Web or the Hidden Internet is a place, where all the missed and deep information is hidden. Fig 1. The image shows the idea of the Deep Web. Image from the Deep Web, Hidden Wiki : (http://wikitjerrta4qgz4.onion/) 3 Nowadays, the Deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet and it is a specific branch of the Internet that is distinguished by that increasingly rare commodity: complete anonymity. Nothing you do on the Deep Web can be associated with your real life, no one will ever know your identity, unless you want someone to know. Most people around you might have never seen the Hidden Internet, however, if you are curious enough to check that, it will not take you more than three minutes to download the browser, which is the easiest way to unlock the Deep Web. Tor is an anonymous browser for this secret world of the dark. Fig 2. Screen shot of Tor Browser. From the moment you have it and find the first website to get you on track, you get a free way ticket to the place, which might be called an electronic heaven for thieves, human traffickers, child pornographers, forgers, assassins, peddlers of loose nukes and state secrets. As doing my research, I realized that most of the information is absolutely new and online articles are much more helpful than any other book, because the theories about the Deep Web are changing a lot. I have chosen to look at this Hidden Internet while using three different methods. In the 4 first paragraph I will talk in a voice of a young mother, who is a freelance journalist. She explores and explains the beginning and the way of how the Deep Web works as in a descriptive analysis. In the second paragraph I am going to write through the eyes of the Dread Pirate Robert’s (or as already known Ross William Ulbircht) friend. He was like a brother and a colleague for the founder and administrator of The Silk Road – an underground online market place. This website might be better known as a secret eBay of illegal drugs. A narrative analysis tells a story, as he is going to tell you about the underground and anonymous life of The Silk Road and all the black market. In the third paragraph I am going to look into the Deep Web, while doing a comparative analysis as a police student from 1988, when none of the webs still existed. Anonymous and unsafe world of the dark As a freelance journalist and a young mother I got a hard task from one magazine. They asked me to get to know as much as I can about the Deep Web and to prepare myself to write a series of articles. I did not know anything about it as I am usually using the Internet only for my e- mail, social networking, blog and reading news. I have decided, that the best way to start researching is to find out the history and the concept of this unknown world of the dark. I read the book written by Peirluigi Paganini and Richard Gatomalo Amores, called “The Deep Dark Web: The Hidden World”. Although, it still took quite a while to understand the whole principle of this Invisible Web. It was a challenge to interpret the difference between the Hidden Internet and the Tor project as well. As I try now to explain the idea of it to my husband and my friends, I say that the Deep Web has much more information than the Surface Web, however, you cannot reach it easily. The idea is to start from one page and to follow the links or either to have a link for an exact website. You will not find anything while searching on Google, as the Deep Web is a World Wide Web content that is not indexed by any standard search engines. 5 Fig 3. Image shows the principle of how does the Deep Web works. Found on : (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deep_Web.svg) Tor was implemented in 1996, in Cambridge, England as an open project developed for the purpose of protecting government communications. Tor – (short for The onion Router) is a browser that allows users to surf the Internet with complete anonymity. People surfing through Tor cannot be controlled by anyone and even government. It was a highly elegant and effective creation, so much so that even the people who built it did not know how to break it. And no one knows it even now. 6 Fig 4. Image shows the principle of how the Tor browser works. Found on: (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/08/what-is-tor-and-why-does-it- matter/#!zd5A5) Interesting, because it started as police usage for anonymous tips online, how to set up operations or to explore illegal websites without tipping off their owners. Despite that, the corruption of the Deep Web began not long after it was built. As having a young family I started to feel insecure after all the information that I found. The Internet never seemed a safe place for my children, but now it looks even worse. Once I downloaded Tor and got on the Deep Web through the first link I realized that it takes only a minute or two to find weapons, children pornography or to order a hitman. 7 Fig 5. Screen shot from the Deep Web of the website called “Hitman Network”, accessed through the Tor browser: http://ybp4oezfhk24hxmb.onion/ Even though I wanted to protect my children, I had mixed feelings about limiting freedom of their Internet usage. “By censoring your child’s Internet access you could be boxing the child into a corner.”1 However, the decision that my husband and I made was to use only one computer in our house. It is blocked from all of the horrible information on the Internet. We think that our children are going to be safer, while they will be protected from the deep secrets of the world. Once we understand that they are mature enough, we will let them know about the Deep Web and anonymous surfing. Hopefully it will not be too late. 1 Kye Valongo (2000). Your Privacy on the Internet. Plymouth: Internet Handbooks. p.123. 8 Story about the eBay of illegal drugs “The real irony of this story, is this thing was built by the US government, in particular, the US Naval research laboratory. They worked out the theory in the 90′s and then launched it in 2003, and they had very good reasons for doing it. The deep web is a vital tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, political dissidents in foreign countries with oppressive governments are trained in it by the state department.” 2 And now it is the time to laugh. FBI and other organizations are spending millions of dollars trying to figure out how to crack it, but also 60% of Tor funding still came from the U.S. government in 2011. It is really strange reading about my best buddy Ross William Ulbircht. Well, he was (and hopefully still is) an amazing person. So smart that no one even knew that he was the owner of the biggest black market place on the Internet. When he came back from Sydney, Australia at 2009 with the idea of the Silk Road we have decided not to talk about it too much as for our own privacy. Everything was going on perfectly for us as we were already ahead from The Farmer’s Market, which opened in 2006 and was selling loads of stuff from marijuana to ketamine. Why we were ahead? Because were using bitcoins. It was a radically new kind of currency introduced as a kind of fiscal thought experiment by someone known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, whose true identity is still kind of a mystery. Bitcoin is both a payment system and a currency that is purely digital - it has no physical form. “A bitcoin's worth is determined by supply and demand and is valuable only insofar as individuals and companies have 2 Hobson. (2013). The Deep Web: Where Google Won’t Take You. Available: http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/11/08/the-deep-web.