- In August 2019 a Canadian man, Benjamin Faulkner,
and his American accomplice Patrick Falte,
were sentenced to 35 years in prison for running
one of the largest child sexual abuse sites
on the dark web.
The site was called Child's Play.
And their arrest and conviction was the result
of a coordinated international effort by law enforcement
agencies to infiltrate the site,
identify its members, and shut it down.
But maybe the most interesting detail of this whole
operation was just how common it's become.
Police and government agencies take down illicit
dark web sites like this every year.
And it's not just child abuse sites.
There's weapons, drugs, even hit men.
And these are all for sale on the dark web.
But what is the dark web?
And how does it work?
And why does a place like this even exits if it attracts
so much criminal activity?
To understand that you first have to understand
how the dark web differs from the regular web.
Think of the internet as a pyramid with three layers.
At the top of the pyramid, the smallest part
is about four to 10% of the web.
And this is called the surface web or the clear net.
Basically it's the part of the web you can Google.
It's publicly visible, it's indexed by search engines,
and it's what most of us think of when we think of
the internet.
But the clear net is just a small fraction of the
information stored online.
Below the clear net is the deep web.
The deep web is the biggest layer of all.
How big?
Well some estimates suggest it could be four to 500
times bigger than the surface web.
The deep web is composed of things like the files
in our Dropbox and Google drive accounts.
Bank and medical records under password,
and the content stored behind membership paywalls
like Netflix and Spotify.
This stuff doesn't come up in public search results
but we still interact with it.
It's private but it's not especially dark.
The clear net and the deep web have this in common.
Your online activity is traceable.
Wherever you go it can be linked back to your IP address.
You can think of your IP address as a license plate
for your computer.
It follows you everywhere.
In fact you need it just to send and receive information
over the web.
So, if someone knows your IP address
and know what they're doing they can track down
which websites you visit and where in the world you're
logging in from.
Unless you go a little deeper,
all the way down to the dark web.
Now the dark web is really just a subsection
of the deep web, the part of the web you can't access
with public searches.
The main difference is that it's completely unreachable
using conventional web browsers.
You can't stumble onto one of them using a standard
web browser like Chrome.
To find a dark web site you need a special browser.
The most popular is called Tor, T-O-R,
it stands for the onion router.
Now explaining how Tor works can get a bit technical
but the big picture is this.
It makes all your web activity completely anonymous
by making your IP address untraceable.
And the reason it's called the onion router
is because it creates layers and layers of encryption
around the information you send through the network.
Like an onion.
Ultimately the dark web isn't so much a place
as it is a way of navigating invisibly through
the deep web.
So when we hear about a child abuse site being taken down
where's it actually hosted?
Where's the content being stored?
Well it could be anywhere.
It could be on a rented server in the Philippines,
or on your neighbor's laptop.
Any computer or server connected to the internet
can be configured with these anonymous routing protocols.
So why does Tor continue to exist if it provides
such a haven for criminal activity?
Well there's actually some pretty good reasons.
This is Einar Stangvik,
he's a white hat hacker and he works for the
Norwegian Newspaper VG.
Einer's got some pretty solid skills.
Actually that's an understatement.
Einer managed to hack his way into Child's Play,
the forum Benjamin Faulkner was running
when he uncovered the forum's IP address.
- Tor can be used by anyone from a journalist who's
working within a government with excessive surveillance
to someone who wants to blow the whistle securely,
anonymously, and also by people who want to avoid trackers,
advertisers, and others that would otherwise monitor
their traffic.
So you could say that the legitimate use
comes at a cost.
So I think you would be better off trying to battle
the specific uses that are illegal
and to battle the specific users than to attack
the technology.
- So there are some legitimate reasons to maintain
a global anonymous online network.
But the question is do they outweigh the negatives?
And if not who should we rely on to keep the darkness
off the dark web?
That mantle has been taken up on occasion
by vigilante hacktivist groups like Anonymous.
Anonymous has taken down child abuse sites
on the dark web by locating and attacking the servers
where they're hosted.
But these events are few and far between.
And they can actually undermine the efforts
of law enforcement operations.
What's proved most effective are specialized police units
coordinating across borders and regional jurisdictions
to identify, infiltrate, and dismantle large criminal
enterprises on the dark web.
Because these criminal networks almost always span
across borders a special law enforcement alliance
called the Virtual Global Taskforce now exists
to coordinate online child abuse operations
between dozens of countries and federal agencies
including the RCMP.
And although the bad guys continue to employ
ever smarter tactics to hide their identities
and activity the good guys are always finding ways
to outsmart them.
Recently the investigative division of the IRS,
the Internal Revenue Service announced the take down
of a major child abuse site along with the arrest
of its Korean administrator and dozens of members
around the world.
They were able to do this by de-anonymizing transactions
of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
Something that was once thought impossible.
So, is the dark web worth keeping?
Well, in the end it's not really up to us.
Because of its distributed nature the dark web
can't really be destroyed.
As a society if we want to preserve the benefits
of an anonymous information network then we also have
a responsibility to update our laws
and provide police with the resources they need
to fight criminals where they hide.
And hopefully prevent the bad actors
from overwhelming the good.