by Kathy Dobson

Credit: Arisirawan’s Blog

After Viktoria Marinova, a journalist with a television station in Bulgaria, was appointed host of a new current affairs show, she vowed that the show would focus on corruption and her increasing concern about the lack of journalistic freedom in her city.  The first episode, which featured a story about two journalists investigating alleged corruption of EU funds, would turn out to be the last. Just hours after going for one of her regular runs along the river, Marinova’s body was discovered on a nearby path, brutally beaten, raped and murdered. Local authorities still claim a lack of evidence to suggest her murder was the result of her investigative journalism, however, as an article in  points out, Marinova’s murder “.” And it’s not just female reporters facing violent attacks.

According to  As part of this new war on the press, repressive regimes are not only keeping close tabs on what journalists are reporting on: if they read or hear about something they do not like, they quickly target the messenger. Attacks on journalists can have a chilling effect on everyone’s freedom of expression, yet according to  The Washington Post isn’t the first to raise the alarm with dire predictions about the safety of journalists. 

At the 28th World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in 2013, Alan Pearce said that being a journalist is now more dangerous than ever.

Pearce says

) expressed similar concerns about the passing of anti-terrorism law , which they argue contributes to the increasingly restrictive environment that journalists have to operate within.  In a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, RSF expressed their concerns about the Bill, claiming a lack of government transparency and it being a “.” RSF pointed out multiple press freedom violations in Canada, including an Ontario judge ordering a VICE NEWS reporter to turn over all communications between him and a source to the RCMP “.” 

In light of increasing concerns about surveillance and the restrictions placed on journalists by both state and other actors, the dark web – that portion of the deep web that is intentionally hidden and inaccessible through regular browsers – might offer more than just a secret space for nefarious activities. In addition to cloaking those illegal activities online from prying eyes, what about those sources who put themselves at great personal risk, simply by talking to a journalist? And what about the journalists themselves? In the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, what about those journalists who also risk everything, including their lives, when they write about and expose governmentally misdeeds, corporate fraud, or whistleblowing about drug cartels?  

Today, if a reporter researches military statistics, watches a couple of videos about explosions on YouTube, and views an extremist website for background research, he or she will be marked from then on and will no longer be able to research in privacy, or protect the anonymity of a source as all of their work as a journalist will be monitored from now on (). This is why many to communicate securely with their sources, protecting their sources from governments and others who would seek to know their identity. Some of the digital tools available include methods to correspond with sources securely, and the ability to pass on secret notes and sensitive documents without fear of being exposed.  

According to the . More than a dozen others have also been killed but since their deaths have yet to be officially linked to their work, they don’t count as part of the official total so far in 2018. These numbers don’t include the more than 300 journalists worldwide who have been imprisoned for their work. Each year dozens of journalists are also detained, harassed and beaten, and it’s not just repressive regimes that journalists have to worry about. Even in democratic countries, surveillance of journalists online and off is becoming increasingly commonplace.

As with any technology, anonymity can be used for a variety of means and ends, and many of those who use the dark web are using it to browse in privacy because of being in a country that doesn’t offer open access to the internet, and they want to be free of government censors (). But given recent revelations about wide-scale nation-state monitoring of the Internet and the increasing threat to the lives of journalists and their sources, the dark web has the potential to play an increasingly critical role in contributing to a healthy democracy. . The dark web includes sites set up specifically for journalists to exchange files and .  

Journalists will always be under threat of attacks for exposing repressive regimes and reporting on horrific stories from around the world. As some have argued, the dark net will continue to provide an increasingly important safe haven not only for those sources who risk their lives when they speak out, but also, to the very journalists whom these sources are speaking out to.  

Works Cited: 

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). (2018). 1334 Journalists have been killed, 1992-2018. Retrieved from  

Chertoff, M. (2017). A public policy perspective of the Dark Web. Journal of Cyber Policy 13, 26-38. Retrieved from 

Con (2018). Can Journalism be Bound for the Dark Web? Darkweb News. Retrieved from 

Marshall, S. (2013). How journalists can enter the ‘deep web’ to stay secure. Retrieved from 

Murray, A. (2014). The dark web is not just for paedophiles, drug dealers and terrorists. Independent. Retrieved from 

Pearce, A. (2013) Tightening the Net: Be careful what you wish for. NUJ. Retrieved from 

Reporters without Borders. (2016). RSF alerts Prime Minister Trudeau of concerns about deteriorating press freedom in Canada. Retrieved from     

