Reviewer: Queenie Lee
The term "darknet" was coined in the 70s,
and it was meant as a way
to describe networks isolated from ARPANET.
ARPANET eventually became the commercial internet
run by the private telecoms we all use today.
ARPANET was created by the US Department of Defense,
and it was created to share data
about their projects in research laboratories,
with the universities.
And for those of you familiar with networking,
it was a first packet-switching Network,
which is the foundation to modern networking.
Now, we're not talking about the World Wide Web here.
That didn't show up until 1990,
when Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server at CERN.
The internet is a massive piece of hardware.
It enables communication instantly,
on a global scale.
[He's lying; it's totally a series of tubes.]
(Laughter)
[It's absolutely massive.]
And in fact, there are hundreds of cables spanning the ocean
along with ground- to-satellite communication
and radio-to-radio communication,
just to make this thing work.
I like to tell people I circumnavigated the globe once,
and I start with that
because it sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.
What I did was to set up a bunch of virtual servers
around the world, running Netcat.
And I cloned the left computer's hard drive
to the right computer
by streaming the data through the tunnel.
And it's so awesome that that works at all.
But I feel like people have ruined this for us.
They've ruined it with spying and surveillance.
And there's a constant need to watch everything we do.
So a lot of us are scared
to read a certain page on the internet or maybe download a publication
that's a little too leftist or rightist in content.
And my hope is, darknets help solve this problem.
So I'm going to explore and share a couple with you here today.
When it comes to darknets, there are a couple different types.
Historically, they were meant to be private file-sharing networks
but these days they're dynamic pages
rich with media content and pictures and videos,
so they're already familiar to us.
With darknets, some are peer to peer,
some are centralized,
but most are going for a decentralized model,
and we're looking for specific types of philosophy
when we consider whether or not our network is a darknet.
We're looking for take-down resistance:
that is the government, or anyone else for that matter,
can't just come in, unplug the thing
and watch it disappear.
We're looking for anonymity,
so nobody knows who's reading, uploading, or creating content.
And content-richness,
because if there's nothing to see or read, or it all sucks,
then really what's the point of even having a darknet?
Turns out they're pretty useful.
And they've been used for political safe-haven,
journalism, piracy, black markets,
but most importantly, at least to me,
privacy.
You've all heard of the Silk Road, I'm sure.
Well, the Silk Road was running on a network known as "Tor."
Tor is a node-based, decentralized anonymity network.
It was initially researched by the US Naval Research Laboratory,
and has been since handed over to a 501c3
known as the Tor project.
Around 80% of their budget still comes from the US government,
and the rest of it from private donors and even other governments.
Tor made its way into the public's hands because that's the only way it could work.
It would be completely pointless
if every request the Navy wanted to make anonymously
came from a Navy controlled network.
So I like to think that they created Kansas City Shuffle,
where they just dropped this thing into the public's hands
and everybody went buck-wild with it.
So while everybody's looking left, at headlines about the Silk Road,
and drugs, and guns, and all the bad stuff,
the Navy's going right and blowing shit up.
Tor works by having relay and exit nodes.
A node is just a computer running Tor software,
and a relay node takes a request,
peels off a layer of encryption
and hands it off to the next node in the route,
still encrypted.
An exit node takes a now unencrypted request
when it reaches through the end of the route,
and makes the call to Google.com or whatever you're trying to access,
and the response comes back and everything happens in reverse
until the content is displayed in the Tor browser.
Tor is cool because it lets you browse the normal internet
along with these things called "hidden services,"
unlike other darknet-like software
where you pretty much just have what the network provides to people,
what people can upload and whatnot.
Hidden services are like normal websites;
they're dynamic in nature,
but you access them with a ".onion" address.
And the .onion address is like a normal domain but less memorable.
Because it's a bunch of random characters followed by ".onion."
So you don't really just say
"Hey, I'm going to go to xyz409.onion,"
you're going to use a search service and find it.
So, that could be a hurdle to some people.
These sites are really the darknet side to Tor
and are often referred to as "the Deepweb."
So, we're going to explore Tor,
and here's the first screen you get when you launch the Tor browser.
The Tor browser comes in "the Tor browser bundle,"
and it's a nice, neat package.
And I love that they did this
because nobody's going to use this stuff if it's hard.
This is something familiar.
This is Firefox, but kind of configured in a way to use Tor.
This is the first screen you get - green.
It says we're connected to the Tor network,
and if it was red, you should stop right there
because you're not anonymous, and you're going to do something stupid.
Trust me, you're going to do something stupid.
(Laughter)
This is an example of me using a service called
"DuckDuckGo."
A lot of you probably started to hear about this
because it's an alternative to Google, kind of gaining popularity.
And I'm searching for "Tails,"
and Tails is an incognito live system.
So, it runs Tor and is very relevant here.
