The Dark Web: Insane trolls, Scammers and Law Enforcement

An insane troll, an advance fee scammer, and a law enforcement agent: The Dark Web in all its gory glory.

This morning, I was watching an episode of Bones - season 11, episode 4, "The Carpals in the Coy-Wolves".

There are actual forensic anthropologists out there that have laughed theirs arses off on it ,so I will not investigate on the science in the episode.

Not that I could if my life depended on it - I am just a drawing animal, not a scientist.

What got my attention was this bit of dialogue;

00:16:02,294 --> 00:16:04,661
MONTENEGRO: So I've spent the last few hours
... surfing all the top sites on the Dark Web.
... You would not believe what people sell on here.
... Drugs, child pornography, human organs.
... Basically, it's a black market Craigslist.

       (I copy-pasted it from the subtitles... call me "lazy", or "accurate")

OK, now, raise hir[sic] hand whomever felt a wave of bitter nostalgia reading it.

Yes, more or less, this is the same way the Internet was described back in the '90s, before it became the preferred method, for grandparents, to keep contact with grandsons living in distant cities (we wish that the 'web was, really, for porn and assorted misdemeanour).

Is it real? Is the "Dark Web" such a sinful freakish place?  As they say in my original country, ni (not/yes).

Yes, because it is troll land without any hope of an IP ban to rein in the worst examples of the category.

No, because the underlining technology has proved pretty permeable to the efforts of the U.S. Law Enforcement Agencies.  

As everybody with a modicum of technical expertise, I tried to download TOR Browser and have a look at the so-called "Deep Web" - the portion of it that runs over the "Onion Routing" anonymizing protocol and its "hidden services" features, at least.

It was (is? I doubt it changed) a lot like the 'net, before search engines allowed people to find things.

If something is on an hidden service (a web server whose position is hidden inside the onion protocol layers), the only way to know it exists at all is that its owner has decided to publicise it.

If he did, it may be in a "onion directory" - and if it is, and it is mildly illegal, some law enforcement agency is probably looking for ways to shut down, take over - or both - the site.  Ooops!

By the way, 90% of the "normal" web isn't indexed or indexable either... password only access sites, extra-nets, shared DB connections, cloud accounts that requires credentials to access etc. most of the resources available on-line are "by invitation" only... sometimes called the "obscure" web, this is  almost as completely invisible today as it was ten years ago.

It was also as big (OK, fiendishly small) as it was the World Wide Web a couple of years or so after Tim Berners-Lee wrote Mosaic (the first Web Browser) ,and the connections through an Onion are as fast and as reliable as they were when I first had my experience with a 33kbit/s US-Robotics dial-up modem.

The "Onion" underlying technology was initially developed by the U.S. Navy and then brought on by a holy alliance between the U.S. State Department and associations of Chinese expatriates, in order to allow to dissidents (of other governments, ça va sans dire) to have a safe way to communicate to the rest of the world the extent of their dissent.

So, given the amplitude of the U.S. Government agencies involvement in the development of the Onion Routing protocol, it didn't exactly came as a surprise when the FBI busted Freedom Hosting and used the access to snoop up the IP and mac addresses of a bunch of users that connected to "bad sites".
 
Even before this federal exploit showed that weaknesses in a user machine can be used to identify someone using Onion, burning quite a bit of the credibility of the anonimity provided by the protocol, I had grown pretty deluded by the "Deep Web".

For one Silk Road, that had a certain fame of actually selling what it sold (it has been taken down and the owner is in jail for life, and then the same happened again to its reincarnation  - one starts to see a certain dynamics in this "lawless" web, don't you?), there were hundreds of others that appeared to be just a bunch of trolls having fun (really, what self-respecting killer for hire would waste his time chatting???), scammers looking to place an advance fee payment request for something that they will never - and never had  any intention to - deliver and, probably, another bunch of law enforcement agencies trying to entrap someone.

About the only thing that was worth the effort of launching the browser, was reading the materials in the Wikileaks hidden service without worrying [too much] about being traced... 

(fun note: one of the documents I read there, pointed out the fact that professional criminals use mostly point-to-point remote desktop on virtual private networks, to sell some of the stuff mentioned by Angela in the episode... private internet by invitation only, indeed).

But even that wasn't enough to keep my interest up... in the end, I stopped searching in it for proof of something that evidently doesn't exist under the Sun ("negative" freedom, for an every day schmuck like me)  and left the little bandwidth in the Onion Routes to people that really needs it (Iranian dissidents, Chinese whistle-blowers, CIA spies in a hurry, criminals in a desperate and pathological need to get caught etc.).


Mind you, sometimes going through the Onion can be useful... for example, when FetLife's content delivery network stopped transmitting images and javascript files where I live (Spain, some kind of snafu in their database), I had to "Onion" out of the affected zone for half a week, to see the drawings about whom I received comments on that site.

But as the "Deep Web" goes, for a guy like me - and I think 99% of the people - it is just a waste of time and resources and, worse, just another "moral scare" for the use of lazy TV writers(*).



When I was younger, it was easier to believe to this kind of crap but, 
growing up, one keep seeing the same shit flowing down the river time and again...

* Jon Cowan, author of this bone episode and another couple of similar "pearls", is on my personal black list, now.May he never write another episode of any series, ever again.