the DEEP WEB: being anonymous to another level

[jaded]

This might sound naive but why don't agents just log in to the place and set people up?

What a ****ed up place.

That Silk Road's founder Ross Ulbricht got busted by the FBI and sentenced to life in prison tells you that there is no such thing as total anonymity on the internet. Tor just makes it harder to trace but if there is enough reason to track someone they can and will.

[MRBOOMER]

This might sound naive but why don't agents just log in to the place and set people up?

What a ****ed up place.

I'm sure there already is. **** I'm sure some of them are crooked cops.

[BrometheusBob.]

That Silk Road's founder Ross Ulbricht got busted by the FBI and sentenced to life in prison tells you that there is no such thing as total anonymity on the internet. Tor just makes it harder to trace but if there is enough reason to track someone they can and will.

I don't believe they were able to trace Tor activity directly, instead Ulbricht ****ed up and left numerous clues.


Like, how dumb can you be to use your personal social media account to say some **** like:


Oh gee, bet that doesn't ring any alarms off.

EDIT: Also yes, a lot of the sites that get taken down result from undercover sting operations.

[BrometheusBob.]

I only know about from what I've read about silkroad. I'm still confused about how it's untraceable. I'm fascinated by its existence but don't care for its content.

Not necessarily completely impenetrable, but the main causes for getting caught doing something fishy on the deepnet are the users or websites doing something ******.

Here is an explanation about how the Tor network works (watch 1:15 on)


The idea is that before doing anything, a path of random networks to bounce things off of is formed. The key that provides the anonymity is that the networks themselves don't know what the path looks like or where the data originated, and instead only know the previous and next points in the path. (With the exception of your machine of course, that created the path to work on)

The deepnet refers to a set of websites that will only communicate in this fashion. Not all said websites are accessible via Tor, but I provided the above to give an idea of how users accessing the deep web do so while keeping private. As a result of how they work, a website on the deepnet should have no personal information on those users that access it unless they offer it up directly (such as by purchasing things on the dark web via credit card, generally considered a no-no. ******* or other virtual anonymous currency is used instead). Because of that, users aren't really concerned about what will happen to them even if the sites are taken down.

You might then wonder how the websites know where to send back a repsonse since your machine's location hasn't been revealed to it. The answer to that is that the website doesn't need to know where you are - it sends a response back to whoever gave it the request in the first place who sends it back to the previous point in the path and so on until arriving at the entry point that sends the website's response back to you.

EDIT: The above is a description for communicating with surface websites through Tor. In the case of a dealing with a 'hidden service', the websites location is hidden from the user as well creating the desired two way anonymity.

The user first contacts some known intermediary points by which the website communicates with anonymously similarly to the above. The user tells the intermediary points to tell the website the location of a randomly chosen rendevouz point. So now you and the website know the location of the rendevouz point but the rendevouz point doesn't know the location of either you or the website. Then from here it basically works the same as the above except that the data leaving the exit point doesn't actually end up at the website but rather at the rendevouz point. Then the communication between the rendevouz point and the website occurs similarly to the communication between you and the rendevouz point.

[Rudyo]

I always wonder where people get the idea that you can hire assassinations, sure you can buy guns and drugs and stuff, but you can still get caught by authorities by shipping it. I don't think there are like hitmen for hire on the darkweb.

[Barcham]

If you live in the US and want to buy a gun, all you have to do is go to just about any gun show and take your pick. No background checks or waiting periods. You have the cash, you can get a gun. You can also buy one through Craigslist or many other classified ads sites from a private seller. Getting a gun in the US is not a difficult thing to do.

[BKM-2010]

I am well aware of the sick **** that unfortunately goes on in this planet. This is simply a new-age device to broadcast it digitally.

I don't know much about it. Can't they just shut down this Tor? Or is there a catch.

[El-blanco]

Not necessarily completely impenetrable, but the main causes for getting caught doing something fishy on the deepnet are the users or websites doing something ******.

