Hi. Just saw your comment on tor. It really interested me and was wondering if I could get some more info since you seem to know about it. Thank you.
Sure thing. Long post ahead, so be warned.
Anything you really need to know about how Tor works, why it was created, and why it is useful can be read about on their official website. When someone talks about the “Deepweb,” 99.9% of the time they are talking about the Onion Network, websites that end in .onion as opposed to .com, .org, .net, etc. and can be accessed via Tor. You can download Tor from their official site and it’s fairly easy to set up. The browser runs off of Firefox, I believe, and the Tor bundle comes with a proxy service. It’s been a while since I’ve downloaded and/or used Tor, though, so the bundle may have changed.
I spent a good amount of time on the “Deepweb” and have seen quite a lot. I’m assuming most people are interested in the scary/disgusting/depraved aspects of it, since it’s always morbidly fascinating to hear about how sickos involved with human trafficking and child porn can skirt under the radar of the authorities.
First off, something you should know is that it’s next to impossible to effectively navigate on the Onion Network. Search engines come and go, but since they are difficult to code, they either don’t stay up for very long or just don’t work. It’s a little complicated, but I believe the difficulty lies in working with SOCKS, the proxy that Tor works through. The same can be said for IRC clients that run off of Tor. I’m probably a bit inaccurate about SOCKS and its relationship with Tor, but I never got much into the technicalities. My boyfriend at the time coded Torgle, a Tor search engine, and it was a constant headache for him.
Anyway, the only reliable way to get around was to use the Hidden Wiki, which, if I’m not mistaken, has since been taken down. The Hidden Wiki could be edited by anyone (as with most wikis), and people would post links to sites they had found or sites that they owned. Torchan was linked under the message boards article, along with several other. There were a LOT of message boards dedicated to pedophilia, some that celebrated it and some that treated it as a support group for people who wanted to or couldn’t stop. I never had any desire to see those sites and would have reported them to authorities, but the authorities 1) likely already knew (the FBI is VERY aware of the Onion Network, Hidden Wiki, Silk Road, etc.) and 2) wouldn’t be able to do anything except try to contact the owner. There were message boards for any kind of sexual interest you could possibly imagine, including snuff and hardcore gore, but CP was by far the most popular.
The Hidden Wiki also linked to actual sites that hosted (or claimed to host) actual CP. They were divided by sections (pictures only, videos only, male only, female only, under 12, etc.). It was thoroughly disgusting. From what I heard on Torchan, most of these sites are honeypots, or stings set up by the FBI/other US law enforcement to try and get the identities of people who wanted to use those services. They asked for personal information (CC number for paysites, name/login info, etc.) before they let the person continue. I’m sure that a lot of people have gotten busted that way, and it makes me glad.
There were hitman services linked as well as services to sell drugs and weapons that were illegal in your country, but I can guarantee you that the hitman services were scams and the only good place to buy weapons/drugs was Silk Road. The weapon part of the SR marketplace was shut down because it didn’t garner much revenue, and I believe SR has been shut down recently. Buying drugs online through SR was anonymous, but trying to hide the contents of your package through the postal system was the problem. I never bought from SR, but I imagine that their preferred method of payment was Bitcoin, if it wasn’t their ONLY method. The most common drugs were prescription, adderall, vicodin, oxy, xanax, but you could also buy pretty much anything else you wanted. Behind prescription, marijuana and cocaine were popular. The process of becoming a merchant was pretty arduous, as I recall, and you had to give a big down payment, so you knew that the sellers with a reputation were legit.
Beyond the CP, drug trade, and scamming, there was also some very legitimate political discourse happening. I saw a LOT of discussions take place in Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Google Translate helped give a tiny bit of context, and I saw what was mostly organizations of people smack talking the government and planning things (what I hope and assume were peaceful protests). Some international folk came on Torchan to speak in English about their plans. There was a lot of discussion that took place in English by non-Americans, most likely because when you have a group of people of several different nationalities, chances are they all speak a little English. When I was active on Torchan, I saw a lot of Israel/Palestine discussions and a lot of talk about the Islamic communities in the UK (some of it good, some of it bad, some of it by the Islamic community itself and some by those not of the faith).
I saw a LOT, and I mean a LOT, of paranoid people who were convinced the NSA was spying on them. I don’t know how much truth was in their claims, if any, but they seemed more comfortable when surfing the internet totally anonymous.
To be honest, I don’t know if Tor does more harm than good by giving absolute anonymity. I know I saw a lot of messed up shit that made me hate humanity, but I saw a lot of people using Tor as it was meant to be used—as a way to retain civil liberty and practice free speech without threat of persecution. I would honestly say that more than half of the Onion Network is comprised of message boards. The rest is dead links, scams, and honeypots, with the real nefarious stuff bringing up the rear as a small minority. Granted, I never went looking for any of the darker stuff, but that’s how it works on Tor. You just stumble upon things, and 9 times out of 10 you’re so out of your element (whether because it’s in another language or it’s pages and pages of technical jargon about how to keep safe and anonymous) that you just retreat back to the safety of the outerweb.
All in all, I understand the fear people have for Tor and the Deepweb, because it can be disgusting and unpredictable. But I absolutely think it’s a necessary tool in the “Information Age,” and the fact that bad people do bad things with this tool is just a side effect that can’t be avoided.
If you have any other more specific questions, please feel free to ask! I tried to cover most of what people are interested in, but there’s quite a lot to cover, honestly.