Underworlds have their own dialects, and the internet is no exception. Underneath the searchable, visible, day-to-day services used by most people lies a realm of “darknets”—hidden networks and methods of information exchange used by those who, for a variety of reasons, don’t want anyone else to find out what they’re doing.
Apparently coined in a 2002 Microsoft research paper, “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution,” the term’s vividness owes a debt to science fiction. What it describes, though, is an eminently practical business.
One key to unlocking the darknet is the use of a specialized program that grants its users anonymity, the most common of which is “the onion router” system, usually simply abbreviated to “Tor.” While the name may sound arbitrary, it is in fact descriptive: developed in the late 1990s, “onion routing” is a system that encrypts messages several times and then sends them through multiple points on the network known as routers. The system works by allowing each router to remove one layer of encryption before passing on the message to the next router: a process analogous to peeling an onion, and which means that the content of messages themselves remains hidden at all points along its journey.107
Once Tor client software has been downloaded, users can theoretically participate in various darknet activities—which may vary from the evasion of censorship and anonymous contact between sources in countries with highly restrictive regimes to the grim businesses of illegal drugs, pornography and so on.
Unlike the conventional internet, navigating darknets isn’t as simple as searching for what you want. Instead, resources like the “Hidden Wiki” tend to be used. As opposed to what’s sometimes referred to as the “clearnet”—that is, the ordinary internet, accessible through ordinary browsers—the Hidden Wiki can only be accessed through Tor services, ensuring anonymity, and contains a linked listing of darknet resources.
One of the most controversial developments among darknet sites is known as Silk Road. Named in honor of the great east–west global network of trade routes along which silk was once exported from China, it was launched in early 2011 as an anonymous marketplace for more-or-less anything that anyone might wish to buy or sell online. The site’s first incarnations were shut down by the FBI in 2013 and 2014, but a third version remained online as of late 2015.
Also accessible only through Tor services, Silk Road is perhaps most intriguing because of its exclusive use of “bitcoins” as currency for transactions. In monetary terms, bitcoins are sometimes called a “crypto-currency” and constitute one of the most radical experiments to date in constructing an electronic cash system entirely based on cryptographic technology—creating a seemingly foolproof, decentralized system able to regulate itself without the need for any government or central authority oversight.108
Initially released at the start of 2009, bitcoins were the brainchild of programmer Satoshi Nakamoto (almost certainly not his real name), and are “mined” at a predetermined rate by all users running the bitcoin software, with an eventual limit to their total circulation set at 21 million. Almost 15 million of these were in circulation by late 2015, with a real-world monetary value of close to 5 billion dollars—albeit at a massively fluctuating exchange rate. Bitcoins themselves aren’t likely to change the world, but the technology behind them just might, given its ability to establish a cryptographically secure shared public ledger in which every transaction is recorded. It’s a form of record keeping, in other words, for people who trust technology more than they trust banks or governments—and that’s a growing global force to be reckoned with.