Free Republic

Despite its dark image, the dark web is not entirely criminal. Human rights organizations use the platform to circumvent government censorship and spread life-saving information.As social media networks continue to attract more users and as we get increasingly addicted to them, a new phenomenon is emerging: new underground movements that are changing cities and raising concerns. While most people are busy documenting every detail of their lives, some are heading in the opposite direction. In the streets of Tel Aviv, New York, and Berlin, secret communities have been sprouting in recent years – groups of activists and change-seekers who prefer...

President Donald Trump has granted an unconditional pardon to the creator of the notorious dark web page Silk Road in honor of the 'Libertarian Movement,' while slamming the 'scum' who prosecuted him. Ross Ulbricht, 40, was arrested in 2013 because the dark website he founded facilitated the sale of illicit drugs using cryptocurrency. In early 2015 he was sentenced to two life terms in prison plus 40 years for drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit money laundering and computer hacking, operating under the pseudonym 'Dread Pirate Roberts.' 'Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s...

Ross Ulbricht has been pardoned by President Donald Trump

Personal information for some 3,191 congressional staffers has been leaked across the dark web, according to new research from internet security firm Proton being released Tuesday. The firm said the data available in the hidden online hubs includes passwords, IP addresses and information from social media platforms. “Many of these leaks likely occurred because staffers used their official email addresses to sign up for various services, including high-risk sites such as dating and adult websites, which were later compromised in data breaches,” Proton said in a statement. “This situation highlights a critical security lapse, where sensitive work-related emails became entangled...

Over 3,000 congressional staffers’ personal information has been leaked across the dark web in a wide-scale cyberattack on the Capitol. Switzerland based security firm Proton, disovered 1,800 passwords used by staffers at the Capitol are avaible on the dark web. In an investigation, Proton along with the the United States based firm Constella Intelligence, revealed 1 in 5 congressional staffers had personal information exposed on teh dark web. In the report, Proton shared, the leaks made their way to the dark web through several sorces such as adult websites, social media and dating apps. In a statement to The Washington...

A North Texas woman was sentenced to nine years in prison after using Bitcoin to pay for a murder. Federal prosecutors said 58-year-old Michelle Murphy of Bedford used the dark web to find a hitman for her boyfriend’s lover. "To my knowledge, it's the first time this has happened in Texas, but it's happened plenty of places all over the United States," said former U.S. attorney Richard Roper. Investigators learned she used an ATM to convert cash to cryptocurrency at least three times and transferred about $10,500 to the hitman’s Bitcoin wallet. The person who accepted the money tipped off...

There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles. A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia. Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God...

Melody Sasser faces up to 10 years behind bars if she is convicted.A Tennessee woman is accused of paying a hitman from the dark web to kill the wife of a hiking buddy she met on Match.com and stalking the woman's whereabouts on a fitness app, court documents reveal. Melody Sasser apparently didn’t like it when her friend, identified in recently unsealed court documents by the initials D.W., told her he was getting married last fall. “I hope you both fall off a cliff and die,” she told the man, according to an affidavit dated May 11. Sasser was charged...

This chilling story is enough to make your stomach turn as Ryan Montgomery shares the details of how he became involved and uncovered a website that led to the discovery of its owner, Nathan Larson, a former congressional candidate. These individuals, who have perpetrated terrible and horrific crimes that will affect their victims for the rest of their lives, have thus far escaped justice. However, Ryan and his partner are actively pursuing them.

@RealRossU Tomorrow I’ll begin my 10th year in prison. I don’t know what to say. I screwed up. I ruined my life and caused a lot of pain. When I look back and see my many mistakes, I feel immense regret.

Among many claimed benefits, cryptocurrencies supposedly offer two significant benefits over fiat currencies: 1) autonomy and 2) discretion. This past week, the U.S. federal government took them both down. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a press statement that it had seized $2.3 million in cryptocurrency. The seizure was the result of the FBI's Colonial Pipeline investigation. As a reminder, Colonial Pipeline, the U.S.'s largest pipeline for refined oil products, was the victim of a cyberattack. Against the U.S.'s wishes and policies, Colonial Pipeline paid millions in ransom to retake control of the pipeline. According to the FBI, they had...

