Look Who's Watching by Fen Osler Hampson

Author:Fen Osler Hampson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP

Source: Adapted and reprinted with permission from Owen and Savage, The Tor Dark Net.

Owen and Savage volunteered 40 relays to be a part of the Tor network. Over a period of six months, they used web-crawling bots to categorize the content of the websites that were hosted on the Tor hidden services — that is, the various .onion websites. As Figure 6.6 shows, they found a wide assortment of websites. There were sites dedicated to chat rooms. There were sites for whistle-blowing and sites for buying and selling illegal goods and services. There were also pornography sites. And, in the deepest recesses, there were sites dedicated to the worst of the worst, child abuse.

Once they had characterized the sites on the .onion suffix, Owen and Savage set about to actually track the flow of traffic to the sites. Because of the system’s anonymity, they were not able to say anything about who was visiting the various webpages. All they could say was that someone (or something, in the case of a web-crawling bot) was visiting a website at a particular time via the Tor network. So from there they started counting. What they found was extremely disturbing.

In their initial categorization of the Dark Web sites, they found that the child abuse sites made up a very small proportion of all available sites on the .onion suffix, roughly two percent. But disturbingly, Owen and Savage found that 82 percent of all the site visits flowing to all the websites that they had catalogued on the Dark Web were going to that small percentage of sites dedicated to the production, dissemination and viewing of child abuse imagery.

It is a horrifying finding, but one that largely fits with what we see on the news. A few times every year, the media covers a story about how law enforcement officials, often working diligently across national borders and with private companies, have broken up a child abuse ring that was virtually housed upon the Dark Web. In 2011, for example, Europol conducted Operation Rescue, together with partners from 13 nations. Police uncovered 670 suspects in a widespread child abuse ring, leading to the eventual arrest of 184 individuals.33 Six-hundred and fifty people were arrested in 2014 by the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency on charges related to child abuse imagery.34 Another 50 were arrested in Northern Ireland in 2015 on similar charges.35

Sometimes, the Dark Web is used for more benign, but still troubling and illegal, purposes. In July 2015, Ashley Madison — a site that aimed to connect men and women who wanted to commit adultery — was hacked. As we described in the first chapter, around 32 million records were stolen by hackers calling themselves the Impact Team. After another month or so of waiting, the hackers behind the breach listed the names and email addresses of the site’s subscribers on the Dark Net. The hack itself was illegal, so spilling the data had to be done carefully so as to avoid the watching eyes of police.

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