The International Federation of Journalists (2018). End Impunity – for a UN Convention to protect journalists. Retrieved from 

The Washington Post. (2018). 2018 has been a brutal year for journalists, and it keeps getting worse. Retrieved from 

Wilson-Raybould, J. Bill C-51. Retrieved from 

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Kathy Dobson

• Senior Research Fellow

The post [I-lluminate] Exploring the Dark Web: A Cloak for Journalists and their Sources appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

by Ghadah Alrasheed & Brandon Rigato

One area that has not received adequate attention in the vast academic literature surrounding extremist movements and their use of the Internet is the Dark Web, whose websites are vaguely assumed to work as hubs for terrorists, drug-traffickers, and gangs. The structure, mechanisms, and impact of dark networks on terrorism is largely unknown for a variety of reasons, the main of which is the difficulty of collecting and accessing primary sources of data on the Dark Web. 

Credit: Quartz

The Dark Web is generally understood as a place for those seeking anonymity and invisibility when the surface web is too risky to use. This anonymity comes from the difficulty of finding who is behind the sites since, unlike other research browsers such as Google, sites are not indexed by search engines (Weimann, 2016a). One way to access them is through TOR (The Onion Router), a software originally developed by “as a tool for anonymously communicating online” (Weimann, 2018, p. 3). The was later offered to the public as a free service to promote anonymous access to the internet, especially where online censorship or surveillance is high (Malik, 2018).  

The Dark Web has sporadically made mainstream headlines. In 2015, it was linked to the database when the personal data of around 37 million clients were stolen and dumped in the Dark Web, including their e-mails, names, home addresses, and credit card information (Zetter, 2015). The technology has also been associated with the infamous WikiLeaks, Bitcoin, and illegal goods ranging from drugs to weapons sold on the infamous (Gehl, 2016; Malik, 2018; Weinmann, 2018). Due to the history of organized crime linked with the Dark Web, Western security agencies have become greatly concerned with the potentiality of the Dark Web to be used by terrorist groups such as ISIS to propagate their narratives while remaining completely hidden from intelligence agencies, thus making it increasingly difficult to detect and arrest terrorism perpetrators or inciters of hate.  

While being connected to a number of scandalous events, the Dark Web has received support and praise from organizations and companies such as Google, Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the it provides (Gehl, 2016). Whatever the capacity or the efficacy of the Dark Web in supporting illegal activities or being essential to political struggles, the Dark Web seems to have become infused with power and is symbolically seen as a source of primary effects.  

Similar to previous technological developments, the novel anonymity and encryption features of the Dark Web have fuelled fears especially in relation to ideological and political violence. In a , titled as Pentagon hunts for ISIS on the Dark Web, Starr and Crawford  (2015, May) state, “The U.S. believes ISIS and other potential terrorists are now using the most covert part of the online world to recruit fighters, share intelligence and potentially plan real world attacks.”.  A report prepared by the Defence and Security Accelerator, part of the UK Government’s  and  (2018), warns of the threatening possibility of the Dark Net and encrypted technology to aid terrorists or criminals and jeopardize national security. The report, however, remains vague about how and when terrorists used the Dark Web to recruit or operate. 

This article is a critical assessment of (scarce) academic research on the terrorist use of the Dark Web and “how” and “if” the Dark Web is used by terrorists as a dissemination or operation tool. It is important to note that there is a small number of resources that tackle the topic. Beside the lack of academic publications on the Dark Web, these resources are often inter-cited, feeding off each other. This gap in academic research on the Dark Web has shrouded the Dark Web in a cloak of mystery and discursively determined it as a place that can only accommodate dark activities. It has also allowed some confusion between the Dark Web and other end-to-end encrypted technology such as the  and . Reviewing the literature on the Dark Web, the main definer of what the Dark Web is or how we can measure its impact is government and security think tanks. On the other hand, the Dark Web has not received much attention from independent academic disciplines and researchers.  

Another form of disconnect between researchers studying the dark web is the literal and figurative use of the “dark web” in the field of terrorism. While there is the literal “dark web” that can only be accessed by downloading the TOR browser (Weimann, 2016), researchers such as HscinChun Chen (2012) and Abdullah bin Khaled al-Saud (2017) use the term “Dark Web” in a , denoting online behaviours associated with the darker side of humanity such as organized crime and terrorism. What these academics are exploring is the “dark” activities in the regular web rather than the technical space of the Dark Web itself. 

