complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

[Eugen Leitl]

(Ghosties 'n goblins, oh my)

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

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

o Andy Beckett

o The Guardian, Thursday 26 November 2009

The Principality of Sealand

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 b
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 b& 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?" b& "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 b& [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 b 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" b 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 b& The value of deep web content
is immeasurable b& internet searches are searching only 0.03% b& 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 b 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 b "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 b 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 b the WELL, one of the
first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible
the Whole Earth Catalog b 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 loos 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 b 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 b the content, links, and
transactions between people b& 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
floures 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.