I'm getting to the download page, and I'm going to download Tails on Tor,
so nobody knows I'm downloading Tails.
Here's an example of the Washington Post SecureDrop.
"SecureDrops" are these things
that news organizations are starting to add to their websites
that allow people to connect to Tor,
go to an Onion address,
and deliver some papers or maybe some intel to journalists.
Here's an example of a .onion search service.
You search for a term, and you get some results back.
So here I searched for "black market."
And I've clicked on a link.
I put this in here
because this is a good example of things not being taken down on Tor.
Yes, the Silk Road got taken down,
but it's very rare, and it was their own fault.
So, here you can spend Bitcoin on assault weapons.
And here are some of the ways that they concealed it.
Here's a social network.
It's a really boring social network;
don't get excited.
But I put this in here
because the registration page is really interesting.
It specifically says:
"No child porn. No porn. No hate speech,"
and "No commercial activities."
And this is a great example of the community that you get on Tor.
They want privacy,
and there's a lot of trying to keep the thing clean
and safe for people to use.
Here's an example of me logging in. There's a stream.
And I put this in here because this is the first question I get
whenever I talk about the Deepweb to somebody.
They say, "Can I buy a hitman?"
(Laughter)
And I'm like, "I'm showing you this thing that makes you anonymous on the internet,
and you ask me about a hitman.
That's the first thing you ask me."
Here's Aphex Twins announcing their new album on a hidden service.
Here's an example of something you should not be doing on Tor, and it's Facebook.
It's because their terms of service are very antipseudonym.
So it's just inherently a bad idea.
Same with LinkedIn, antipseudonym -
you are who you legally are;
therefore, you should not be using an anonymization service.
And here's something that's maybe okay, and that's Twitter.
I see a lot of people using Twitter anonymously.
I haven't read the terms of service so I'm not sure if that's okay or not.
Tor is great.
My experience with Tor has been very pleasant.
The network is actually pretty fast, contrary to popular belief.
And a lot of people use it.
Edward Snowden used it
to upload documents to journalists about the NSA files.
And it was used during the Arab Spring,
in 2011 Iran protests.
I also looked at Freenet.
Freenet is a decentralized, peer-to-peer file sharing network.
It's similar to BitTorrent but everything's encrypted,
so it's really hard to detect Freenet traffic.
And you share your hard-drive space and some bandwidth with the network,
and it basically stores things on your hard-drive.
They're encrypted,
so you're not really held accountable for what you're serving up to the network,
and you can be serving some pretty shocking things.
They have these things called "Freesites" and "Flogs."
They are static; they're not dynamic.
So people have to re-upload the content over and over and over again.
So things kind of go out of date.
The last Flog that I saw updated was in like 2011.
So we're going to take a look at Freenet.
Here's the first thing you see when you first install it,
and I don't like that, because it is a setup screen, and nobody likes that.
Nobody likes setup screens.
Here's another setup screen.
More setup.
Now you have to choose which security mode you want.
And you're like: "I want high security, but I have no friends using Freenet."
Here's a browser advisory telling you not to browse in non-incognito mode.
Data store size, bandwidth limits, more setup. It's just setup.
And here's the first page that you get to.
It's confusing already.
And here's an index page; finally, I'm in an index page.
And I scroll through this thing, and I can't find anything that I want.
So I get another index page.
I download this one, and now I have a virus on my computer.
(Laughter)
Here's an index page that's just offering me a bunch of porn.
Here's a cleaned up index page;
ah, finally.
I've found the links I'm looking for.
Freenet is slow and hard to use.
I put it in here because it's a good example of a different type of darknet.
It's harder to use and I don't think it's the right direction.
But it exists.
How many of you read Linux Journal or Boing Boing?
I see a couple hands.
You're all extremists.
(Laughter)
Darknets are very important and have played an important role
in uprisings, journalism overseas, and in states of political turmoil.
They're pretty useful.
They became especially useful after the Snowden leaks of 2013.
Specifically, because of what the files contained.
That is, according to the XKeyscore system,
Linux Journal and Boing Boing are extremist forums,
and will make you a target for surveillance
if you visit certain links to those sites.
So it's safe to say - if you're unfamiliar with XKeyscore,
it's an SA program designed to help analysts pick targets for surveillance
by searching for keywords such as emails, emails body content,
and other types of data collected as part of its broad data-collection activities.
So it's safe to say that I do a lot of reading on Tor.
And it's because - I don't know about you all -
I don't want to feel like I've done something wrong doing research.
And I just don't want to feel judged in general while I'm on the internet.
So, I hope this got you as excited as I am about darknets and the deepweb.
And there's a lot more than this to learn and explore as well.
But I'll leave you with this:
Darknets are an important piece to surviving a surveillance state.
And the past a year and a half has made it very clear
that the entire world is living in a surveillance state.
Thank you.
(Applause)