Prakash Per­sad

Re­cent­ly, a British in­tel­li­gence of­fi­cial in­di­cat­ed that ter­ror­ists and crim­i­nals are us­ing In­ter­net-based com­mu­ni­ca­tions me­dia to plan and im­ple­ment their ac­tiv­i­ties.

The call for greater en­cryp­tion of da­ta, un­der pri­va­cy con­cerns, it would ap­pear, might be play­ing right in­to the hands of those bent on il­le­gal, an­ti-so­cial de­struc­tive be­hav­iour.

The dig­i­tal con­nec­tiv­i­ty that blos­somed with the com­ing of age of the In­ter­net comes with a down­side; the host­ing of sites that en­gage in the sale of arms, drugs and pornog­ra­phy.

These sites, in or­der to avoid de­tec­tion by the law, utilise the dark­net, the pur­pose of which is to not on­ly hide the com­mu­ni­ca­tions them­selves but al­so the fact that in­for­ma­tion is be­ing ex­changed.

So what is a dark­net? It is es­sen­tial­ly a com­put­er net­work, with re­strict­ed ac­cess that is main­ly used for il­le­gal in­for­ma­tion-shar­ing.

It can be part of the In­ter­net ad­dress space that has been spe­cial­ly con­fig­ured so that it is very dif­fi­cult to trace or dis­cov­er by the usu­al means and thus users face lit­tle risk of be­ing de­tect­ed.

Pop­u­lar dark­nets in­clude Tor (the so-called onion router), Freenet and I2P.

These net­works are usu­al­ly of a de­cen­tralised na­ture. The in­for­ma­tion (e-mails, texts, videos etc) is rout­ed through a maze of servers which makes it very dif­fi­cult to trace its source.

Many a time, these servers are pro­vid­ed by vol­un­teers.

Tor is the prod­uct of a US in­tel­li­gence agency de­vel­oped for the fur­ther­ing of its goals. It has been used to pro­vide dig­i­tal con­nec­tiv­i­ty in coun­tries in which the In­ter­net and Face­book have been banned, re­strict­ed or mon­i­tored. It is part of the In­ter­net and re­quires a spe­cial brows­er to ac­cess it.

To make it se­cure from pry­ing eyes, many lay­ers of en­cryp­tion are in­clud­ed in the net­work and hence its name; the onion router.

It fa­cil­i­tat­ed pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Egypt, which al­lowed for the or­gan­is­ing of the protests that even­tu­al­ly over­threw the Mubarak regime.

Mil­i­tary and law en­force­ment per­son­nel utilise it. So too jour­nal­ists who need to sat­is­fy the anonymi­ty re­quire­ments of whistle­blow­ers.

Re­cent­ly, Face­book in­tro­duced a fa­cil­i­ty for users to con­nect di­rect­ly to the so­cial net­work via Tor.

Co-op­er­a­tion be­tween law en­force­ment agen­cies and new tech­niques to track down the phys­i­cal lo­ca­tions of servers have re­sult­ed in sig­nif­i­cant suc­cess­es in de­tect­ing and clos­ing down sites on the dark­net. Three years ago, the Tor dark­net was pen­e­trat­ed and some 40 child pornog­ra­phy sites were tak­en down. Eu­ropol re­cent­ly closed down some 400 sites that were be­lieved to be in­volved in sell­ing il­le­gal drugs and weapons. Some ar­rests were al­so made.

These, how­ev­er sig­nif­i­cant, do not rep­re­sent or sig­ni­fy vic­to­ry in the war against cy­ber­crime, which is set to be­come a bit more dif­fi­cult with the con­cern for in­di­vid­ual pri­va­cy. This con­cern has led tech com­pa­nies to start util­is­ing even more en­cryp­tion tech­nolo­gies.

The In­ter­net is thus prov­ing to be a dou­ble-edged sword. Its val­ue in ed­u­ca­tion and busi­ness is un­ques­tion­able. In so­cial me­dia, the ju­ry is out.

It is, how­ev­er, prov­ing to be a boon to the crim­i­nal el­e­ments.

The dark­net may have pro­vid­ed and in­deed may pro­vide com­mu­ni­ca­tion fa­cil­i­ties for peo­ple in re­pressed regimes. But judg­ing from the re­sult of the so-called Arab spring, one may have to re­think the val­ue of this fa­cil­i­ty.

More im­por­tant­ly, the anonymi­ty pro­vid­ed by it can al­so pro­vide a se­cure en­vi­ron­ment for those in­tent on may­hem and ex­ploita­tion.

A bal­ance must be struck, for there is the dan­ger that the bad may out­weigh the good.

Some­where in the dis­cus­sions, the de­bate as to whether the pro­fessed de­moc­ra­ti­sa­tion of some coun­tries is worth more than the sex­u­al ex­ploita­tion of chil­dren from all coun­tries must take place.