“DO NOT click the link! Do not click the link!” The floppy-haired young man screams at his laptop, but we know his friends are going to die anyway. It is why we watch horror films.
A group of twenty-somethings are hanging out via video chat. One of them is using a laptop that someone left behind in a cafe. He shows his friends a hidden folder that connects him to a strange part of the internet.
“Dude, this is dark web,” says one of them.
Advertisement
“What’s dark web?” another asks.
“Drugs, illegal IDs, even assassinations for hire.”
“Włó´Ç˛ą!”
“Yeah, the dark web is mostly about the bad guys.”
Released in UK cinemas in August, the film (directed by Stephen Susco) is now out on DVD and streaming services. It is OK if you like scares on rails. But the new twist is the choice of baddie.
The laptop turns out to contain dozens of grainy videos that show people chained up in basements or stuffed inside barrels. The friends realise that these snuff videos are being made and traded online by a ring of sadistic killers.
The fun begins when a member of this ring pops up in the friends’ video chat to ask for his laptop back. But the real monster here is the dark web itself. Unfriended taps into the popular idea of a shadowy, unmapped part of the internet where nasty things lurk.
“It’s a seductive, terrifying trope, the idea that some monstrous collection of horrifying data lurks beneath the reach of the average web user,” writes Robert Gehl in (MIT Press), a terrific analysis of the web’s wildest, oddest frontier.
An internet ethnographer at the University of Utah, Gehl is good at unpicking the mythology. He draws on three years of observing the dark web, noting what people do and interviewing those doing it. Along the way, he contributed to wikis, ran a blog, hosted a homepage and even helped edit a dark web literary magazine.
“The term Dark Web very likely evokes some decidedly illegitimate associations: drug markets, unregulated guns for sale, child exploitation images, stolen credit cards for sale, or phishing attacks,” he writes. He reminds us of Silk Road, the billion-dollar marketplace selling everything from psychedelic mushrooms to heroin. Slickly run by Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road became a kind of underworld Amazon.
We also hear reports generally that terrorist cells are setting up encrypted and untraceable communication channels. And that the dark web is where the spoils from massive personal data thefts – such as the names and credit card details of people who used the adultery site Ashley Madison – end up for sale.
While we tend to remember the sensational stories, Gehl writes that for “each nefarious use of the Dark Web, we can find beneficial uses”. Newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian have dark websites so that whistle-blowers can upload information without revealing their identities. In fact, The New York Times mirrors its website on the dark web so people living under oppressive censorship can visit without being tracked. It is a safe place for dissidents worldwide.
This was one of the main reasons the dark web came into being. Gehl gives us the full history of the technical infrastructure needed. In 1999, Ian Clarke, a computer scientist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, drew attention to two flaws in the design of the 10-year-old web. By using a public addressing system and routing software that could be traced, the web was too easy to monitor and censor.
As Gehl puts it: “If our reading habits and publications are always tied to us, Clarke reasons, powerful entities such as governments or corporations could use that information to control us. Moreover, if the web relies on centralized infrastructures, such as DNS [which translates names into internet addresses], blocking access to particular sites – say, those critical of ruling parties and leaders – is trivial.”
“In theory, nobody knows who runs the dark web’s websites or who visits them”
Clarke was right. Surveillance capitalism (as we now know it) tracks everything we do on the web – and our attention is manipulated by someone for profit. In many parts of the world, governments block websites that work against their interests.
Clarke went on to develop Freenet as a decentralised, anonymous alternative to the web. Others soon followed with Tor and I2P (the Invisible Internet Project). These three networks together make up the dark web.
Rather than immoral or hidden, we should think of the “dark” in dark web as representing a communications blackout. The single factor that distinguishes it from the rest of the web is that it runs on software that obfuscates the routes web traffic takes, so users cannot be traced. In theory, nobody knows who runs its websites or who visits them.
People use dark web forums to share topics that are illicit for some, says Gehl, including “political theory, gender studies, physics, chemistry and engineering”. Others simply want to escape the Sauron’s eye of Facebook and Google.
True, most dark web guides, such as Jamie Bartlet’s excellent (Windmill Books), use “dark” in a moral sense. And the US documentary series (Showtime) has episodes on cyber-kidnapping, digital warfare, porn addiction and online cults.
But, for Gehl, a moral definition doesn’t cut it. “Some Dark Web sites are downright boring, providing cat facts, highly specialized computer networking technology discussions… or a means to play chess anonymously,” he writes. Plenty of the dark web is about as dark as the rest of the internet.
And it isn’t very hidden. Anyone who installs a free browser upgrade to Chrome or Firefox can go there. Not only can you browse it like the rest of the web, but it has search engines. Many dark web sites want to be found. Before it was shut down, AlphaBay, a market similar to Silk Road, hired a PR firm to publicise it on normal web forums.
It even gets hacked. Last month, attackers deleted more than 6500 websites from a popular server called Daniel’s Hosting, which many used to host dark web sites.
Gehl prefers a technical definition: “The Dark Web functions much like the regular web – with the key exception that one needs special routing software to access it.”
Whether the dark web is the best response to the weaknesses of the regular web is up for grabs. As with other anonymising tech such as bitcoin, being able to hide your identity has obvious benefits for those up to no good. What is plain, though, is that the dark web is not such a bad place. Gehl is one of the few commentators bringing light to the darkness.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Unpicking the mythologies around the dark web”