One study on the encrypted Dark Web was conducted by Nakita Malik in 2018, confirming that terrorists use the Dark Web to recruit, radicalize, gain material benefits and hide their communications and propaganda. The main evidence in the article for ISIS’s use of the Dark Web as a was a single website found by the researcher Scot Terban via a message on the Shamikh forum (one of ISIS’s websites on the regular web). Although this is clear evidence, it is not balanced by a systematic study of the Dark Web’s content or a comparative study of such content in the open and Dark webs. The lack of evidence leads one to question the necessity or the practicality of Malik’s proposal to found a governmental “regulatory body” to oversee the Dark Web (Malik, 2018).  

In Malik’s piece (2018), there is evidence of encrypted services such as the Telegram being used to send TOR links amongst ISIS members, as witnessed following the . However, there is no strong evidence of wide-spread adoption of TOR for mainstream distribution of ISIS propaganda, which is different technology than . This difference between the two technologies is well described by Dilipraj (2014): 

In 2018, Gabriel Weinman published an article, according to which ISIS has turned to the Dark Web following the Paris attacks in 2015 when there was a massive takedown of ISIS accounts. This move, as Weinmann indicates, resulted in the creation of more than 700 Telegram channels. Similar to Malik’s piece, there is an interchangeable use of the Dark Web and other encrypted technologies such as the Telegram. Therefore, it is not clear evidence of ISIS’s increasing use of the Dark Web for recruitment and propaganda dissemination.   

The findings of these studies are usually founded on empirically scarce ones. The only study that is based on rigorous is Moore and Rid’s paper, which reveals a “near-absence of Islamic extremism on TOR hidden services” (Moore and Rid, 2016, p. 21). In their scan of hidden-services websites within the Tor network, Moore and Rid collected data through a website crawler and found 2,723 websites that met the criteria of containing illegal content. Among these, the researchers have found only a fewer than a handful of active Islamic extremist sites. While groups such as ISIS tend to use the internet for propaganda and internal communication, both uses have not stabilized on the Dark Web.  Moore and Rid explain that the reason that the Dark Web is not commonly used by ISIS mass-spreading of violence is because of the Dark Web’s limited reach and its unsustainability as a way of communication.  

The conclusion of Moore and Rid’s study contradicts the work of many who suggest that the Dark Web is a safe haven for terrorists and an effective tool for their communications. While it is true that there is apparent and clear evidence of terrorists (like other criminals) utilizing the Dark Web for transfer of funds using the Bitcoin (Weinmann, 2018 & Malik, 2018), there is less consistent substation of the argument that the Dark Web is an ideological or discursive hotbed for terrorists and groups such as ISIS.   

Robert Gehl refers this unreasonable fear of the Dark Web to moral panics associated with the internet over the past 35 years. We, similarly, argue that tech-deterministic understandings of new technologies in previous eras have constituted “a historical prior” that determines discourses and extends technological utopian/dystopian discourses to newer technologies. Discourses on the internet, therefore, tend to cluster around “liberating” or “threatening” rhetoric. It is not surprising to find such rhetoric recurring with the development of the Dark Web.  

Works Cited:

Abdullah bin Khaled al–Saud. (2017). The tranquility campaign: A beacon of light in the dark world wide web. Perspectives on Terrorism, 11(2), 58-64. 

Chen, H. (2012). Dark web: Exploring and data mining the dark side of the web. New York, NY.

Defense and Security Accelerator (2018). Future technology trends in security. Retrieved from 

Dilipraj, E. (2014). Terror in the Deep and Dark Web. Air Power Journal 9 (3), 121-140. 

Gehl, R. W. (2016). Power/freedom on the dark web: A digital ethnography of the dark web social network. New Media & Society, 18(7), 1219-1235.  Retrieved from 

Jardine, E., & Centre for International Governance Innovation (2015). The dark web dilemma: Tor, anonymity and online policing. Waterloo, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation. Retrieved from 

Malik, N. (2018). Terror in the dark: How terrorists use encryption, the Darknet, And cryptocurrencies. The Henry Jackson Society. Retrieved from   

Moore, D. & Rid, T. (2016). Cryptopolitik and the Darknet. Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 58(1). Retrieved from

Starr, B. & Crawford, J. (2015, May). Pentagon hunts for Isis on the secret internet. CNN. Retrieved from 

Weimann, G. (2018). Going darker? the challenge of dark net terrorism. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved from 

Weimann, G. (2016a). Going dark: Terrorism on the dark web. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 39(3). 

