The Dark Net (15 page)

In 2011, there were believed to be at least forty Tor Hidden Services that hosted child pornography, the largest of which contained more than 100 gigabytes of images and video. The same year the hacktivist collective Anonymous – which, although generally in favour of unfettered free expression online, does object to child pornography – managed to locate the server where some of these sites (including Lolita City) were hosted, and knocked them offline in what they called Operation DarkNet. But within a few days, most were running again using different servers, and with more visitors than before. Between June 2012 and June 2013, one exploitation ring was abusing children and sharing images via a Tor Hidden Service to 27,000 visitors, hosting 2,000 videos and involving 250 victims. By June 2013, Lolita City had grown to 15,000 members, and its database had increased to well over one million illegal pictures and thousands of videos.

Next it was the FBI who struck. In August 2013, following a lengthy investigation, they arrested Eric Eoin Marques
^fn3
, the twenty-seven-year-old Irishman who, they alleged, ran Freedom Hosting, which provided server space for many of the most notorious Tor Hidden Services, including criminal hacking site HackBB, money laundering sites, and over one hundred child pornography sites. After Freedom Hosting was taken offline, most of the major child pornography sites went down with it.

Child pornography forums on Tor Hidden Services were ablaze with rumour and discussion about the arrest. They were trying to work out collectively where the new sites were, and how to access
them: discussing downloading times, the quality of material, and above all the security features of new sites. Shortly after Marques’ arrest, back-up or ‘mirror’ versions of the sites were up and running again on new servers. Slowly, functioning links started to reappear on the Hidden Wiki, as users began creating new servers and uploading their own collections again. Then it was the turn of a couple of lone vigilantes to take it down. In March 2014, a hacker called Intangir, together with another who uses the Twitter handle Queefy, managed to take control of the Hidden Wiki I had accessed, and close it down, along with its child pornography links. But, by the time you read this, there’s every likelihood that it will be available again.

Although their job is difficult, the authorities still make hundreds of arrests a year. In 2013, one of their targets was Michael. He describes the moment the police presented him with a warrant for his arrest – he was at home with his wife and daughter.

That experience can prove too much for many. In 1999, the FBI seized the database of a company called Landslide Inc., which it suspected of selling child pornography on the internet. The database was found to include the credit card details and IP addresses of over 7,000 Britons, data which was swiftly handed over to the British police, who subsequently made almost 4,000 arrests. It resulted in 140 children being rescued, and in the suicides of thirty-nine of those arrested. Although no data is available, Tink believes
that suicide rates are higher among those arrested for offences online, than those perpetrated in the real world. The online offenders continue to retain Suler’s dissociative fantasy. ‘It was only when the police arrived,’ says Michael, ‘that I realised the severity of what I’d been doing.’

For obvious reasons, Michael wants the machine to bear some of his guilt. ‘I cannot believe there is so much of it out there!’ he tells me, when I ask him what should be done to stop people accessing child pornography. ‘Why on earth was it so easy for me to find it?’ According to Professor Wortley, the potential to become sexually attracted to children is not as rare a phenomenon as we’d like to imagine. The human sexual impulse is extraordinarily flexible, and at least partly shaped by social norms. Without some degree of demand for these images, these images wouldn’t be produced and shared in such staggering volumes. This is why the net has led to such an explosion in both content and the number of people accessing it: by making it easier to find, the latent demand can be more readily realised, and in some cases, created.

This does not excuse what Michael did. Just because something is three clicks away does not make it any less of a crime. Michael repeated to me several times that he never actively searched for the material. He clearly thinks that mitigates in his favour. But the distinction between searching and accidentally-finding-and-keeping is pretty meaningless on the internet. Michael clicked three times: and then he kept clicking. It’s not the computer’s fault. It’s Michael’s fault. But if it had been a little harder for him to find, if jailbait pornography wasn’t so easily accessible, perhaps Michael’s casual or vaguely formed attraction to children would never have been
explored. Without the internet, I don’t think Michael would be a convicted sex offender.

The task of ridding the internet of child pornography is exceptionally difficult. Michael is just one type of sex offender, and is at the less serious end of the scale. There are many more committed sex offenders than him, and no matter what we do, they will always search, find and share obscene images, and the police will always try to catch them. The criminals are getting smarter, but so are the authorities. The chief task for organisations like the IWF and the police is to keep bearing down on supply as far as possible to limit the content that is available and make sure people like Michael – browsers – realise that they might get caught. The flow of material probably can’t be stopped, but anything that can stem the tide can and does make a difference.

But bearing down on supply is getting harder. In addition to Tor Hidden Services, popular culture is prevailing against the IWF. According to a major review into the sexualisation of teens, conducted in 2010 by Dr Linda Papadopoulos for the UK Home Office, many young people are developing unhealthy attitudes and patterns of behaviour towards sex. Pornography of all types is now widely available and easily accessible to young people – and more of them are watching it at an earlier age. This is the awkward secret of child pornography: a growing proportion of it is made by the victims. They, too, are subject to the same dissociative effect. Although data
is highly variable – with estimates of teens in the US and UK who have created a sexual image or video of themselves or sent sexually explicit messages ranging from 15 to 40 per cent – the number is believed to have increased dramatically in recent years. According to the NSPCC, sexting has become the ‘norm’ among young teens. It’s quite a natural thing for young people to explore their own sexuality. But the moment a digital file is posted online, it is almost impossible to control who sees it, and what they do with it. There are sex offenders who trawl the net searching for this material, which they will find, save and share with others. According to the IWF, as much as one third of all material they see is now self-generated, and it covers all five levels of obscenity. Digital files: reproducible and shareable at almost no cost.

