The Dark Net
Authors: Jamie Bartlett
Contents
Introduction: Liberty or Death
Chapter 1: Unmasking the Trolls
Chapter 6: Lights, Web-camera, Action
Beyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit – a world of Google, Hotmail, Facebook and Amazon – lies a vast and often hidden network of sites, communities and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits, and where people can be anyone, or do anything, they want. A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think.
The dark net is an underworld that stretches from popular social media sites to the most secretive corners of the encrypted web. It is a world that frequently appears in newspaper headlines, but one that is little understood, and rarely explored.
The Dark Net
is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous subcultures: trolls and pornographers, drug dealers and hackers, political extremists and computer scientists, Bitcoin programmers and self-harmers, libertarians and vigilantes.
Based on extensive first-hand experience, exclusive interviews and shocking documentary evidence,
The Dark Net
offers a startling glimpse of human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity, and shines a light on an enigmatic and ever-changing world.
Jamie Bartlett is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, where he specialises in online social movements and the impact of technology on society. He lives in London.
Inside the Digital Underworld
Jamie Bartlett
For Huey, Max, Sonny and Thomas, who were born while I was writing this book. When they are old enough, I hope they will read it and wonder what on earth all the fuss was about, and laugh at their uncle’s hopeless predictions.
The Dark Net
is an examination of what are, in many cases, extremely sensitive and contentious subjects. My primary aim was to shine a light on a world that is frequently discussed, but rarely explored – often for good reason. Throughout I have endeavoured to set my own views aside and write as objective and as lucid an account of what I experienced as possible. Readers may question the wisdom of writing about this subject at all, and express concern at the information
The Dark Net
reveals. Although my intention was never to provide a guide to illegal or immoral activity online, this book does contain material that some readers will find shocking and offensive.
As a researcher I felt a duty to respect the privacy of the people I encountered. Where necessary, I have altered names, online pseudonyms and identifying details, and, in one chapter, created a composite character based on several individuals. For the reader’s ease, I have also corrected many (but not all) spelling mistakes in quoted material.
I have tried to balance the rights of individuals with the social benefit that I believe comes from describing them and the worlds they inhabit. It is not a foolproof method; rather a series of judgements. Any errors, omissions and mistakes are mine alone, and I hope those included in this book will accept my apologies in advance for any distress or discomfort caused.
Online life moves quickly. Doubtless by the time you read
The Dark Net
, certain parts of the story will have changed, websites will have closed down, sub-cultures will have evolved, new laws will have been enacted. But its core theme – what humans do under the conditions of real or perceived anonymity – will certainly have not.
Jamie Bartlett
July 2014
Liberty or Death
I HAVE HEARD
rumours about this website, but I still cannot quite believe that it exists. I am looking at what I think is a hit list. There are photographs of people I recognise – prominent politicians, mostly – and, next to each, an amount of money. The site’s creator, who uses the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thinks that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance – I mean absolutely
zero
chance – of being caught, you would. That’s one of the reasons why he has created the Assassination Market. There are four simple instructions listed on its front page:
>Add a name to the list
>Add money to the pot in the person’s name
>Predict when that person will die
>Correct predictions get the pot
The Assassination Market can’t be found with a Google search. It sits on a hidden, encrypted part of the internet that, until recently, could
only be accessed with a browser called The Onion Router, or Tor. Tor began life as a US Naval Research Laboratory project, but today exists as a not-for-profit organisation, partly funded by the US government and various civil liberties groups, allowing millions of people around the world to browse the internet anonymously and securely.
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To put it simply, Tor works by repeatedly encrypting computer activity and routing it via several network nodes, or ‘onion routers’, in so doing concealing the origin, destination and content of the activity. Users of Tor are untraceable, as are the websites, forums and blogs that exist as Tor Hidden Services, which use the same traffic encryption system to cloak their location.
The Assassination Market may be hosted on an unfamiliar part of the net, but it’s easy enough to find, if you know how to look. All that’s required is a simple (and free) software package. Then sign up, follow the instructions, and wait. It is impossible to know the number of people who are doing exactly that, but at the time of writing, if I correctly predict the date of the death of Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, I’d receive approximately $56,000.
It may seem like a fairly pointless bet. It’s very difficult to guess when someone is going to die. That’s why the Assassination Market has a fifth instruction:
>Making your prediction come true is entirely optional
The Assassination Market is a radical example of what people can do online. Beyond the more familiar world of Google, Hotmail and Amazon lies another side to the internet: the dark net.
For some, the dark net is the encrypted world of Tor Hidden Services, where users cannot be traced, and cannot be identified. For others, it is those sites not indexed by conventional search engines: an unknowable realm of password protected pages, unlinked websites and hidden content accessible only to those in the know. It has also become a catch-all term for the myriad shocking, disturbing and controversial corners of the net – the realm of imagined criminals and predators of all shapes and sizes.
