+1 862 207 3288 case study
Project description
or deny them?), and an overall opinion of the piece.
Author Anonymous
Technoscience Review
Postphemonology WT
Anarchic Principles, Ethics, and Anonymity: A Cultural Examination of the Deep Web – Three Anonymous Case Studies
The average end-user internet browsing experience goes something along the lines as follows: open computer, check email, check facebook, look
at relevant media sites, watch pornography, continue on your day. A more advanced user might perhaps add in the occasional FTP connection, spend
some time in a UNIX shell, or even try and scam a credit card company out of some money. This is all child’s play. Over the last several years the
internet has been provided as a tool for political, individual, and social anonymity – a portal into the depthsof encoded information, both legal and
illegal, for the sake of good or for the purpose of destruction; a place to discuss politics in an open forum and a place to buy a hit on your wife,
a place to consume ideas and a place to sell narcotics, this hidden part of the internet is known asthe Deep Web.
It is impossible to deny the value and importance of the Internet. It has opened up new methods, paths, and venues for the travel and
collection of information and the spreading of ideas – in short there is not a single element of modern society that is not to a certain degree
‘under the influence’of the existence of the internet. Yet the common experience is one in which people are still regulated by some version of a
normative basis ofsocial and political regulation; laws and civil conduct still do, to a certain degree determine the ‘order’ of the Internet – think
if you will of the recent explosion in lawyers moving towards intellectual property law, thanks to the net.
However universally, this is not the case. More and more people are beginning to recognize that true anonymity exist standing in harsh opposition to
the open networks most people are involved with, regulated only by certified anonymity, crypto-terrorism, and wannabe hacker police. Referred to as
the Tor network, or in some cases simply as the anonymity network, deep net browsing uses encrypted hash tags, worldwide connection nodes, and
randomly generated dynamic individual identities to guarantee a fully autonomous experience of whatever one could imagine. This deep web is
uncategorized, uncataloged, and hidden from popular search engines and indexing programs. To access the deep web you must either know someone who
understands the deep web, have helped design and maintain it yourself, or find someone on the open net willing to show you the way.
This paper will focus on the cultural, social, and politicaloutcomes of true anonymity as expressed in technological mediation, exploring the depths
of the hidden web and analyzing the principles of freedom that exist when actions are occulted behind a veil of data and encryption, found only in
the deep net. This paper will further examine three case studies that I have developed in the deep web with three anonymous users who have provided
me with information regarding themselves, their ideals, their goals, and their methods. Take into account that the information provided must be
taken with a grain of salt – I have only been given weblinks, hash keys, ciphers, photographs, user reviews, and user names and thus must take the
information I’ve been given as the only information available to me – a consequence of anonymity.
I will examine these three case studies in an attempt to understand social, ethical, and political reasons behind what it is that my studies showed,
and – through a twice mediated hermeneutic evaluation of ‘users’ – attempt to determine why the deep net has become the market for terror, death, and
human trafficking. The fundamental question I have been led to ask is not why individuals have used a completely anonymous system for illegal
activity but rather, how it could be that these actions could be prevented without authoritative legislation. Lastly, I will use the date I received
in an attempt to analyze whether the three aforementioned aspects of the web are necessarily bad or rather just happen to stand against the normative
barrier of the non/pre-technological life world. We have been provided with the ultimate practical tool for the birth of Anarchism and have turned
it into, and seen it turned into the realm of the nefarious and treacherous, while also becoming the home for crypto-anarchism, cypherpunk ideals,
counter-economics, darknet file sharing, hacktivism, and infoanarchism. The point must be made clear: the political has ignored the technological
for too many years and while the political world is still stuck in the dark ages, the technological is exploding towards the future; the
technological has become morepolitical then the political itself and, in the hands of the completely anonymous this could be a bit worrisome.
II -The History of the Web
Whether it actually began with a system wide crash after a student typed the letter G or not is irrelevant, as on October 29th, 1969 two
individuals at Stanford and UCLA ‘connected’ their computers together for the first time over a large spatial distance and sent a message to one
another: that message was ‘login’ – and yes that G caused the first worldwide crash of the internet.
Seven years prior, JCR Licklider of MIT had begun his discussion of what he called the, “Galactic Network” – a concept in which he envisioned
globally interconnected sets of computers through which anyone and everyone could access data and programs from any location. Along with these
visions came the first sets of books on packet switching technology which would attempt to displace circuit switching technologies which, at the
time, allowed computers on a given local network to communicate with one another.