A revelation buried in a cache of documents opens a new and potentially important investigative corridor for Special Counsel John Durham. The shady tech executive who featured prominently in the federal indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also communicating with a covert group of computer scientists skilled in mining internet data. This revelation raises concerns that the man referred to in special counsel documents as Tech Executive-1, Rodney Joffe, may have shared sensitive government and private internet data more broadly than previously thought. Joffe’s role in Spygate represents one of the most recent developments exposed by the...

A joint academic research project from the United States has developed a method to foil CAPTCHA* tests, reportedly outperforming similar state-of-the-art machine learning solutions by using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to decode the visually complex challenges. Testing the new system against the best current frameworks, the researchers found that their method achieves more than 94.4% success on a carefully curated real-world benchmark dataset, and has proved capable of ‘eliminating human involvement’ when navigating a highly CAPTCHA-protected emerging Dark Net Marketplace, automatically resolving CAPTCHA challenges in a maximum of three attempts. Architecture for DW-GAN. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.02799.pdf Workflow for DW-GAN. Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.02799.pdf...

JOSH Duggar made a startling "non-admission" when questioned about alleged child pornography on his work computer in 2019. In court on Wednesday, audio from an interview with Homeland Security agents conducted with Josh in 2019 was played. At the time, after being presented with evidence, Josh told arresting officers: "I’m not going to say anything that’s going to incriminate me. I’m not denying guilt. I’m not saying if I am guilty or not." In another audio recording played for the court, Josh was asked by an agent if he was aware of what peer-to-peer was, according to a Sun reporter...

Authorities in the U.S. and Europe say they've coordinated on one of the largest dark web drug busts in history. The coordinated police operation, dubbed “Dark HunTor,” involved a large number of law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Europol, and various other U.S. entities, including the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Postal Service. So far, “HunTor” has resulted in the arrest of 150 people worldwide, as well as the seizure of some $31.6 million from both cash and digital currencies (aka Bitcoin and other cryptos). Police say that they have also seized approximately 234 kilograms of narcotics.......

Earlier this week, the bitcoin community was shocked when a digital wallet containing roughly $1 billion in bitcoin...was emptied by an unknown individual. The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it had seized the wallet’s contents as part of a civil forfeiture case targeting the Silk Road. The government said it retrieved the roughly 70,000 bitcoins with the help of an unnamed hacker, whose identity is known to the government but who is simply referred to as “Individual X” in court documents. “Individual X” allegedly hacked the Silk Road’s payments system some time in 2012 or 2013. The government...

In the last three days, I have begun having issues using Google (I have to use Google for work, and I haven't seen the issue there) getting constant CAPTCHA, and this morning, out of the blue, my banking program refused to work saying that I had cookies blocked. Now, I haven't made any changes to my browser settings (I use Safari) so I made sure VPN was off, cleared all caches, history, and cookies, but was still unable to login. So I decided to change some settings I haven't touched in years, and one of them was the setting for...

South Korean national and hundreds of others charged worldwide in the takedown of the largest darknet child pornography website funded by bitcoin Dozens of minor victims who were being actively abused by site users rescued WASHINGTON – Jong Woo Son, 23, a South Korean national, was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia for his operation of Welcome To Video, the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content. The nine-count indictment was unsealed today along with a parallel civil forfeiture action. Son has also been charged and convicted in South Korea and is currently...

  Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, February 6, 2020 Hosting Service Contained Over 8.5 Million Images of Child Exploitation Material A dual national citizen of the United States and Ireland pleaded guilty in federal court in Maryland to conspiracy to advertise child pornography.Eric Eoin Marques, 33, of Dublin, Ireland, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang to conspiracy to advertise child pornography.  In his plea agreement, Marques admitted that between July 24, 2008, and July 29, 2013, he conspired to advertise child pornography by operating an anonymous web hosting service (AHS). Marques was extradited to...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed “flashing videos” on the “dark web” for her 2016 presidential election loss last Friday during a radio interview. Clinton said on Campaign HQ’s podcast that she anticipates President Donald Trump will employ a similar strategy to win re-election next November. (RELATED: ‘Error’ Page On Trump’s Website Shows Hillary Clinton As President) “I think it’s going to be the same as 2016,” Clinton said. “I’m going to show you in these flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they’re on the dark web and nobody can find them, but you’re going to see...