Posted on 03/14/2015 10:40:47 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The ‘Darknet’ is dangerous. It’s also deeply democratic
The ‘Darknet’ is in the spotlight. Over the past few months, stories of paedophile rings, drug empires and terrorist organisations have set pulses racing as investigative journalists have begun dipping their toes into the network. Cue stories such as: ‘Five scary things ANYONE can buy in the Darknet’s illegal markets‘. Now, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology have released a briefing.
The note, entitled ‘The Darknet and Online Anonymity’, centres on Tor. Tor is an easy-to-use web browser that makes tracking a user’s online activities much more difficult. It is designed to prevent government agencies and big corporations learning your location, your identity and your browsing habits. As well as browsing the ‘open web’ anonymously, it also allows users to access ‘Tor Hidden Services’, more commonly known as the Darknet.
Tor is attracting more and more users, for a myriad of different reasons. There are criminals, of course, looking to buy, sell or share illegal goods and services. The most high-profile of these was the Silk Road – an online drugs market – taken down again by the CIA in February (it was first taken down in October 2013). There are journalists and activists looking to communicate securely as governments look to prosecute them, such as during the Arab Spring in Egypt. There are those citizens looking to bypass censorship in countries where internet content is suppressed: it bypasses ‘The Great Firewall of China’, for instance. Finally, there are ordinary citizens who would prefer their viewing habits not to be dictated by algorithm and who would prefer their personal data to remain, well, personal.
The noises coming from Westminster recently on the subject of online anonymity and tracking internet communications data have been mixed. Generally speaking, the Home Office and other have sounded like they’re on the attack. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Cameron made it clear that ‘modern forms of communication’ cannot be allowed to ‘be exempt from being listened to’. Boris Johnson isn’t ‘particularly interested in this civil liberties stuff when it comes to people’s emails and mobile phone conversations’. The ‘snooper’s charter’ appears to live a ghoulish, necromantic half-life, never lurking far from the topsoil.
This note, published by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, is a step-change, both in terms of practice and ideology. Recent public calls for greater surveillance by bodies such as the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament haven’t tended to offer practical suggestions for how intentions might be put into practice. Malcolm Rifkind criticised Facebook for not alerting MI5 to a message sent by one of Lee Rigby’s murderers without any real appreciation of how difficult the task of identifying one of the fifty billion messages sent across Facebook’s systems (which now includes WhatsApp) would really be.
The note, for a change, admits the technical challenge monitoring or supressing Tor. It also presents a sceptical analysis of how much illegal content or communication actually takes place on the network. It concludes that ‘banning online anonymity systems altogether is not seen as an acceptable policy option in the UK’.
Even more significantly, however, the piece suggests that even if such action were possible, it might not be a good idea. In doing so, it presents a side to the argument that is rarely voiced in Westminster: a defence of online anonymity.
The ability to be anonymous online has all manner of benefits – for all of us. As my colleague Jamie Bartlett puts it, ‘Syrian democrats really do create secret and untraceable chat rooms to co-ordinate activity. Russian dissidents really do need to circumnavigate state censorship of the net. Gay people in the Middle East really do use anonymous browsers to evade the brutal enforcers of state morality’.
They use the same technology used by terrorists and paedophiles – and there is no way of getting around that. Forget for a moment the glamour and horror of terrorists and freedom fighters, because the ability to go online without being traced, tracked, monitored and watched at every turn brings all sorts of benefits to us dullards too.
It means we can speak our mind freely, without fear of judgement: the Federalist Papers – critical documents for the American Revolution – were authored anonymously. It allows us to address and raise sensitive information without giving away too much about ourselves. It means we can browse the net without fear of hackers learning our IP address. That’s not to say there aren’t problems. As Bartlett has recently argued in a new e-book ‘Orwell Versus the Terrorists’, online anonymity is being used by terrorists and paedophiles to evade detection. But the answer, he suggests, is not to remove everyone’s ability to stay hidden online: it’s to develop new more targeted techniques to get at the bad guys. The benefits of this sort of freedom are immense – it’s what propels society along. The cost is that some people will misuse it. Otherwise known as life in a liberal democracy.
My husband and I are familiar with Tor and use it carefully. We have been to Saudi Arabia and China and have used Tor to send images back home. There is a place for this. It can be legitimate. But be careful.
Aw jeez, not this shit again!
“Democratic” is not capitalized in the title at the site. By capitalizing it you have changed the meaning. Small “l” liberalism and small “d” democracy are the antithesis of the American Democrat party.
This is way different than R&R and D&D. You don’t want to visit the wrong sites on that internet. There’s a darkness out there that we can not fathom. They say what we see on the normal internet is literally a tip of the iceberg compared to the darknet. Believe it.
November, 2014 - “Welcome to “Operation Onymous.” Europol’s Cybercrime Centre, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this month that they had formed a Joint Cybercrime Action Team and spent six months preparing to take down sites on Tor. Troels Oerting (head of the Cybercrime Centre) said “we have demonstrated that we are able to efficiently remove vital criminal infrastructures that are supporting serious organised crime. And we are not ‘just’ removing these services from the open Internet; this time we have also hit services on the Darknet using Tor where, for a long time, criminals have considered themselves beyond reach. We can now show that they are neither invisible nor untouchable.”
The Onion Router (as it was originally known)
Mostly used by pedophiles to traffic child porn.
Those are the ones that need executed.
I do not think there are any ‘democrats’ in Syria
As long as they take down real bad guys and leave the rest alone, no problem
The subject of the article is how Westminster is dealing with TOR, although it does suppose that democratic groups in Syria are using TOR to organize.
But that is the problem. The vast majority of Patriot Act laws are used against terrorists less than a fraction of one percent of the time. However, they have opened the floodgates against ordinary American citizens.
In effect it legitimized what had been highly illegal acts by government agencies, and not just against domestic criminals, but vast numbers of people with absolutely no suspicions against them.
And the truly aggravating parts of it all is that while they are desperate to destroy every shred of privacy and voyeuristically peer into the minutiae of every citizen’s life, real terrorists are easily evading them, often without even trying, their activities buried under a Mount Everest of data like how much toilet paper does a particular woman in the Midwest buy on a monthly basis.
And it costs hundreds of billions of dollars to accomplish the same as some local police detective.
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