The Dark Web

You can picture the internet we use every day as an iceberg floating in a huge ocean. The tip of the iceberg, which sticks out of the water where anyone can easily see it, is the surface web. Ordinary websites and news articles that pop up right away when you type something into Google belong here.

But under the sea hides a far bigger chunk of ice than the part above water. Places that don't show up in search, but that you enter with a password, like your email inbox, your bank account history, and private cloud storage, are together called the deep web. Most of all the data on the internet actually belongs to the deep web.

The dark web is a special zone hidden at the very bottom of that huge deep web. You can't just click a link to get in. You have to use special software that thoroughly hides your location and your traces.

On the regular internet, it's like sending a letter with the sender's address (the IP address) and the recipient's address written right on the envelope. If your internet provider or a server administrator wants to, they can easily trace when, where, and which sites you visited.

The dark web, by contrast, uses a path encrypted in many layers, like the skin of an onion. Your data passes through several relay computers scattered around the world. Each computer knows only the address of the computer right before it and right after it, and can't know where the data first started or where it's finally going.

It's like putting an envelope inside an envelope, with each courier tearing open only their own outer envelope and handing the rest to the next courier. That's how very strong anonymity is created: the server operator doesn't know who the visitor is, and the visitor can't know where the server really is. Still, there are several cases where a user's mistake or a security hole exposed someone's identity to law enforcement, and the operator was arrested.

Because of the name "dark web," it's easy to assume it was built for crime from the start. But this technology was originally developed in the 1990s at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect intelligence agencies' communications. Later it became widely used in authoritarian countries for press freedom and personal safety. For whistleblowers and journalists who dodge surveillance to tell the truth, it's like a lifeline.

But people abused the fact that it's nearly impossible to trace, and dark markets appeared where all kinds of illegal activity happens, such as drug dealing, trading illegal personal data, and selling malicious software. In effect, anonymity turned into a hideout for criminals.

Also, just getting on the dark web is often not illegal in itself. But if you go in out of curiosity with no protection, your computer can easily get infected with a virus, or you can get scammed. With no safety net, it's a dangerous space full of traps. Keep that in mind.