The Dark Net Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: Liberty or Death

  Chapter 1: Unmasking the Trolls

  Chapter 2: The Lone Wolf

  Chapter 3: Into Galt’s Gulch

  Chapter 4: Three Clicks

  Chapter 5: On the Road

  Chapter 6: Lights, Web-camera, Action

  Chapter 7: The Werther Effect

  Conclusion: Zoltan vs Zerzan

  Endnotes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Beyond the familiar online world that most of us inhabit – a world of Google, Hotmail, Facebook and Amazon – lies a vast and often hidden network of sites, communities and cultures where freedom is pushed to its limits, and where people can be anyone, or do anything, they want. A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think.

  The dark net is an underworld that stretches from popular social media sites to the most secretive corners of the encrypted web. It is a world that frequently appears in newspaper headlines, but one that is little understood, and rarely explored. The Dark Net is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous subcultures: trolls and pornographers, drug dealers and hackers, political extremists and computer scientists, Bitcoin programmers and self-harmers, libertarians and vigilantes.

  Based on extensive first-hand experience, exclusive interviews and shocking documentary evidence, The Dark Net offers a startling glimpse of human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity, and shines a light on an enigmatic and ever-changing world.

  About the Author

  Jamie Bartlett is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, where he specialises in online social movements and the impact of technology on society. He lives in London.

  The Dark Net

  Inside the Digital Underworld

  Jamie Bartlett

  For Huey, Max, Sonny and Thomas, who were born while I was writing this book. When they are old enough, I hope they will read it and wonder what on earth all the fuss was about, and laugh at their uncle’s hopeless predictions.

  Author’s Note

  The Dark Net is an examination of what are, in many cases, extremely sensitive and contentious subjects. My primary aim was to shine a light on a world that is frequently discussed, but rarely explored – often for good reason. Throughout I have endeavoured to set my own views aside and write as objective and as lucid an account of what I experienced as possible. Readers may question the wisdom of writing about this subject at all, and express concern at the information The Dark Net reveals. Although my intention was never to provide a guide to illegal or immoral activity online, this book does contain material that some readers will find shocking and offensive.

  As a researcher I felt a duty to respect the privacy of the people I encountered. Where necessary, I have altered names, online pseudonyms and identifying details, and, in one chapter, created a composite character based on several individuals. For the reader’s ease, I have also corrected many (but not all) spelling mistakes in quoted material.

  I have tried to balance the rights of individuals with the social benefit that I believe comes from describing them and the worlds they inhabit. It is not a foolproof method; rather a series of judgements. Any errors, omissions and mistakes are mine alone, and I hope those included in this book will accept my apologies in advance for any distress or discomfort caused.

  Online life moves quickly. Doubtless by the time you read The Dark Net, certain parts of the story will have changed, websites will have closed down, sub-cultures will have evolved, new laws will have been enacted. But its core theme – what humans do under the conditions of real or perceived anonymity – will certainly have not.

  Jamie Bartlett

  July 2014

  Introduction

  Liberty or Death

  I HAVE HEARD rumours about this website, but I still cannot quite believe that it exists. I am looking at what I think is a hit list. There are photographs of people I recognise – prominent politicians, mostly – and, next to each, an amount of money. The site’s creator, who uses the pseudonym Kuwabatake Sanjuro, thinks that if you could pay to have someone murdered with no chance – I mean absolutely zero chance – of being caught, you would. That’s one of the reasons why he has created the Assassination Market. There are four simple instructions listed on its front page:

  >Add a name to the list

  >Add money to the pot in the person’s name

  >Predict when that person will die

  >Correct predictions get the pot

  The Assassination Market can’t be found with a Google search. It sits on a hidden, encrypted part of the internet that, until recently, could only be accessed with a browser called The Onion Router, or Tor. Tor began life as a US Naval Research Laboratory project, but today exists as a not-for-profit organisation, partly funded by the US government and various civil liberties groups, allowing millions of people around the world to browse the internet anonymously and securely.fn1 To put it simply, Tor works by repeatedly encrypting computer activity and routing it via several network nodes, or ‘onion routers’, in so doing concealing the origin, destination and content of the activity. Users of Tor are untraceable, as are the websites, forums and blogs that exist as Tor Hidden Services, which use the same traffic encryption system to cloak their location.

  The Assassination Market may be hosted on an unfamiliar part of the net, but it’s easy enough to find, if you know how to look. All that’s required is a simple (and free) software package. Then sign up, follow the instructions, and wait. It is impossible to know the number of people who are doing exactly that, but at the time of writing, if I correctly predict the date of the death of Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, I’d receive approximately $56,000.