Here is an explanation about how the Tor network works (watch 1:15 on)


The idea is that before doing anything, a path of random networks to bounce things off of is formed. The key that provides the anonymity is that the networks themselves don't know what the path looks like or where the data originated, and instead only know the previous and next points in the path. (With the exception of your machine of course, that created the path to work on)

The deepnet refers to a set of websites that will only communicate in this fashion. Not all said websites are accessible via Tor, but I provided the above to give an idea of how users accessing the deep web do so while keeping private. As a result of how they work, a website on the deepnet should have no personal information on those users that access it unless they offer it up directly (such as by purchasing things on the dark web via credit card, generally considered a no-no. ******* or other virtual anonymous currency is used instead). Because of that, users aren't really concerned about what will happen to them even if the sites are taken down.

You might then wonder how the websites know where to send back a repsonse since your machine's location hasn't been revealed to it. The answer to that is that the website doesn't need to know where you are - it sends a response back to whoever gave it the request in the first place who sends it back to the previous point in the path and so on until arriving at the entry point that sends the website's response back to you.

EDIT: The above is a description for communicating with surface websites through Tor. In the case of a dealing with a 'hidden service', the websites location is hidden from the user as well creating the desired two way anonymity.

The user first contacts some known intermediary points by which the website communicates with anonymously similarly to the above. The user tells the intermediary points to tell the website the location of a randomly chosen rendevouz point. So now you and the website know the location of the rendevouz point but the rendevouz point doesn't know the location of either you or the website. Then from here it basically works the same as the above except that the data leaving the exit point doesn't actually end up at the website but rather at the rendevouz point. Then the communication between the rendevouz point and the website occurs similarly to the communication between you and the rendevouz point.

Thanks for the video and description man, very interesting. The guy was a total beta but gave a good breakdown of how it works. For something like Silk Road, how did the purchaser relay their shipping information without it being caught? As the video said if you transmit any information it comes out at the exit point.

[2ofEverything]

I am well aware of the sick **** that unfortunately goes on in this planet. This is simply a new-age device to broadcast it digitally.

I don't know much about it. Can't they just shut down this Tor? Or is there a catch.

Well Tor is used by a bunch of people who don't go on the dark web either, it's just a software that lets you browse the web anonymously, which for many people is something important. Ever since all those articles on google and other companies tracking your history all the tinfoil hats use Tor now. Even though it's a pretty shitty browser that slows your internet down tenfold.

[BrometheusBob.]

Thanks for the video and description man, very interesting. The guy was a total beta but gave a good breakdown of how it works. For something like Silk Road, how did the purchaser relay their shipping information without it being caught? As the video said if you transmit any information it comes out at the exit point.

Yes information like that can be snooped on at the exit point, but as long as it is encrypted it shouldn't be viewable.* The main problem with sending credit card info isn't as much that it could be used to identify you if viewed, rather it is that a bank will perform the transaction, know who both parties are, and have a record of it. Giving shipping information doesn't come with any external catches like that.

I'm not an expert on the more sophisticated ways that deepnet traffic can be snooped on, but in general if you avoid using peer to peer networks or one of several browser extensions (java for instance) that can compromise you, and you stick to encrypted connections, you should be able to maintain anonymity.

*The way encryption works is that it involves forming 'keys' that encode and decode a message. You give the other end the key to encoding information (it is OK if anyone sees this one) that you receive from them. You keep a private key that decrypts the message, and you don't ever give anyone the private key. The reason that encryption is so reliable is that com*****g what the private key is would be computationally infeasible, but with the private key the decryption is very fast. For example, RSA is a popular encryption method. In short, it takes advantage of the fact that it is incredibly difficult to find the prime factorization of a big composite number.

To give you an idea of how long it would take to compute one's private key, I looked up how big of keys people have cracked before. It took two years and hundreds of computers to crack an RSA encryption where the key that was 768 bytes long, and in practice people use keys that are 1024-4096 byes long. Chances are good that no one has the time and computational resources to decrypt your messages.