Early technologies used packet switching to transmit data, a method of transferring data regardless of type and size to another host in bundles of
data that are sent and received from peer to host and visa versa. ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network was the host and the
world’s first operational network of delocalized packet receiving computers (and was of course, funded by the US Department of Defense). ARPANET is
still understood as a collection of the first hosts that would one day become the unified infrastructure of the internet.
The ARPANET exploded in size and within a few months there were hosts set up as far east as Utah encorperating visualization projects and 3d modeling
technologies for mathematical formulas. By the end of ’69 ARPANET had fully created and began use of the Network Control Protocol, or NCP for
communications (which would today be replaced with TCP/IP) as the first understood protocol for transmission and reception of data over the web.
By 1972 worldwide displays of the power of the ARPANET had began to spring up as the new hot application of electronic mail messaging was introduced.
Keep in mind that e-mail’s relevance to the development of the net is not simply in the fact that it has become, worldwide, the number one avenue
for the exchange of information but was also the first truly established means of traffic via peer-to-peer or, people-to-people technologies on a
delocalized technological sense.
Thus the ARPANET became the backbone for what developed as the Internet; an idea that wanted multiple independent networks of arbitrary importance or
design to be able to communicate with one another through packet switching technologies. This concept of open-architecturetechnologies is still the
fundamental concept of the net, its not about who are what your computer looks like or what language it wants to speak, it can still connect to a
host and be provided with information. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network
architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking
Architecture”.
In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be separately designed and developed and each may have its own unique interface which it
may offer to users and/or other providers. including other Internet providers. Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific
environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be included or on their
geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer.
Because ARPANET required Interface Message Processors, or IMP communications protocols, data had to be received in a particular way in order for
communications to take place at all. Thus, thinkers developed the four golden rules that became the regulative foundation for Internet technologies
that have carried over (to some degree) up until modern times in order to try and prevent privatization and/or monopolization of the internet:
•Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
• Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the
source.
• Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the
gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery
from various failure modes.
• There would be no global control at the operations level.
These principles in theory led to the development of the protocols that we now use, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/IP(Internet Protocol) – IP,
which allowed only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and TCP which dealt with the actual methods by which the packets traveled
(think flow rate, data space allocation, etc). TCP/IP allowed to net to function without restriction There was also developed at the time a separate
protocol, User Diagram Protocol or UDP which will later become an essential tool in anonymous web browsing.
By the early 80’s, any company or organization requiring data communications was hooked up to one of the networks for global data transfers.
AT&T began its free-wheeling distribution of UNIX (arguably the first global, large scale anarchist-technology project) which spawned UNIX’ own
USENET and BITNET the first non purpose-built networks that relied on peer to peer maintenance and control for the their own sustenance and
development; every user became a tester, and every computer became a hub. Theses systems became the backbones for the RFC (Request for Comments)
program in which the massive expansion and development of the Internet could only be made possibly through the use of peer communication and
reciprocal development and testing. This led to the development of the modern FTP and the standardizing of most internet protocols and the rapid
expansion of the internet continued to be fueled by the constant reminders and understandings that the Internet was the key location to share ideas,
promote the dispersion of information, and spread ideas on a globalized scale.
Since the 1980’s countless large scale innovations have taken place throughout and by means of the Internet includingglobalized transmission
of information, freedom to access countless texts, files, and programs that would be otherwise held back due to spatial restriction, online
marketplacing, etc. Data is now being sent and received faster than it ever has been before. Information is now being transmitted across oceans,
land masses, and from political organization to individual faster than ever before, and this of course is where the problem arises.
Unfettered access to information is not something our government has ever been particularly fond of – things are kept under wrap for reasons
that we are not meant to know or even contemplate. The authorities had always hoped that the average end user would be unable to access certain
levels of information, which were restricted to higher-end corporations and associates. However, as the Internet developed into a system, which was
clearly capable of supporting its own infrastructure and technologically mediated sociopolitical ideas, the power and development of the net moved
from the hands of the few to the hands of the many. Networks like USENET and BITNET became tools for the free sharing of information not directly
related to the development of the backbone infrastructure; people began using USENET newsgroups to discuss politics, religion, activism, gun control,
and of course the infamous boom of globally marketed child pornography – the regulators could not sit idly by.
1993 marked the beginning of the .gov and .org extensions, arguably, the beginning of the end of freedom on the internet. Certainly prior to
1993 the government had its teeth deeply sunken into the radical ideologies that were making their ways into Johnny’s back door in rural upstate New
York (He’d never even heard of the word anarchism before) but the distribution of untaxable, unethical material forced legislation on the net that
provided a beautiful method for the complete control over the internet: packet sniffing, IP dumping, and the complete loss of anonymity. If you use
the internet, someone can find out who you were, where you live, what you’ve used the internet for, and probably every other piece of private
information you thought you had stored so securely on the last website you used to order a textbook.
