The Dark Net (27 page)

In the essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, George Orwell wrote of being confronted with an enemy who was fleeing while trying to hold up his falling trousers. ‘I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”,’ he wrote, ‘but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself.’ Most of the chief protagonists in this book I met online first, and offline second. I always liked them more in the real world. By removing the face-to-face aspect of human interaction, the internet dehumanises people, and our imagination often turns them into inflated monsters, more terrifying because they are in the shadows. Meeting them in person rehumanises them again. Whether it was anarchist Bitcoin programmers, trolls, extremists, pornographers or enthusiastic self-harmers, all were more welcoming and pleasant, more interesting and multifaceted, than I’d imagined. Ultimately, the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online – but still recognisably us.

^fn1
Anders will be frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, which charges a total of $200,000 ($215,000 for UK residents) for Whole Body Cryopreservation.

^fn2
I cannot say that Zerzan was unwilling to engage with the transhumanists. When he learned that I’d been communicating with Zoltan, he sent him the following, unsolicited message:

I understand that you are in contact with Jamie Bartlett regarding his book project, dealing with the internet and technology more generally. JB had been in touch with Anders Sandberg, who at first agreed to do a dialog with me for the end of Jamie’s book. He disappeared after the “first round” of our exchange. A few years ago (2008?), producers at the
Daily Show
, American television, asked me to tape a brief debate with Ray Kurzweil and I agreed. After quite a bit of discussion of details of how and when, etc., the idea was cancelled with no explanation. It is my assumption that Kurzweil changed his mind. My question is, are you up for a public discussion or just another coward who can’t back up the techno-worship you advocate? I would like a serious and widely publicised debate, of your choice of venue, etc. I’d also like a bit of funding so as to be able to come to California, which I’d think would be a good place, somewhere there(?) I await your response . . . Zerzan.

As this book was going to press, Zoltan and Zerzan were attempting to organise a series of debates.

The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

The Dark Net
necessarily relies on a large number of online sources, including forum posts, articles and websites. A full list of working links is available at:
www.windmill-books.co.uk/thedarknetlinks

Introduction

p.2
‘Tor began a life as a . . .’
https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
;
http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-free-software-awards-announced
.

p.2
‘That’s why the Assassination Market . . .’ There is an interesting parallel to be found in Ancient Greece. The word ‘ostracise’ comes from a strange ritual that occurred every year in Athens during the fifth century
BC
. Each citizen would anonymously scratch the name of the person they wanted to banish from the city on to a shard of broken pottery or on a scrap of papyrus. When counted up – and assuming a certain quorum had been reached – the person who’d been named the most often would be forced to leave, ‘ostracised’, for a decade. The fear of the vote was thought to keep everyone, especially holders of public office, well behaved. It was democracy without justice: there was no charge, no trial and no defence. Just a vote. As far as historians can work out, poor Hipparchos, son of Charmos, was the first person to be ostracised, for reasons now unknown.

p.5
‘The Pentagon hoped to create . . .’ The team responsible for this project was a group called the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which was part of the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) inside the Pentagon. In 1966 Robert Taylor, the IPTO boss, was funding three universities to work on something called ‘time sharing’, which was a way to allow multiple users to access a single computer simultaneously. Each university used its own computer with its own programming language, which meant Taylor needed three teletype terminals in his office to access their work, which was infuriating and wasteful. (Taylor called it the ‘Terminal Problem’.) He worried the problem would get worse as more of IPTO’s research groups were requesting their own computers. Taylor realised the answer lay in trying to tie the computers together into a single network, allowing different computers to speak directly to each other in a common computer language. That would make it easier for researchers to share resources and results more easily. After a twenty-minute meeting with the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, Taylor was given one million dollars to develop this idea. Internet seed funding – and it came from the US Department of Defense. On 3 July 1969, UCLA put out a press release, ‘UCLA to Be First Station in Nationwide Computer Network’. This story is brilliantly told in full in
When Wizards Stay Up Late
.

p.6
‘In July 1973, Peter Kirstein . . .’ Kirstein, P.T., ‘Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK’. This new international version of the Arpanet was being called informally at the time the ‘Internetwork’, and was shortened to the ‘Internet’ in 1974.