  It may seem like a fairly pointless bet. It’s very difficult to guess when someone is going to die. That’s why the Assassination Market has a fifth instruction:

  >Making your prediction come true is entirely optional

  The Dark Net

  The Assassination Market is a radical example of what people can do online. Beyond the more familiar world of Google, Hotmail and Amazon lies another side to the internet: the dark net.

  For some, the dark net is the encrypted world of Tor Hidden Services, where users cannot be traced, and cannot be identified. For others, it is those sites not indexed by conventional search engines: an unknowable realm of password protected pages, unlinked websites and hidden content accessible only to those in the know. It has also become a catch-all term for the myriad shocking, disturbing and controversial corners of the net – the realm of imagined criminals and predators of all shapes and sizes.

  The dark net is all of these things, to some extent – but for me, it is an idea more than a particular place: an underworld set apart yet connected to the internet we inhabit, a world of complete freedom and anonymity, and where users say and do what they like, uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society’s norms. It is a world that is as shocking and disturbing as it is innovative and creative, a world that is also much closer than you think.

  The dark net is rarely out of the news – with stories of young people sharing homemade pornography, of cyberbullies and trolls tormenting strangers, of political extremists peddling propaganda, of illegal goods, drugs and confidential documents only a click or two away appearing in headlines almost daily – but it is still a world that is, for the most part, unexplored
and little understood. In reality, few people have ventured into the darker recesses of the net to study these sites in any detail.

  I started researching radical social and political movements in 2007, when I spent two and a half years following Islamist extremists around Europe and North America, trying to piece together a fragmented and largely disjointed real-world network of young men who sympathised with al-Qaeda ideology. By the time I’d finished my work in 2010, the world seemed to be different. Every new social or political phenomenon I encountered – from conspiracy theorists to far-right activists to drugs cultures – was increasingly located and active online. I would frequently interview the same person twice – once online and then again in real life – and feel as if I was speaking to two different people. I was finding parallel worlds with different rules, different patterns of behaviour, different protagonists. Every time I thought I’d reached the bottom of one online culture, I discovered other connected, secretive realms still unexplored. Some required a level of technical know-how to access, some were extremely easy to find. Although an increasingly important part of many people’s lives and identities, these online spaces are mostly invisible: out of reach and out of view. So I went in search of them.

  My journey took me to new places online and offline. I became the moderator of an infamous trolling group and spent weeks in forums dedicated to cutting, starving or killing yourself. I explored the labyrinthine world of Tor Hidden Services in search of drugs, and to study child pornography networks. I witnessed online wars between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists on popular social media sites, and signed up to the latest porn channels to examine current trends in home-made erotica. I visited a Barcelona squat with anarchist Bitcoin programmers, run-down working men’s clubs to speak to extreme nationalists, and a messy bedroom to observe three girls make a small fortune performing sexually explicit acts on camera to thousands of viewers. By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature? And if so, how?

  The Dark Net is not an effort to weigh up the pros and cons of the internet. The same anonymity that allows the Assassination Market to operate also keeps whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners and activists alive. For every destructive sub-culture I examined there are just as many that are positive, helpful and constructive.

  This book cannot even be considered a comprehensive account of the multitude of darker sub-cultures that permeate online life. From encrypted Tor Hidden Services to popular social media sites, it’s difficult to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. This is instead one person’s experience of spending an extended period of time in a few of the internet’s least explored backwaters, and an attempt to try to understand and explain what takes place there, and why. In the dark net, I came to learn, things are often not what they first appear.

  Connected

  The net as we know it started life in the late 1960s, as a small scientific project funded and run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a development arm of the US military. The Pentagon hoped to create an ‘Arpanet’ of linked computers to help top American academics share data sets and valuable computer space. In 1969 the first networked connection was made between two computers in California. It was a network that slowly grew.

  In July 1973 Peter Kirstein, a young professor of computer science at University College London, connected the UK to the Arpanet via the Atlantic seabed phone cables, a job that made Kirstein the first person in the UK online. ‘I had absolutely no idea what it would become!’ Kirstein tells me. ‘None of us did. We were scientists and academics focused on trying to build and maintain a system which allowed data to be shared quickly and easily.’ The Arpanet, and its successor, the internet, was built on principles that would allow these academics to work effectively together: a network that was open, decentralised, accessible and censorship-free. These ideas would come to define what the internet stood for: an unlimited world of people, information and ideas.