III – The Development of the Deep Web
Despite its original success as an open-architecture based platform for the free distribution of information and development of globalized
software and programs, it became clear that certain individuals would use the Internet as another means of crime and theft. Howeveroriginally, it
was rare that these crimes were unfounded. Early hackers joined the ranks by putting their names up on corporate home pages and would only commit
acts of maliciousness if they felt their rights were being impinged upon. Individuals who grew up helping to develop the backbone of what is now the
most world-wide used element of technology were suddenly being told that their packets were being traced, their IP addresses were used to locate
their physical addresses, and their rights were being compromised; 18 year old kids writing their names on microsoft’s homepage that they helped
design were spending ten years in jail. The hacktivists did they only thing they knew how to do – they attacked back, putting pressure on the
government officials who were implementing the restrictive policies on global network data. The intent was never to take advantage of, or to hurt,
but was rather to simply say in the only way they knew how, “please leave us alone, we built the thing you’re taking away from us. We build freedom
of exchange of information and you built another means of tyranny.”
By the early 2000’s, individuals high-end users could not deal with the legislation anymore and in September of 2002, the Tor network was
invented and began its initial implementation. Tor is a program and project that works with the Vidalia browsers to anonymize Internet browsing.
The onion routing network makes it so that in order to access the net one must go through hundreds of worldwide relays and portals, all encrypted
from the public net, slowly peeling away layers until they reach the net (hence the onion imagery). By relaying through hundreds of encrypted
networks before making access to a single unencrypted host, Tor has made it almost impossible for actions to be logged and followed on the internet.
Anonymity is also helped through the actions of the end user who can control their Tor network activity, frequently refresh their identity and using
UDP protocols rather than the standard TCP/IP.
IV – Three Case Studies
After discovering the deep net tor portal, I found a user run, operated, and maintained forum where activists, murderers, drug dealers, politicians,
bored children, angry dads, and a general plethora of pissed off individuals gathered to discuss their views on things generally not discussed in
either the public or the open net. These topics included means of revolution that surprisingly aren’t found in anything Marx wrote, reviews of drugs
that people purchase through the deep net economy, politicians home addresses, phone numbers and pictures of their families, and ratings and reviews
on the sale and purchase of human lives. There are three anonymous individuals with whom I had conversations on these boards that I would like to
discuss. Keep in mind that all of the identities, names, and locations have not been omitted by me but rather, had never existed. All of this was
done within the realm of the Deep net and thus everything was completely anonymous. However, any disbelief that I had when confronted with certain
things was immediately squashed when I would receive a new website link and a randomly generated hash tag encryption key that allowed me to log into
a site and bid for a human life.
A. Case A refers to a man who called himself the general and specialized in the distribution of and purchasing of large scale weapon caches and
drugs. His company worked out of Northern Europe but guaranteed shipping worldwide. According to the ratings and reviews (the forum upon which
people and drugs are reviewed is fairly unsecure and known as the silk road forums – the place to check reviews for anything and everything), he was
operating at about 95% success, had very reasonable prices, and was “A pleasure to work with.” His general view on what he was doing was that he was
‘helping people liberate themselves in a world where liberation through another was impossible’. He expressed that Tor browsing had given him the
ability to help people who were trapped in positions where they were unable to use the help (governmental aid) that was being given to them (speaking
of gun sales). His beliefs on drug sales were similar, he responded to my question of, “Understanding your views on gun sales, why sell drugs as
well?” by saying that, “The illegalization of drugs worldwide has driven globalized social policy into a numbers game that, for some reason, the
governments want to stay out of. Numbers show that illegalization has never taken away from sales numbers, curious kids, but rather show sales
driven up from the allure of the forbidden plant so until someone shows me the direct correlate between smoking pot and killing innocent babies, I’ll
keep doing what I’m doing. I mean, its an easy harmless way to cover overhead costs, and well, we all like to get high winky face”
B. Case B is a conglomerate of individuals who have been lumped into a single study as I was never certain as to whom I was speaking. They were
all part of a group of Chinese Anarchists whose aim and purpose was to freely release the withholding of information via the Chinese government and
to allow for free reign browsing of the world wide web. They hoped that by exploring various avenues of freedom of information they could help to
disavow hierarchical methods of institution, that is, they believed that the person with the information, not the person with the capital (which
interestingly enough becomes secondary to information) becomes the person with the power and, should the complete extinction over the control of
information be established, there would, over a long period of time, give way to the extinction of authoritative distinctions or as they said, “the
asymmetry for knowledge is a huge aspect to capitalist domination and must end before anything further take place.” Unlike people throughout the
rest of the world, the Chinese are unable to access most online forums available to the web due to the country’s restrictive firewalls so Tor
Networking is the only way in which they are able to communicate openly. While agreeing that the Tor network for them has been equated to a project
and movement in practical anarchism, the group were quite unsurprised by the atrocities found upon the web, “of course people so deep within an
already fucked up social condition are going to develop new methods of exploitation, and Tor provided them with that – its not an either or, it’s a
both and with the good, you get the bad. We hope that certain political shift might be able to dissuade the bad in favor of the good, specifically
free exchange of information, but in the mean time no one on Tor should be able to abuse authority, regulate information, or try and prevent actions
that are already occurring, that’s something we all stand firmly behind.”
