Written by NPR staff
The average computer user with an Internet connection has access to an amazing wealth of information. But there's also an entire world that's invisible to your standard Web browser.
These parts of
the Internet are known as the Deep Web. The tools to get to there are
just a few clicks away, and more and more people who want to browse the
Web anonymously are signing on.
Fans of the series House of Cards
might recall the Deep Web being worked into the plot of latest season.
The character Lucas, a newspaper editor who was trying find a hacker,
gets a little crash course from one of his reporters:
"Ninety-six
percent of the Internet isn't accessible through standard search
engines. Most of it's useless but it's where you go to find anything and
everything: child porn, Bitcoin laundry, narcotics, hackers for hire
..."
Wired reporter Kim Zetter tells NPR's Arun Rath that the
show kind of got it right, but that there should be a distinction
between what's called the Deep Web and what are known as Darknet sites.
"The Deep Web is anything not accessible through the commercial search engines," Zetter says.
Then,
there's the Darknet, a specific part of that hidden Web where you can
operate in total anonymity. Without being tracked, people can access
websites that sell drugs, weapons and they can even hire assassins. One
such black-market site, Silk Road, got attention last fall after a .
Zeeter
says the Darknet has another purpose that doesn't usually make the
news: It helps political dissidents who want to evade government
censors.
Accessing The Hidden Internet
Tor
is the main browser people use to access the part of the Web where
anonymity reigns. "Tor" is an acronym for The Onion Router; the onion
refers to the layers you go through to disguise your identity.
It's
free and anyone can download it. It's a simple site that looks like a
Web browser, but if you take the right steps, it's quite different. When
you connect to a site through Tor, your computer goes through a series
of other computers and bounces around anonymously until it reaches a
destination.
"No one will be able to see you're the one visiting those websites,
and the websites will not be able to see you either," says Runa Sandvik,
a privacy and security researcher. "They will only be able to see that
you're using Tor to do something."
Usually when you visit a
website, your Internet service provider can see that you are visiting
that site. Sandvik, a former contractor with the , says if you use Tor, the location that you appear to be in will change.
"You
can be in D.C. and send your traffic through Germany, Sweden and
Russia, for example," she says. "And the website that you're visiting
will see that someone in Russia is visiting, not you in D.C."
Like
the Internet itself, Tor was created by the government. Developed at
the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, its initial purpose was to protect
the communications of the U.S. military, Sandvik says.
"But the
challenge here is that if you have this anonymity system and [all]
traffic going into the system is the U.S. Navy and everything popping
out is the U.S. Navy, then you're not that anonymous," she says. "So by
opening up this system to everyone, different groups of people can hide
in a big crowd of anonymous Tor users."
Sandvik says because of
how Tor was developed, emphasizing privacy by design, there is no way
to figure out who's using Tor or if those users are using it for illicit
activities.
It's Not All Dark
Despite the reputation Silk Road brought to the Deep Web, Sandvik says there's a lot more going on besides criminal activity.
"There's
human rights activists, journalists, military, law enforcement [and]
normal people," she says. "It just really depends on what you want to
do."
Tor is a valuable tool for Chinese dissidents who can't
access sites like Twitter. And it became a valuable tool during the Arab
Spring.
"We saw that the numbers were skyrocketing," Sandvik
says. "For example in Iran, Tor usage went from 7,000 users in 2010 to
40,000 users two years later."
In Syria, the number of Tor users grew from 600 to 15,000 in just two years, she says.
Closer
to home, Tor's executive director is working with victims of domestic
abuse, who need to communicate without being tracked by their abusers.
Tor
use jumped again in the last year, since the revelation of the National
Security Agency's surveillance program. Sandvik estimates there are
close to a million daily users worldwide.
With Americans
increasingly concerned about being monitored online by corporations, or
their government, that number is certain to grow.
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