Haven for illegal online activity

What ever the darkest corner of diabolical human mind can conceive, darknet can deliver with anonymity and impunity. Anything goes in darknet:

-From urban legend of ‘Red rooms’ facilitating live streaming of brutal murders or torture

-Dirty perversions like necrophilia, cannibalism or paedophilia

-Darknet marketplaces like ‘Silk Road’ , its avatars and ‘Alpha Bay’ ,brazenly selling child pornography, contraband drugs, rocket launchers, grenades or even human organs

-Children and models being abducted from Milan to be auctioned on darknet forum ‘black death group’ ,as a part of larger darknet human trafficking network

-Darknet websites like ‘Besa Mafia’ affiliated to Albanian mafia and ‘Azerbaijan Eagles’ offering hitmen on hire services for contract killings for upwards of USD 5000

-Darknet websites like ‘Lolita City’ or ‘Playpen’ or ‘Pornhub’(now defunct) offering for sale, over 100 GB of videos catering to lascivious child pornography

-Chat fora of conspiracy theories claiming moon landing was fake or 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by USA itself, spawning alarm and distrust

-Counterfeit currency

-Fake passports

-Fake driving licence

-Details of millions of credit cards, all for sale in enigmatic market places of darknet shrouded in secrecy. Hence, in the mysterious world of darknet ,questions like legal or illegal, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, fade into oblivion.

Darknet kicked off a little over 20 years ago and its progenitor was ‘The Onion Router’ (abbreviated as TOR) Project funded by US Naval Research Laboratory, in mid-1990s, to design a network that facilitates safer, encrypted communication with intelligence sources around the world. The idea was to protect sensitive information from snooping by oppressive authorities. Hence, the bonafide objective was to protect anonymous sources and to promote free speech in tyrannical regimes. In order to camouflage confidential government information, public access to the network was permitted, albeit only through Tor browser, to merge and blend the sensitive data with distributed ecosystem.

The world wide web essentially may be fragmented into surface web, deep web and dark web. The best analogy to understand the three components is the oft-quoted one of Iceberg or entirety of oceans. While the top of the ocean, which is visible and accessible represents surface web, deeper part of the ocean hidden by the top surface alludes to the deep web and the bottom most part embodies the mysterious dark web accessible only through specialised tools. Surface web is accessible through popular search engines like Google, Bing et cetera. We access surface web in our daily online activities like reading news, e-commerce on Amazon, surfing social media and websites et cetera. While surface-web appears gargantuan with over 1000 pictures posted on Instagram, 8000 tweets on Twitter, 70,000 google searches and one lakh YouTube videos viewed every second, veritably it is the tiniest sliver of the entire internet accounting for just over 3% of world wide web. The massive part of the world wide web is the deep web and is about 5000 times larger. While surface web comprises of 20 TB of data, deep web has within its folds 7500 TB of data.

The pages in deep web consist of information behind the iron-curtain of passwords or encryption and are not searchable by common search engines. It comprises of enormous data bases like cloud data, online banking procedures, medical records, all of which are password protected. Technically, all of us access deep web while accessing our email accounts, which are password protected and generally encrypted as well. Ensconced in the dark alleys of deep web is the enigmatic dark web not searchable through regular internet search engines and accessed through specialised encrypted and spliced browsers like TOR ( The Onion Ring) or I2P( Invisible internet programme).

The rudimentary question arises what makes dark web such a safe haven for predators, narco and human traffickers, black hat hackers et cetera. How such nefarious activities happen with impunity in the darknet, even when law enforcement agencies are cognisant of the heinous crimes. As an illustration, it is estimated that dark Web has around 76,300 websites dealing with contraband items. From 2011 to 2014, darknet market places like ‘Silk Road’ and ‘Empire Market’ earned a humongous USD 500 billion, as proceeds of transborder online crime, until Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road was arrested by FBI in 2013 and handed a double life sentence. Ironically, Ross himself had allegedly hired hitmen through darknet to assassinate six people. The answer to the conundrum lies into phrases (a) The Anonymised Tor browser (b) The cryptocurrency surge from 2010 onwards.

The Tor browser is called onion router because it comprises of application layer encryption sandwiched within several communication protocol layers, akin to layers of an onion. The beauty of Tor is that It masks internet protocol IP addresses by a phenomenon of ‘Proxy Bouncing’ wherein the darknet message is bounced off multiple transnational servers, with layers of encryption, enabling hiding of real locations and identity from surveillance and traffic analysis. This ensures that darknet users remain anonymous and secure from snooping by authorities. As an illustration, a communication or illicit advertisement on darknet from Mumbai maybe bounced multiple times and seem to have originated from North Korea.

The year 2010 was a landmark year in the meteoric growth of darknet, with the advent of crypto currencies like bitcoin, which enabled anonymous transfer of funds through exchanges bereft of KYC procedures, providing a robust smokescreen for both buyers and sellers on darknet.

The darknet has several uncanny similarities to surface web. It facilitates search engines like ‘DuckDuckGo’, ‘SearX’, ‘Hidden Wiki’ etc. It has secure, non-traceable email service ‘Proton-mail’, BBC and even Facebook have their darknet versions sans censorship or identity verification requirements. Darknet even has ‘Secure Drop’ forum where whistleblowers and investigative journalist interact and it is unanimously endorsed that Middle Eastern hactivists through darknet spawned Arab springs leading to coup d’état in several tyrannical regimes.

In India, darknet crimes have proliferated in the last decade especially in the arena of cyber terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography. Significantly, the year 2021, witnessed maiden, first of its kind, legal action and arrests relating to desi drug cartels flourishing on the darknet. The authorities busted a Haridwar-based pharma firm supplying amphetamine, worth Rs 27 crore to European countries concealed in herbal supplement packages.

Moreover, darknet drug trafficker, Deepu Singh, a 21-year-old hotel management graduate was arrested in Lucknow. Symptomatic of new age darknet crimes, in a recently released flick on Netflix, it is graphically shown how the protagonist hires hitmen services from darknet in an attempt to get his wife killed. In December 2021, the Parliamentary Panel on Home Affairs, raised concern over digital currency, and use of darknet for drug trafficking and recommended creation of cyber wing under narcotics control bureau.

An emerging grave concern as highlighted in a study by Harvard university, related to national security is sudden mushrooming of darknet chat platforms of terrorist recruiters and sympathisers with online step-by-step tutorials on how to hide identity, how to use explosive laden drones as weapons or how to execute cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.

A momentous question staring us is that if darknet crime is anonymised , foolproof and secure, then how do law enforcement agencies grapple with it or how such crimes are detected, albeit few and far in between. In a democratic country like India, the dark web, as distinct from deep web, serves no worthwhile purpose, it is only becoming a sanctuary for online nefarious criminal activity. Hence, it is high time that India adopted the ‘China model’, wherein the great firewall of China, blocks Tor traffic. On similar lines, ‘The Incredible Firewall of India ‘ will affect a body-blow to flourishing darknet crime. In the interim, the agents should go ‘undercover online’, eliciting physical addresses, emails, tracking shipments, CCTV surveillance and fingerprint analysis on shipments. Even the perfect darknet crime can provide smoking gun, tell-tale signs through clever social engineering and psychological tricks on chat forum with darknet criminals.

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