After I left the Hidden Wiki, I went on to the safer and more familiar surroundings of Facebook. ‘Hottest Teens 2013’ popped up. It read: ‘Teens: post your sexiest pics on this page! Whoever gets the most likes from other Facebook users will be declared the winner.’ Twenty thousand had already signed up.

^fn1
Not his real name.

^fn2
Which has since been taken offline and is currently being investigated by the Metropolitan Police.

^fn3
Marques denies all charges.

THE INTERNET HAS
transformed commerce and trade. It seamlessly connects buyers and sellers around the world, opens new markets and makes shopping simple, convenient and quick. Approximately 50 per cent of all global consumers now make online purchases – a percentage that grows every year. But alongside the multi-billion-dollar world of e-commerce with its buy-it-nows, one-click buys and next-day deliveries, exists another market that is growing just as rapidly. In this world everything – legal and illegal – is for sale.

According to a 2014 survey of almost 80,000 drug users from forty-three countries, an increasing number of users are sourcing their drugs online. Last year alone, approximately 20 per cent of UK drug users scored from the net. And the majority of them went to one place. I don’t take illegal drugs, and I’ve certainly never bought them before, but this morning an innocuous-looking white envelope was posted through my door. It contains a very small amount of high-quality cannabis. With a few simple clicks I’d done
what approximately 150,000 people have done over the last three years: I bought drugs on the Silk Road.

In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana. It was the start of a small but very noticeable trend. Throughout the nineties groups of dealers would periodically pop up in online drugs discussion boards to sell niche narcotics to drugs connoisseurs.
^fn1
By the early 2000s the first large-scale online drugs market had appeared on the surface web. The Farmer’s Market offered an email-only service selling mainly psychedelics. According to an FBI indictment, between January 2007 and October 2009, the Farmer’s Market processed over 5,000 orders, and a million dollars’ worth of sales in twenty-five countries. Then in 2010, the Farmer’s Market became a Tor Hidden Service.

Today there are around 40,000 Tor Hidden Service sites in operation. With a sophisticated traffic encryption system, Tor is the ideal place for unregulated, uncensored markets. Although many Hidden Services are legal, approximately 15 per cent relate to illegal drugs.

On 27 November 2010, a user named altoid posted the following message on the surface net magic-mushroom forum, the Shroomery:

I came across this website called Silk Road. It’s a Tor hidden
service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously. I’m thinking of buying off it, but wanted to see if anyone here had heard of it and could recommend it.

Two days later altoid turned up on
bitcointalk.org
, a discussion forum about the crypto-currency: ‘Has anyone seen Silk Road yet? It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don’t think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff.’ Altoid linked to a wordpress blog that gave further information: ‘Marijuana, Shrooms and MDMA’ were already for sale, and it urged users to register as buyers, or ‘join as a vendor’. Word started to spread, and by spring 2011, a handful of sellers had signed up, attracting a small number of buyers. By May 2011, there were over 300 product listings, nearly all of them illegal drugs. When news of this new ‘anonymous marketplace where you can buy anything’ was reported in the online magazine
Gawker
in June 2011, the response was predictable. Thousands rushed to join.

What these new visitors found was a radical alternative to rickety, unprofessional sites like the Farmer’s Market or risky ad hoc deals through forums. As altoid suggested, the site was professionally and intuitively designed. On the left-hand side of the webpage there were categories listing the different products on offer, and, when you clicked through, photographs of each. Vendors, too, were well represented. Each was listed with a short description and contact details. A link to customer service complaints was prominently displayed, as was your shopping ‘cart’, and how much money you had in your account. Behind the slick facade was a sophisticated security system. The site was accessible only via a Tor browser, products could be
bought only with Bitcoin, and visitors were advised to sign up with digital pseudonyms. Any correspondence between buyers and sellers took place using PGP encryption, and once read, messages were automatically deleted. In June 2011, a secure forum was set up in order to enable better communication between users of the site.

As well as being customer-friendly, the site was also extremely well managed. In October 2011, altoid returned to
bitcointalk.com
, no longer posting as a curious potential shopper, but as a key member of the quickly burgeoning site, ‘looking for an “IT pro”’ to help to maintain it. At that point, a team of between two and five administrators kept the site running, dealing with buyers’ and sellers’ complaints, resolving disputes and scanning the site for signs of any possible infiltration by law enforcement agencies. These administrators submitted a ‘weekly report’ to the main site administrator – a user named Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) – via Tor Chat and an internal email system, describing work completed, any issues that needed resolving, asking for guidance and requesting leave. Silk Road received a cut of all the sales that went through the site, and the administrators received a salary of between $1,000 and $2,000 a week for their troubles.

Despite the occasional hack, vendor arrest and dispute over site commission rates (most notably when the website announced key changes to its rates in January 2012), the Silk Road kept growing. According to the FBI, by July 2013 the site had processed over $1.2 billion worth of sales. Almost 4,000 anonymous vendors had sold products to 150,000 anonymous customers across the world, and DPR was believed to be making $20,000 a day on commission alone.

This was by far the most sophisticated online drugs market ever
seen. And it was a project that was motivated by more than financial gain. When you first arrived at the original Silk Road, a message from DPR greeted you:

I’d like to take a moment to share with you what the Silk Road is and how you can make the most of your time here. Let’s start with the name. The original Silk Road was an old-world trade network that connected Asia, Africa and Europe. It played a huge role in connecting the economies and cultures of these continents and promoted peace and prosperity through trade agreements. It is my hope that this modern Silk Road can do the same thing, by providing a framework for trading partners to come together for mutual gain in a safe and secure way.