Welcome to the "Dark Side"............

................................ [well.... it is Hallowe'en!]
Following Peter's comments on my Cyber Balkanisation blog I thought,
"Hey it's Halloween I'll explore the Dark Side" and I thought the findings were worth sharing ’cos it’s all really rather scary stuff.

As a self confessed Star Wars fan I was a bit excited at the thought of going over to the "Dark Side" of the net - I thought it must be where you could socially interact with Darth Vader, my all time favourite bad guy, and that lead me to explore and be curious.

The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – ooh those metaphors alone make it suddenly intriguing 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 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. No Darth Vader to network with then? Bit disappointing but decided to learn more.

 Most of it is 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.

Fourteen years ago, an 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".

This says it all doesn’t it ?! Can’t get scarier than that!

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 Paedophile [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."

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography. Freenet means controversial information does not need to be stored in physical data havens they can be disguised in a very normal way.

However even the "open" internet  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 as they search for online privacy.

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 but I’m not so sure you’d want to go over to the dark side just to try and get annominity and if we’re trying to network as professionals there wouldn’t be much point. Certainly as an entertainer I can’t see me getting seen by the right people who can promote my career.

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."

Interestingly, 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.

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. A place you definitely don’t want to be seen and how bad if some of the allegations are not true. That suggests there is real scope for abuse by someone who may want to damage a person’s reputation. Real scary stuff!!

I don’t think I want to go over to the dark side after all and for the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I think I may stick to Google ........... even on Hallowe’en.  

Anyway.................. Darth Vader has a Twitter account I can talk to him there!!!