p.6
‘September 1993, the date . . .’ One Usenet group –
www.eternal-september.org
– gives the date, as of writing, as September 7247, 1993. Further information about ‘the September that never ends’, in Dery, M.,
Escape Velocity
, p.5.

p.7
‘Leading psychologists of the day . . .’ Turkle, S.,
Life on the Screen
.

p.7
‘Parents panicked about children . . .’
http://textfiles.com/bbs/fever
. A BBS user of the time warned others: ‘If you don’t already own one of those evil instruments called a modem, take warning! Don’t even think about buying one. Modem fever sets in very quietly; it sneaks up on you and then grabs you by the wallet, checkbook or, heaven forbid, credit cards. Eventually your whole social life relies upon only the messages you find on electronic bulletin boards; your only happiness is the programs you have downloaded. (You never try any of them, you only collect them.)’;
http://textfiles.com/bbs/danger1.txt
. As usual, the police were also way off track, seeking desperately to illustrate ‘warning signs’ of computing obsession. The 1993 list produced by the Philadelphia police read:

*COMPUTER ADDICTION* (WITHDRAWS FROM FRIENDS, FAMILY, ETC.) MAY LOSE INTEREST IN SOCIAL ACTIVITIES, USE OF NEW (UNUSUAL) VOCABULARY, HEAVY WITH COMPUTER TERMS, SATANIC PHRASES OR SEXUAL REFERENCE (OR SUDDEN INTEREST IN RELATED POSTERS, MUSIC, ETC.) LOOK FOR RELATED DOODLING OR WRITING. USE OF WORDS SUCH AS: HACKING, PHREAKING (OR ANY WORDS WITH ‘PH’ REPLACING ‘F’) LACK OF INTEREST IN SELF AND APPEARANCE OR INDICATIONS OF LACK OF SLEEP (WHICH MIGHT INDICATE LATE NIGHT MODEM-PLAY) COMPUTER AND MODEM RUNNING LATE AT NIGHT (EVEN WHILE UNATTENDED) STORING OF COMPUTER FILES ENDING IN: PCX, GIF, TIF, DL, GL (THESE ARE VIDEO OR GRAPHIC IMAGE FILES AND PARENTS SHOULD KNOW WHAT THEY ILLUSTRATE) NAMES ON COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAMS WHICH SEEM SATANIC OR PORNOGRAPHIC, OBSESSION WITH FANTASY ADVENTURE GAMES (DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, TRADE WARS, SEXCAPADE, ETC.).

This misunderstanding and moral panic typically accompanies most new technologies.

p.8
‘Whether actual or perceived, anonymity . . .’ ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’,
CyberPsychology and Behaviour
7 (3). This article was published in 2004, but Suler had set out his thesis before then, in 2001:
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/1094931041291295
&
http://users.rider.edu/~suler/vita.html
.

p.8
‘It’s true that from . . .’ Drew, J.,
A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media
, Routledge, Taylor and Taylor, New York, US; Abington, Oxon, UK, p.92; Bitnet (1980) and Fidonet (1981) soon followed, along with hundreds of smaller community networks: Cleveland Free-Net, WellingtonCitynet, Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (PEN), Berkeley Community Memory Project, Hawaii FYI, National Capitol Free-Net, and perhaps most famously of all for the nascent digital liberties movement, The WELL (1986).

p.8
‘Alongside purposeful and serious groups . . .’ Bryan Pfaffenberger, ‘“If I Want It, It’s OK”: Usenet and the Outer Limits of Free Speech’,
The Information Society
12:4 (1996), p.377.

p.8
‘Bell, a contributor to the list . . .’ Greenberg, A.,
This Machine Kills Secrets
, pp.121–122.

p.9
‘In 1995 he set out his idea . . .’ There is some dispute as to whether ‘Assassination Politics’ was first posted on the cypherpunk mailing list, or on the Usenet group alt.anarchism.

p.10
‘The organisation that ran the market . . .’ Bell, ‘Assassination Politics’, part 3;
http://web.archive.org/web/20140114101642/
http://cryptome.org/ap.htm
. Besides, Bell added, the organisation could ‘adopt a stated policy that no convicted or, for that matter, even suspected killers could receive the payment of a reward . . . but it has no way to prevent such a payment from being made’.

p.10
‘The worse the offender . . .’ The term ‘Assassination Market’ is never used in ‘Assassination Politics’; I refer to it as the most common contemporary descriptor of the system that Jim Bell proposes.

p.10
‘Chances are good that nobody . . .’ ‘Assassination Politics’, part 2.