The dark net is all of these things, to some extent – but for me, it is an idea more than a particular place: an underworld set apart yet connected to the internet we inhabit, a world of complete freedom and anonymity, and where users say and do what they like, uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society’s norms. It is a world that is as shocking and disturbing as it is innovative and creative, a world that is also much closer than you think.
The dark net is rarely out of the news – with stories of young people sharing homemade pornography, of cyberbullies and trolls tormenting strangers, of political extremists peddling propaganda, of illegal goods, drugs and confidential documents only a click or two away appearing in headlines almost daily – but it is still a world that is, for the most part, unexplored and little understood. In reality, few people have ventured into the darker recesses of the net to study these sites in any detail.
I started researching radical social and political movements in 2007, when I spent two and a half years following Islamist extremists around Europe and North America, trying to piece together a fragmented and largely disjointed real-world network of young men who sympathised with al-Qaeda ideology. By the time I’d finished my work in 2010, the world seemed to be different. Every new social or political phenomenon I encountered – from conspiracy theorists to far-right activists to drugs cultures – was increasingly located and active online. I would frequently interview the same person twice – once online and then again in real life – and feel as if I was speaking to two different people. I was finding parallel worlds with different rules, different patterns of behaviour, different protagonists. Every time I thought I’d reached the bottom of one online culture, I discovered other connected, secretive realms still unexplored. Some required a level of technical know-how to access, some were extremely easy to find. Although an increasingly important part of many people’s lives and identities, these online spaces are mostly invisible: out of reach and out of view. So I went in search of them.
My journey took me to new places online and offline. I became the moderator of an infamous trolling group and spent weeks in forums dedicated to cutting, starving or killing yourself. I explored the labyrinthine world of Tor Hidden Services in search of drugs, and to study child pornography networks. I witnessed online wars between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists on popular social media sites, and signed up to the latest porn channels to examine current trends in home-made erotica. I visited a Barcelona squat with anarchist Bitcoin programmers, run-down working men’s clubs to speak to
extreme nationalists, and a messy bedroom to observe three girls make a small fortune performing sexually explicit acts on camera to thousands of viewers. By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature? And if so, how?
The Dark Net
is not an effort to weigh up the pros and cons of the internet. The same anonymity that allows the Assassination Market to operate also keeps whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners and activists alive. For every destructive sub-culture I examined there are just as many that are positive, helpful and constructive.
This book cannot even be considered a comprehensive account of the multitude of darker sub-cultures that permeate online life. From encrypted Tor Hidden Services to popular social media sites, it’s difficult to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. This is instead one person’s experience of spending an extended period of time in a few of the internet’s least explored backwaters, and an attempt to try to understand and explain what takes place there, and why. In the dark net, I came to learn, things are often not what they first appear.
The net as we know it started life in the late 1960s, as a small scientific project funded and run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a development arm of the US military. The Pentagon hoped to create an ‘Arpanet’ of linked computers to help top American academics share data sets and valuable computer space.
In 1969 the first networked connection was made between two computers in California. It was a network that slowly grew.
In July 1973 Peter Kirstein, a young professor of computer science at University College London, connected the UK to the Arpanet via the Atlantic seabed phone cables, a job that made Kirstein the first person in the UK online. ‘I had absolutely
no
idea what it would become!’ Kirstein tells me. ‘None of us did. We were scientists and academics focused on trying to build and maintain a system which allowed data to be shared quickly and easily.’ The Arpanet, and its successor, the internet, was built on principles that would allow these academics to work effectively together: a network that was open, decentralised, accessible and censorship-free. These ideas would come to define what the internet stood for: an unlimited world of people, information and ideas.
The invention of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in 1978, and Usenet in 1979–80, introduced a new generation to life online. Unlike the cloistered Arpanet, Usenet and BBS, the forerunners of the chat room and forum, were available to anyone with a modem and a home computer. Although small, slow and primitive by today’s standards, they were attracting thousands of people intrigued by a new virtual world. By the mid-nineties and the emergence of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, the internet was fully transformed: from a niche underground haunt frequented by computer hobbyists and academics, to a popular hangout accessed by millions of excited neophytes.
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According to John Naughton
,
Professor of the Public
Understanding of Technology at the Open University, cyberspace at this time was more than just a network of computers. Users saw it as ‘a new kind of place’, with its own culture, its own identity, and its own rules. The arrival of millions of ‘ordinary’ people online stimulated fears and hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution
Wired
and
Mondo 2000
magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew. (The
New Yorker
put it more succinctly: ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.’) Leading psychologists of the day, such as Sherry Turkle in her influential 1995 study of internet identity,
Life on the Screen
, offered a cautious welcome to the way that online life could allow people to work through the different elements of their identity.