Dark Web Contents
We cherish our freedom of speech, of the press and to post or click within the bounds of the law (which allows a surprising amount of free speech). Of course this is not discussing the adult film industry or certain illegal (and should be) websites. Moreover, the Dark Web was created for all the right reasons:
The Dark Web: what is it? It’s a part of the Internet that cannot be accessed by search engines like Google. It’s hidden on purpose. You need a special web browser to access it, and it’s designed to be used anonymously — no tracing.
Which is useful for people in Iran, Hong Kong, China or other countries who lock down the ‘net to safely surf “subversive sites” without being traceable by their government.
TOR, the software that makes this anonymous and so hard to track and makes much of what you’ve just seen possible, was created by the United States Navy. Part of the goal was help people in oppressed nations have Internet freedom. So the Dark Web is not all bad.
“For us in America we live in a free society, for the most part, but there’s plenty of people in the world who don’t, who live in oppressive regimes, where they control the Internet,” Upbin of Forbes said.
Unfortunately, there are those who would use this software for anything but good.
A high-profile criminal case goes to trial next month. At the center of that case is a Dark Web site called Silk Road.
The U.S. government says Ross Ulbricht is behind one of the largest drug and crime rings in history. The man seen in a video on the “Free Ross” website certainly does not look like a worldwide menace, an Internet mobster.
In a video on the site, his mother, Lyn Ulbricht, said Ross “Is the most peaceful, non-violent, positive compassionate person I’ve ever met.”
Ulbricht was arrested last fall on charges of running Silk Road, a Dark Web site akin to Amazon or eBay with buyers, sellers, user and product reviews, except the product in Silk Road’s case is usually drugs.
Instead of using the site for free speech in places where this was not possible, some boneheads decided to use Bitcoins to deal drugs, sell sex slaves, counterfeit money, sell guns, hack systems and worse still recruit for Jihad. All of which behavior gets the full attention of the Federal courts. For good reason. Several alphabet agencies are understandably concerned about these things. Mr. Ulbricht is hardly a peaceful positive compassionate person in my book. He richly deserves the prison time the US Attorney is going for and maybe just maybe he will learn something during his incarceration. See below for the content of said site.
Thanks to ISIS sympathizers and other terrorist groups and drug dealers and pedophiles and assorted knuckleheads, the whole discussion changes. This is sadly not about free speech but it is about a clear and present danger. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated in 1919,
“The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
And sadly there will be freedoms lost. Thanks to the stupid stuff people do. And once again common sense is anything but common. The internet is not WOW or a giant LARP.
While Silk Road was used for some nefarious purposes, there were plenty of things that were legitimately being sold as well. I’ve never purchased anything from Silk Road, but I’ve seen the site many times, and spent a lot of time on what most people call the “dark web.”
The dark web itself isn’t the problem. There are a lot of people who use it because their country blocks free speech, or because their government tracks everything they do. When one gets sick of Yahoo and Google and NSA and everything else, it’s not that much of a stretch for the computer literate to install the Tor Browser, maybe an extra proxy or two or a virtual sandbox, and ‘free’ themselves a bit.
You can find a lot of criminal activity and disgusting, awful things on the dark web, most of which you spend your time trying to step around so you don’t even accidentally see it. That being said, there are also a lot of resources there that a lot of people may and even should be interested in. Everything from books on ditch medicine, prepping, herbal medications, languages, classics, anything you want. There are even patriot groups that do their networking and planning there. Sure, you can get a lot of that elsewhere…but if you don’t want the government staring at your stuff, the dark web is a lot more tempting.
Gail Boer says: Kit I agree but the question to me still is is how to deal with sites like this and porn sites without losing a ton of freedoms.
Appalled By The World says: The problem with common sense is that it is no longer common. These days it would be better to call it uncommon sense. And because so few people seemingly have any sense these days we have the wretched refuse of humanity doing all sorts of vile things, eroding the freedoms of the rest of us in the process.
Gail Boer says: Exactly. And the lack of shame makes it worse.
Appalled By The World says: Shame? What’s that?
Gail Boer says: Well there is that.
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