When the United States government took down Silk Road in May 2013 and arrested the founder, it asserted that: “the defendant, deliberately set out to establish an onlxine marketplace outside the reach of law enforcement or governmental regulation. Ulbricht has sought to achieve this end by anonymizing activity on Silk Road in two ways. First, Ulbricht has operated Silk Road on what is known as “The Onion Router” or “Tor” network, a special network on the Internet designed to make it practically impossible to physically locate the computers hosting or accessing websites on the network. Second, Ulbricht has required all transactions on Silk Road to be paid with “Bitcoins,” an electronic currency designed to be as anonymous as cash”.
Four years later, the United States government took down another Dark Web site – AlphaBay, which it charged: “was designed to facilitate the illicit commerce hosted on the site by providing anonymity to its users in two primary ways. First, the AlphaBay hidden website operated on the dark web accessible only through The Onion Router (“ToR”) network, a special network of computers on the Internet designed to conceal the true IP addresses of the computers on the network. Second, AlphaBay required its users to transact in cryptocurrencies, also referred to as digital currencies, such as Bitoin, Monero and Ethereum”.
With these high profile take-downs of “Dark Markets”, and the drama that followed – Silk Road’s founder losing his life sentence appeal in May 2017, and the suicide of AlphaBay’s alleged founder in a Thailand prison in July 2017, Dark Web gained an unshakable reputation as a murky and mysterious place in the internet where criminals gather to conduct illicit activities.
Anonymity – a privacy principle that protects individuals but also the criminals, Tor – the anonymizing technology, and digital means of payment (or cryptocurrencies) – BitCoin, Monero, Ethereum, also got caught up in this maelstrom of allegations and corruptions, illegal goods and services, organized crime and cyber underground.
And swept alongside mentions of “Dark Web” were also references to the digital world of “Deep Web”…Click here to read full article.