crypto-anarchism
Case B can be considered crypto-anarchists, a new branch of anarchism that has become manifest only in the radically technological age. Crypto-
anarchists employ cryptographic software to evade prosecution and harassment while sending and receiving information over computer networks, thereby
protecting privacy and political freedom.
Using such software, the association between the identity of a certain user or organization and the pseudonym they use is difficult to find, unless
the user reveals the association. It is difficult to say which country’s laws will be ignored, as even the location of a certain participant is
unknown. In a sense, the encrypted anonymous networks (the “cipherspace”) can be regarded as an independent lawless territory or as an autonomous
zone. However, participants may in theory voluntarily create new laws using smart contracts or, if the user is pseudonymous, depend on online
reputation.
C. Case C, arguably the most challenging case to work with was from an anonymous user also operating out of Northern Europe and Eastern Europe
in the exchange and trafficking of human beings. I’m certain that he thought my opening post on a the anon-forums would make for a great marketing
ploy but, after he learned that I was an American working on studying the ethics of the deep net, his communications with me became very scarce. He
responded to my slew of questions with a 24 bit hash key, a decryption key, a randomly generated login name and password. After using the key to
decrypt the hash tag, I wound up on an incredibly well designed auction house website staring at pictures, descriptions, sizes, measurements, places
of origin, ages, and all the personal background information on people for auction. These individuals were bid on over 12 hour periods of time (the
site only remained intact and in a single place for 12 hour periods at which point it would relocate and kick all its non-purchasing users from the
site) and sold from five thousand and a quarter of a million dollars. Most of the people for auction were in their late teens from impoverished
parts of Europe and were going to be used for sex trafficking in brothels in larger cities around Europe. I did however notice that blood types were
frequently given as well as medical history, which might be indicative of the sale of organs and body parts, this is of course speculative. I did
not have time, or the resources, or the ability to actively speak to any members of the human trafficking community but rather spent my time trying
to wrap my head around the fact that I was staring at a website at which individuals could buy human beings.
V – Anarchism, Tor, and Freedom
Anarchism:
“The name given to a principle or theory of life
and conduct under which society is conceived
without government—harmony in such a society
being obtained, not by submission to law, or by
obedience to any authority, but by free agreements
concluded between the various groups, territorial
and professional, freely constituted for the sake of
production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”
Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Britannica)
It is clear that the deep net, along with similar projects including LINUX, UNIX, GNU, etc. can be considered an anarchist project.
Similarly to the ideas of Linus Torvold (considered the original creator of Linux), Tor was developed as an open sourced development system in which
individuals could, to their fullest extent, explore the full depths of the internet and its architectures. All individuals involved in the project
become members of the testing community, to use is to debug and to create. Problems that individuals confronted that they couldn’t solve themselves
were posted up on USENET forums for the community to deal with as a whole. But the major problem here is not in the fact that Tor is being
capitalized or exploited but rather that it is allowing for acts to take place upon its network that are simply, no matter how one might put it,
beyond any ethical dimension of normative anarchist ideas. How could it be that such an implementation of an anarchist idea becomes an avenue for
the trafficking of human bodies? Anonymity is the last step in free speech, but free speech does not mean immunity, rather, it must – in order for
the deep net to continue to flourish, scream for radical responsibility.