  The invention of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in 1978, and Usenet in 1979–80, introduced a new generation to life online. Unlike the cloistered Arpanet, Usenet and BBS, the forerunners of the chat room and forum, were available to anyone with a modem and a home computer. Although small, slow and primitive by today’s standards, they were attracting thousands of people intrigued by a new virtual world. By the mid-nineties and the emergence of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, the internet was fully transformed: from a niche underground haunt frequented by computer hobbyists and academics, to a popular hangout accessed by millions of excited neophytes.fn2

  According to John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, cyberspace at this time was more than just a network of computers. Users saw it as ‘a new kind of place’, with its own culture, its own identity, and its own rules. The arrival of millions of ‘ordinary’ people online stimulated fears and hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’ Barlow believed that the lack of censorship and the anonymity that the net seemed to offer would foster a freer, more open society, because people could cast off the tyranny of their fixed real-world identities and create themselves anew. (The New Yorker put it more succinctly: ‘On the Internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.’) Leading psychologists of the day, such as Sherry Turkle in her influential 1995 study of internet identity, Life on the Screen, offered a cautious welcome to the way that online life could allow people to work through the different elements of their identity.

  But others worried what might happen if no one knows you’re a dog. Parents panicked about children infected with ‘modem fever’. Soon after Turkle’s study, another psychologist, John Suler, was studying the behaviour of participants in early chat rooms. He found that participants tended to be more aggressive and angry online than offline. He suggested this was because, when protected by a screen, people feel that real-world social restrictions, responsibilities and norms don’t apply. Whether actual or perceived, anonymity, thought Suler, would allow you to explore your identity, but it might also allow you to act without fear of being held accountable (in 2001 he would call this ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’). It’s true that from the outset, many BBS and Usenet subscribers were treating cyberspace as a realm for all sorts of bizarre, creative, offensive and illegal behaviour. In Usenet’s ‘Alternative’ hierarchy, anyone could set up a discussion group about anything they wanted. The first group was alt.gourmand, a forum for recipes. This was swiftly followed by alt.sex, alt.drugs and alt.rock-n-roll. ‘Alt.*’, as it came to be known, immediately became the most popular part of Usenet by far. Alongside purposeful and serious groups for literature, computing or science, Usenet and BBS contained many more dedicated to cyber-bullying, hacking and pornography.

  Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

  It was in this heady atmosphere that the radical libertarian Jim Bell first took the promise of online anonymity to a terrifying conclusion. In late 1992, a group of radical libertarians from California called the ‘cypherpunks’ set up an email list to propose and discuss how cyberspace could be used to guarantee personal liberty, privacy and anonymity. Bell, a contributor to the list, believed that if citizens could use the internet to send secret encrypted messages and trade using untraceable currencies, it would be possible to create a functioning market for almost anything. In 1995 he set out his ideas in an essay called ‘Ass
assination Politics’, which he posted to the email list. It made even the staunchly libertarian cypherpunks wince.

  Bell proposed that an organisation be set up that would ask citizens to make anonymous digital cash donations to the prize pool of a public figure. The organisation would award the prize to whoever correctly predicted that person’s death. This, argued Bell, wasn’t illegal, it was just a type of gambling. But here’s the ruse: if enough people were sufficiently angry with a particular individual – each anonymously contributing just a few dollars – the prize pool would become so large that someone would be incentivised to make a prediction and then fulfil it themselves in order to take the pot. This is where encrypted messages and untraceable payment systems come in. A crowd-sourced – and untraceable – murder would unfold as follows. First, the would-be assassin sends his prediction in an encrypted message that can be opened only by a digital code known to the person who sent it. He then makes the kill and sends the organisation that code, which would unlock his (correct) prediction. Once verified by the organisation, presumably by watching the news, the prize money – in the form of a digital currency donated to the pot – would be publicly posted online as an encrypted file. Again, that file can be unlocked only by a ‘key’ generated by whoever made the prediction. Without anyone knowing the identity of anyone else, the organisation would be able to verify the prediction and award the prize to the person who made it.

  The best bit, thought Bell, was that internet-enabled anonymity safeguarded all parties, except perhaps the killer (and his or her victim). Even if the police discovered who’d been contributing to the cash prizes of people on the list, the donors could truthfully respond that they had never directly asked for anyone to be killed. The organisation that ran the market couldn’t help either, because they wouldn’t know who had donated, who had made predictions or who had unlocked the cash file. But Bell’s idea was about more than getting away with murder. He believed that this system would exert a populist pressure on elected representatives to be good. The worse the offender – the more he or she outraged his or her citizens – the more likely they were to accumulate a large pool, and incentivise potential assassins. (Bell believed Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would all have been killed had such a market existed at the time.) Ideally, no one would need to be killed. Bell hoped the very existence of this market would mean no one would dare throw their hat into the ring at all. ‘Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security,’ he wrote, ‘. . . combined with the ease and security with which these contributions could be collected, would make being an abusive government employee an extremely risky proposition. Chances are good that nobody above the level of county commissioner would even risk staying in office.’