The Dark Web (or 'Darknet'​) - It's a small dot, just about to expand

This Press Release is in prompted by an article raising interesting news from wired.com, which the Author Mr. Smith expected was well and truly bound to happen. A link is attached at the bottom of the page to the article.

After reading the article today, Mr. Smith knew it was coming. He said, "As one of the very few court Expert Witness individuals that can be called upon independently to give expert evidence in Dark Web cases, I must state that the following article is somewhat not surprising to me. In complete anonymity, through sheer misunderstanding of a court, its prosecutors', and the lack of any evidence 'beyond reasonable doubt', I have seen too many people remanded for months and months waiting for the Police to 'find' evidence and even understand it."

"My personal view is, that in the contrary, until somebody is found guilty with evidence, they should have the right to freedom of movement. As a programmer of a variant iOS TOR Browser myself, I know that my users expect anonymity because they are sick of large companies spying on them. How many companies have 'lost' sensitive information recently? People have to do something to protect their information. I have nothing to hide, and so does 99% of the population, but when you have seen what I have seen, and met the eye of injustice - you must insist on your right to privacy."

"I have only recently seen what authorities can do without you even being aware, in relation to monitoring, bugging, and tracing. One misconception is that many people mistakenly confuse the Dark Web with the Deep Web. Let me explain the difference very clearly, because even experts get this wrong. The Deep Web is everything we cannot search for, naturally, our emails, our items we would expect to be under lock and key. We access it every day."

Therefore, it is obvious, the internet as we know of is made up of three segments. The Surface Web, Deep Web and Dark Web. The Surface Web is everything else intended to be public. The Dark Web is a tiny dot of the Deep Web. People may not know that the Dark Web is not intended to be a 'bad dangerous place', and should not be if you don't seek the wrong sites. It was never intended to be a black market or to be used in that way.

Mr. Smith stated, "Some of you may have heard of TOR, or 'The Onion Router'. This is software which does the connections. It is one of the limited ways to access the Dark Web mostly (.onion) websites. As mentioned there are variants out there, but run the same open source code that have been upgraded. Essentially TOR is a service that runs on top of the internet (very securely playing hop, skip, and jump)".

"Many do not know, but it was actually developed by the United States Navy for the purposes of creating intelligent and untraceable secure communications. It was used to gather intelligence from people anonymously who needed to get a message out without fear in other countries, say for example, who need help but have the internet monitored as such they would be killed if they leaked out information. The United States military used this as a way to communicate through the public internet with intelligence agents, as well as Americans that were stationed abroad without being detected as it has a highly secure handshaking cryptic mechanism that albeit slow, is practically untraceable. Eventually the United States Navy released "The Onion Router" code to the public in 2004, and in 2006 a group of developers formed the "The Onion Router" as an open source project and it has since been ported to different platforms, like Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac etc. It is known to most of us via the media for its' use for illegal activity, but this only makes up a tiny percentage of the sites it serves."

"What the below article means is that essentially the technology that we use to browse the Dark Web (the secure onion sites, that's if you even use the browser for that) is going to be easier opened up to the public in reverse. It is going to now be easier for common people to host content (like web servers) that are secret, and not discoverable, via normal DNS lookups and allow people to essentially become more involved in the 'hidden internet'. It does not necessarily mean illegal or dangerous activity. I caution people though, that since the Government and judiciary do not appear to be fully understand the Dark Web (apparent in their sudden ban on the Pirate Bay which clearly does not fix the problem), this will mostly be taken as a negative. From a cybercrime perspective, I see no change", he said.

"Cybercriminals will still be criminals. They should be caught and charged, this is not going to change anything for them. As an ethical hacker, I will be the first to say that there is no benefit to the sudden blockage of 'The Pirate Bay' and there will be no benefit to any kind of similar restrictions to the Internet in general. In fact, I fear Cybergeddon is here, and that the human element lack of education, misunderstanding of what is hacking compared to negligence, and rushed decisions or attempts to censor the internet will actually cause chaos and raise cybercrime beyond control."

The moral of this story and others Mr. Smith has written about is that there is always a smart way to catch somebody involved in cybercrime, even in the most difficult cryptographic situations, and it is not always about the technology.

The article on wired.com is available here: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/get-even-easier-hide-dark-web/