Chapter 1
Unmasking the Trolls

p.13
‘
A Life Ruin
. . .’ This is a true story, which I collected and documented in full. The name has been changed, as has the date.

p.13
‘It was an announcement to the hundreds . . .’ Encyclopedia Dramatica – an offensive Wikipedia for trolling culture – lists camgirls as ‘camwhores’, and describes a camwhore as ‘a variety of attention whore, typically a young and very stupid woman who will do anything on a webcam for attention, money, items from online wish lists, or just to be generally slutty’. On 4chan and elsewhere there are several infamous camgirls. Professional camgirls are discussed in chapter 6. It’s impossible to be sure how many people are ever on 4chan because the number of people viewing a page is not recorded.

p.15
‘The hacktivist group Anonymous? . . .’ Users of /b/ also act responsibly, and have, in the past, worked to identify users who they believe pose a genuine threat. In 2006 one user posted on /b/: ‘Hello, /b/. On September 11, 2007, at 9:11 am Central time, two pipe bombs will be remote-detonated at Pflugerville High School. Promptly after the blast, I, along with two other Anonymous, will charge the building, armed with a Bushmaster AR-15, IMI Galil AR, a vintage, government-issue M1 .30 Carbine, and a Benelli M4 semi auto shotgun.’ Users of /b/ informed the police immediately and the poster was arrested.

p.18
‘One user created a fake Facebook account . . .’ Some users were trying to offer (pretty reasonable) advice, believing that Sarah was still on the site, ‘lurking’. One user commented: ‘SARAH YES YOU ARE LURKING I’m sorry this had to happen to you, but it happens to any girl who posts nudes here. This is why girls shouldn’t post nudes here. There is a board specifically for that. In the future, do not give so much information about yourself to random strangers on the internet. I know it is fun for first timers and you want to be chatty with everyone to please them, but just send a message to your friends and apologise to them because some of them will be contacted by fake profiles who will send them your nudes. Just say this to them. “So I posted nudes somewhere on the internet. And some of you may get them from a couple of gay dudes who want to spite me. I apologise for that.” You pretty much have to make it seem like you don’t give a fuck about it and have nothing to lose.’

p.20
‘After appearing on BBC’s
Question Time
. . .’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/10218942/Twitter-trolls-mess-with-Mary-Beard-at-their-peril.html
.

p.20
‘In June 2014, the author J. K. Rowling . . .’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/10893567/JK-Rowling-subjected-to-Cybernat-abuse-after-1m-pro-UK-donation.html
.

p.20
‘In 2007, 498 people . . .’
http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/beware-of-the-troll#image-rotator-1
;
http://www.knowthenet.org.uk/knowledge-centre/trolling/trolling-study-results
;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233428/Police-grapple-internet-troll-epidemic-convictions-posting-online-abuse-soar-150-cent-just-years.html#ixzz2Xtw6i21L
. Section 127(1) and (2) of the Communications Act 2003 from 498 in 2007 to 1,423 in 2012; also
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/keir_starmer_warns_against_millions_of_trolling_offences/
.

p.20
‘In a poll of almost 2,000 . . .’
http://yougov.co.uk/news/2012/06/29/tackling-online-abuse/
.

p.22
‘Within four years of . . .’ Hafner, K. and Lyon, M.,
When Wizards Stay Up Late
, p.189.

p.23
‘Durham was attacked relentlessly and . . .’
Ibid
, pp.216–7.

p.24
‘But even the first emoticon wasn’t enough . . .’ In 1982 Scott Fahlman reproposed it, as it was clearly not catching on, although nastiness obviously was: ‘I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: :-(.’ Vertical emoticons are believed to have originated in an 1881 edition of
Puck
magazine.

p.25
‘Dedicated groups started to appear. . .’ In one 1980s user guide to flaming on BBS, the author concludes: ‘If American politics and advertising have taught us nothing else, they have shown that intelligence and honesty have nothing to do with being persuasive. Stated another way, personal attacks can be just as good as facts. In recognition of this universal truth, it is up to all BBS users to upgrade the quality of their “flames” so they can take their place as a valid form of BBS communication. Remember: If George Bush can do it with Willie Horton, so can you!’