Insider a Dark Web

If our popular culture is to be believed, most people assume there's a place online where the worst of the headlines you read about drugs, money laundering, murder for hire, and vast child pornography rings are born. It's called many things, though "Dark Web" is the most dramatic.

Although it's true that this Dark Web exists, it's much larger and more diverse than merely these illegal activities. What's more, the same technology that makes it possible for such marketplaces to operate in secret is also protecting political dissidents overseas and hiding everyday Internet traffic from surveillance. It may be that this digital back alley is the path toward a more secure Internet.

The World of Webs

Most people take the Internet at face value, but what most of us interact with is really just a slice of the information available called the Surface Web. To get to the Dark Web we have to go deeper, away from the world of standard Web addresses and onto the anonymity network called Tor. When you click on a link in Google, you're connected with the target information fairly directly. Someone accessing the same site while connected through Tor would have their request bounced randomly through volunteer computers called nodes before exiting Tor and arriving at the site, making their online movements much harder to track.