The dark side of the internet

[R.A. Hettinga]

Lions and Tigers and Freenet, oh, my...

Oh. And Rough's Tower, too!

;-)

Cheers,
RAH
------

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet/
print
 >


  The Guardian

The dark side of the internet
In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as
they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

Andy Beckett
The Guardian, Thursday 26 November 2009

Freenet means controversial information does not need to be stored in
physical data havens such as this one, Sealand. Photograph: Kim
Gilmour/Alamy
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions
arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and
computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a
Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System",
or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for
people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's
software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat
online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost
complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be
about  freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in
the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be
monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more
old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering
software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit
lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky 
they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more
appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how
many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded
from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is
blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend
to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved
version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also,
in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at
all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires
minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few
terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do
you need?"  "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or
"MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested,
imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online
world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official
Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran
News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to
explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot
A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate
copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more",
"Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal
rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish,
Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from
America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are
disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here
because of kiddie porn  [but] I might post some images of naked
women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the
teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger
and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference:
"If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness  its
global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing
search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google
they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder
of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine
companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small
fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the
surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a
really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as
big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web"  the
metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and
mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet",
"invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty
address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a
"darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from
non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that
implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of
unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of
search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet
addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped
working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the
confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet
out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and
properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it
created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future
of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of
the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he
undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my
staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular
web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . .
completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and
discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly
cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than
the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the
fastest growing category of new information on the internet  The
value of deep web content is immeasurable  internet searches are
searching only 0.03%  of the [total web] pages available."

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly
transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by
Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A
hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything  that's
not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University
of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep.
"It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just
too much data."

But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled
[searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can
actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone
[searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is
commercial  "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say,
a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to
copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons.
"There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business
Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor
Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping
around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending
out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online
identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The
internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has
been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex
geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky
address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an
entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online
companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet
service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in
the earliest days of the internet  all these have left the online
landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for
illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are
returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I
don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes
a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for
secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint
creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture
 the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities,
was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog  and both
groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments
as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in
parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for
online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely
alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military
endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run
project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online
communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's
users, according to its website, include US secret service "field
agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to
surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale
tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example
"environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under
surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism".
Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its
fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as
labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some
observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the
internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of
"so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his
influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at
first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised
information could be concealed, were established in discreet
jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American
internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data
haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British
territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had
housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo
announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism
or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand
as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden
depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate
Bay  the downloading of music and films for free being another
booming darknet enterprise  announced its intention to buy Sealand.
The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported
that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical
data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet
perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the
"open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly
contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for
concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people
walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking
websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be
bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online
persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime
Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet
secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is
on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to
find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to
an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the
18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click
something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn
and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's
nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are
not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways
known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long
before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet,
however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive
governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended
absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke.
"But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could
establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet  we
could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to
that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting
served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get
pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of
Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as
Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The
anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get
round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded
somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that
information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by
the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be
co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more
commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become
larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is
increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There
has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges
regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths
into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently
denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand
Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep
web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through
obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet
user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try
hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make
the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing
field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic
panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable 
suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited
with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which
computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web  the
content, links, and transactions between people  A 'Semantic Web',
which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does,
the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives
will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic
web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a
reality.

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One
obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in
unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is
have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of
something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998,
the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the
internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't
talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase
for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly
thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online
environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places
to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's
original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere
for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations
against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs,
extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses.
In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material
contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in
court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof
requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm
wandering around online, I may stick to Google.