Dark-Net: The Hidden Side of the Internet

Cyber Crime

Introduction
Criminology can be defined as the study or scientific discussion of criminal activities.
Criminology aims to study and analyse the causes of crimes, criminals’ responses towards law
and law enforcement systems, and the possible methods of crime prevention. Criminology is
considered as a part of sociology which deals with scientific analysis of social behaviours. In
this paper criminal activities will be discussed in a modern context. The advent of internet
technology is considered as a recent phenomenon; the impacts of this technological invention are
visible in every aspect of modern life and criminal activities are no exception in this context. The
term cyber crime has gained immense popularity these days; it simply refers to those crimes in
which computers are used as the primary tools. The concept of dark net is closely associated with
the term cyber-crime. Dark net is defined as an umbrella that covers all those areas of internet
services that are purposefully closed to the general public (Seigfried-Spellar, Villacís-
Vukadinović and Lynam, 2017). Dark-net is also known as Tor Network that helps criminals
conduct illegal trading activities. In this essay the positive and negative sides of dark-net will be
discussed broadly and its impacts on the society will be evaluated critically. Finally a few
recommendations will be made to resolve the current problem as far as possible.
Main Body
The term dark-net came into existence in 1970, in that era many computer networks were
secluded from the ARPANET for certain security reasons. Even though Arpanet could not access
dark-net, it was the primary means of communication for the dark-net users. Dark-net functions
on the same principles even today. Dark-net is a hidden network that works on the principle of
network encryption. Popular Search engines such as Yahoo, Google or Bing do not index dark
websites as these areas of the internet are only available to certain group of individuals. General
public cannot access the dark-net as it requires authentication, special configuration and certain
software to be reached. Many non-standard protocols are generally used in dark-net in order to
deliberate make it inaccessible through Internet (Button and Cross, 2017). It has been observed
that popular culture treats dark-net and dark-web as synonyms. Dark-net offers anonymity to its
users, people can utilise this as a means of communications without having their identities been
revealed. This feature of dark-net attracts criminals; criminals can confidently conduct their
illicit businesses through dark-net as no fear of repercussion is there.

In this context the purpose of dark-net should be discussed elaborately. Today people use the
word internet as a short for the term internetwork. The primary objective of internet is to connect
numerous computer networks so that people all over the world can communicate with one other
with ease. Internet network allows all those devices to connect with one another that are parts of
its connection web. Therefore it can be said that internet is simply a means of communication in
the modern world. Internet in this modern world is being used for different purposes such as
academics, business, communication and so on (Demant, Munksgaard, Décary-Hétu and
Aldridge, 2018). It cannot be denied that internet has become an integral part of modern
economy. However most of the people have access to the ‘surface web’ only that covers only 4%
of the contents available on internet. Rest of the contents can be found on the ‘deep web’ that
requires credentials (log-in information, it is not anonymous) to be accessed. People generally
fail to differentiate dark and deep web. Deep web technology aims to prevent regular internet
crawlers to access confidential information. Some example of deep web contents would be
medical records of patients, library catalogues, tax data, government database etc (Maguire,
Uchida and Hassell, 2015). Therefore it can be said that the main purpose of deep web is to
protect confidential data from illegal and unauthorised access. Dark web is also not essentially
‘evil’, for example sharing anti-government opinions can definitely be illegal, but it shouldn’t be
considered as evil. Journalists, thinkers, and other people can use dark-net to share their
ideologies which are not accepted in the society. Government also uses dark-net to track illegal
activities. However, since the dark-net offers anonymity, it essentially benefits criminals. Dark-
net doesn’t require credentials; it uses certain software packages rather, such as Tor, I2P,
Freenet, ZeroNet and so on. In most of the cases it has been observed that dark-net is being used
by drug dealers, weapon dealers, hackers, gamblers, assassins, terrorists, vendors of illegal goods
and information (Kethineni, Cao and Dodge, 2018).
In order to understand the impacts of dark-net on the society, one needs to compare its positive
and negative influences properly. In this context it must be mentioned the term ‘dark’ doesn’t
essentially mean ‘bad’, it actually refers to the privacy that dark-net offers to its users. Dark-net
is a part of the deep web and it has strong access to some legal and popular websites such as
Facebook, New York Times, Proton Mail, and ProPublica. Thses sites allow dark-net to be
associated with them only because of the benefits privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of
information it provides. People in the modern era are constantly living under the surveillance of