Weimann, G. (2016b). Terrorist migration to the dark web. Perspectives on Terrorism, 10(3), 40-44. Retrieved from

Zetter, K. (2015). Hackers finally post stolen Ashley Madison Data. Wired. Retrieved from 

The post [I-lluminate] Exploring the Dark Web: Where Terrorists Hide? appeared first on ALiGN: Alternative Global Network Media Lab.

By Nasreen Rajani 

The Tor browser – often mistaken as being the “dark net” itself and seen as being synonymous with illegal or nefarious activities – has become a useful platform for activists who require privacy and anonymity, and one has been attracting increasing attention from activists and citizens alike in recent years. Tor is being seen as a potential tool for ensuring privacy in a world where the online activity of both activists and even everyday citizens are being closely monitored by corporate and state interests.  

 Credit: Fedotov.co

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGIES AGAINST ACTIVISTS   

Many activists now rely on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, to organize and mobilize for their cause. These platforms are widely relied upon by activists because of the low barrier to access, the potential to reach the millions of users locally and globally, and because they can be used to document protests and initiatives. As it turns out, these platforms are also heavily used by governments to monitor activists.   

. This phenomenon of increasing state surveillance coincides with a period of significant political and civic mobilization and action – including the Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter movements – and with the development and widespread global adoption of digital technologies, including personal computers, smart phones and social media platforms. 

Journalists have reported that the Department of Homeland Security consistently collected information of those attending protests from their social media platforms2, such as Facebook events set up to promote the protests, Twitter hashtags, Instagram and Vine feeds. Furthermore, journalists or everyday citizens taking photos of protests who post them on social media are providing further data for police to identify and surveil activists. The goal for these surveillance tactics over social media platforms were reportedly to . However, as VICE points out, even without tagging an individual, . 

Social media platforms are not neutral, open spaces and it’s clear that corporate interests do not align with activists needs. Social media design and policies are also often in tension with activist social media goals and needs (; ; ). While social media technologies , the primary objective of social media companies, many of which are publicly traded companies and have fiduciary obligations to shareholders, is generating profit through advertising. Business models of these companies are built upon the mining of personal data about users, and keeping those users online as long as possible ().  

TOR AS AN ALTERNATIVE AND SECURE BROWSER 

The Tor browser provides an online alternative, allowing activists who have some technological know-how to use the browser as a means of organizing and mobilizing while remaining anonymous. Tor addresses concerns about privacy by letting activists encrypt their messages to one another, thereby making it difficult to find out who is sending messages to whom. Tor masks your IP address (which identifies your location and then your potential identity) to prevent it from be used by governments to censor parts of the web. In this case Tor acts similar to a VPN but is volunteer-run, not subject to subpoenas, and does not keep logs of user traffic. For a VICE special on how to not get hacked, J. These are: .  

Although the Tor platform is often associated with the “dark web” based on the “darker” acts that occur using such encrypted communication technologies, as discussed in other parts of this issue, the anonymity of Tor has human rights and social justice implications. The “dark web” is often associated with the dangers that stem from its applicability for “dark” purposes such as criminal activity, buying and selling deadly weapons, illegal drugs, child pornography, ISIS communication, and White Supremacist communication. But the privacy and encryption offered by Tor are not just useful for criminal masterminds. These darker aspects are just a small percentage of what takes place on Tor. :  

Tor is neither “good” or “bad” just like the rest of the internet, however, what’s important here is in how it is being used, who has access to this knowledge and who is often left out of the positive potentials of being anonymous online. As Jardine (2015) shows, the technology of the Tor platform can be used for both “darker” activities but also for democratic purposes. Data collected from ), in 2015, for instance, with over 2.5 millions users on Tor, only 40% of Tor’s browser was used for nefarious purposes while 60% wasn’t. 

The anonymity of Tor provides users the benefits of organizing and communicating online with some safety from surveillance. . Examples of groups using these won’t be that many because the whole point is for them to remain to be private. However, .  

Tor, is, of course, not completely free from the risk of data and privacy breaches. There have been reports of security hacks and infiltration from the state and police that are concerning. Tor is left vulnerable through “weak links” in the computer network that is potentially logging more traffic that the node should be (Tor is hosted by volunteer computer nodes). This was how investigators were able to infiltrate ISIS communications (Roe, 2014). Police have also reportedly entered known child pornography forums, gathering information as a pretend pedophile. The FBI has also reportedly developed and used an application called .   