The Inuit, one of the few large groups of people that are still to this day not ruled by a form of external hierarchy but rather by small
syndicates of individuals with common goals have figured out a way to deal with the problem of individuals who are working against the common good of
the people: a song. It is against the Inuit principle to hurt another in your tribe directly. All food is shared upon being caught, all
responsibilities are shared within the group and taken very seriously, anything that an individual should want or chose to do, the tribe can and will
provide. Like any other group of socially responsible people not dependent upon external structures of power, the Inuit were confronted with
individuals who did not hunt, they did not mend, they did not help the tribe in any way but expected, to the same extent as the workers of the tribe
to be taken care of. The Inuit developed a song that became known as the death song about people who refused to work. People would sing the song
around the non-workers who would be passively shunned from gatherings, meals, and tribal meetings until they were forced to try and find another
tribe with whom they could live. However, the song would follow them, the mark of the non-laborer would stay attached to their very being, they
could not escape their own demise unless they radically changed the way they interacted with the tribe; radical responsibility in a radically free
society.
Now what does this have to do with the deep net and the practical anarchism we find attached to anideology in praxis? We must first
understand the stance taken by formal principles of anarchism that reject all authoritative restrictions on freedoms. Certainly the anarchist stance
on deep web practices of the sale of weapons and drugs, or the dissemination of child/animal/whatever pornography cannot be a strict against all
policy; there is no way that anarchism can deny people the right to both look at, and exchange “illegal” types of objects and information. However,
anarchism can certainly do two things: 1. Reject the commodity exchange values that directly attach a capital value to an object or ideal and reject
the direct applications of capital and exploitation that find their ways into all means of modern exchange and 2. Establish a way in which the
community of users can force people into responsibilities for their own actions, thus marginalizing certain individuals to the point of social
dismissal; the community would no longer support or give the necessary preconditions for the existence of said actions.
Let us for example imagine the full group of individuals on the Tor network at any given time as sample group X. Within this group we have
three sub sections A, B, and C (let each of them reflect each case study respectively – that is A sells guns and drugs, B fights for symmetry in
information exchange and C sells people) who perform certain actions and have various beliefs.
Now let us apply the methods previously discussed to this theoretical area of anonymous browsing. However, we can’t be naïve enough to believe that
all means of commodity exchange be brought to a halt and I don’t have the time or interest right now to argue against capitalism as such but I can
say that if we apply the general understanding that capital means bad we can sidestep some major issues that I’d really prefer to ignore right now.
I’m not looking for the more fundamental problems and design flaws of modern capital but rather, why the way in which it has manifest on the deep
net, which I still consider a forum for radical anarchist ideology, is not being dealt with in a reasonable fashion. Therefore we must ignore the
capital attached to the sale and exchange of goods on the deep net and rather focus on the second step, the way in which the deep net community can
non-authoritarianly deal with the problems of human trafficking and similar practices.
For the sake of the argument, groups A and B both agree that the actions being taken by group C are, without any reasonable doubt, unethical in the
treatment of human life – I would be hard pressed to find a proper philosophical argument for the support of trafficking of human beings. Group C’s
actions become publicly known and both group A and B are disgusted but, according to basic principles of deep net browsing and the fundamental
anarchist principles upon which it rests, cannot simply go forth and attack group C (a because their actions would therefore be authoritarian and b.
because anonymity makes any attempt at pointing blame quite difficult). Therefore in order for groups A and B to non-authoritatively prevent the
action of human trafficking in a principally anarchist medium we must appeal to the Inuit method of dissonance and prevention – we must make the
means of group C’s actions unattainable.
In order for Group C to continue to exist, the entire Tor network must continue to exist in order to keep the infrastructure running. Because each
user/node/server exists as a foundation or backbone to the entirety of the network, any lost piece of the structure would result in losses of
anonymity and therefore, a loss of the network. Tor must demand the radical responsibility that the Inuit do – users must establish themselves as
the true clients; everything must be brought to attention.
The naivety by which individuals treat the political while excluding the technological is simply stunning. We’ve seen over the last several years
regimes being overthrown with the help of Facebook, videos of tyrants and thieves being executed publicly worldwide (all of the planning that took
place prior to 9/11 took place on the tor network), and the ‘simple’ transmission and dissemination of information being relayed at a speed that
allows politics to exist in a global environment. Technology is the new realm of the political and has to be treated with respect enough to
understand this very fact. Furthermore, understanding the Tor network as a Temporary Autonomous Zone (as preached by the crypto and infoanarchists)
is a way into understanding how the (a)political might manifest and how individuals without authority might have a method of dealing with truly
unethical behavior.
Tor has been criticized as the portal for the scum of the earth to function and operate out of the bounds of the law and my question is no longer,
why are they doing this, but rather, why is the rest of the network letting them. Letting to be understood in the most passive sense and network to
be understood in the most communal sense; the Tor family simply just has to stop, and say no.
PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT 🙂