But for now, . The issues with many of these aforementioned applications in comparison to Tor is that they retain some metadata and, just like Facebook and Twitter, comply with data requests and court orders from government and local police authorities.  

THE TOR PROJECT 

Because the Tor browser is funded through the US government and military but run completely by volunteers, it’s hard to say how long the browser will survive given the trend of increasing state surveillance. And as more activists turn to Tor, technical limitations could pose challenges, including the need to handle the uptake of users while ensuring enough volunteer computers are in place to keep traffic secure.  

The , a non-profit organization that maintains the Tor software, is one example of a current initiative to expand Tor to everyone, beyond the criminal masterminds and spies that we often think of lurking in the dark depths of the Internet. The wants everyone to be using it, so this shows us its capabilities as more than just a space where evil lurks. Using Tor effectively still requires technical know-how and access to the Internet, and in countries with repressive governments, such access to Tor may be hard to penetrate.   

Donating to the Tor project, which , or becoming an active relay for computer nodes, are just a few ways to help ensure that the present and future of internet privacy is maintained for some of us until more of us demand action from our current browser and social media owners and more transparency from our governments in their interactions with them. 

LESSONS FOR EVERYONE ELSE 

Corporate online surveillance is not just an issue that active protestors now need to worry about, but something that so many more of us are affected by in various ways. Recently, . While the outing of such research studies has been a catalyst for improvement, with social media companies taking a more meaningful approach to educating users about privacy (Facebook and recent privacy notifications and suggestions to improve your privacy settings), users’ data is still at risk given the legal authority of government authorities to access data through court order or through surveillance of digital technologies by agencies responsible for protecting national security.   

Privacy is important for everyone who engages with online and networked forms of communication. Platforms like Tor help us to maintain our privacy to some extents. For activists engaged in social justice, this could provide a more secure way to organize and mobilize.  

Works Cited:

Altman, A. (2015). “Person of the year, the short list: Black Lives Matter.” In Time Magazine. Retrieved from   

Chang, A. (May 2, 2018). “The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, explained with a simple diagram.” In Vox. Retrieved from   

Dencik, L. & Leistert, O. (2015). . Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield International. 

Hern. A. (Aug 23, 2017). “The dilemma of the dark web: Protecting neo-Nazis and dissidents alike.” In The Guardian. Retrieved from   

Igo, S. (Apr 10, 2018). “How you helped create the crisis in private data.” In The Conversation. Retrieved from   

Jardine, E. (2015). “The Dark Web dilemma: Tor, anonymity and online policing.” Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series, No. 21. Retrieved from SSRN:  o°ů  

Jardine, E. (2018). â€śTor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online anonymity-granting technologies.” New Media & Society, 20(2), 435-452. Retrieved from 

Jeong, S. (Nov 27, 2017). “The Motherboard guide to avoiding state surveillance.” In Motherboard by VICE. Retrieved from   

Leistert, O. (2015). â€śThe revolution will not be liked: On the systemic constraints of corporate social media platforms for protests.” In L. Dencik and O. Leistert (Eds.) perspectives on social media and protest: Between control and emancipation. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Patterson, B. E. (Oct 19, 2017). “Police spied on New York Black Lives Matter group, internal police documents show”. In Mother Jones. Retrieved from   

Poulsen, K. (Dec 16, 2014). “The FBI used the web’s favorite hacking tool to unmask TOR users.” In Wired. Retrieved from   

Roe, K. (Nov 5, 2014). “Meet TOR: The misunderstood gateway into the Dark Web.” In The Bottom Line. Retrieved from   

Rogers, K. (Feb 7, 2016). “That time the Super Bowl secretly used facial recognition software on fans”. In Motherboard by VICE. Retrieved from   

Russell, J. (2016). “TOR turns to crowdfunding to lessen its dependence on government money.” In Techcrunch. Retrieved from   

Taylor, A. (Sept 8, 2011). “9/11 The day of the attacks”. In The Atlantic. Retrieved from   

Tor Project. (n.d.). “Tor project.” Retrieved from   

van Dijck, J. (2013).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

Youmans, W. L., & York, J. C. (2012). â€śSocial media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements.” Journal of Communication, 62, 315–329.  Retrieved from 

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