Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds
wired.com
wired.com
"Tor hidden service traffic, which Dr. Gareth Owen discussed in his talk this afternooon, is only 1.5% of all Tor traffic. Tor gets about 2 million users per day total.
The researcher ran a set of Tor relays for a six month period, and recorded how many times somebody attempted to look up a hidden service (this lookup is one of the steps in visiting a hidden service). Then at the end of that period, he scanned the hidden services he'd learned about, to find out what sort of content was on them.
Dr. Owen's data shows that there's a lot of churn in hidden services, so nearly all of the sites were gone by the time he did these scans. His graphs only show data about the sites that were still up many months later: so his data could either show a lot of people visiting abuse-related hidden services, or it could simply show that abuse-related hidden services are more long-lived than others. We can't tell from the data.
Without knowing how many sites disappeared before he got around to looking at them, it's impossible to know what percentage of fetches went to abuse sites.
There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously. These uses for hidden services are new and have great potential.
PS: Law enforcement agencies use Tor to stay anonymous while they catch bad guys. Law enforcement agencies use and run hidden services, too." https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-80-percent-percent-1-2-...
Wasn't there a article a while back that said around 95% of all internet traffic was imitated by computers and not humans? What would the percentage be for hidden services?
There's a parallel here with the "guns don't kill people" sentiment that's often brought up when people call for stricter gun controls. And here I fnd myself exhibiting some cognitive dissonance; I could say "Tor doesn't exploit and abuse children, people do" and I believe that, but I also believe that guns are inherently bad and I would like to see stricter controls. I'm not sure there's a solution to this moral puzzle and I find myself actively choosing hippocracy. I'll keep on advocating stricter gun laws whilst vehemently opposing stricter controls on the freedom of information.
So if anyone has a logical or philosophical solution to this mini moral crisis of mine, I'd really love to hear it.
I would just point out that you owe zero loyalty to what you thought yesterday (or 30 seconds ago). Maintaining views despite new information and logic is just dogma. Once you make things dogma and they conflict, you can either be a hippocrit (which at least makes you self-aware) or create ridiculous tortured logic to try to self-justify (which seems to be what you are asking for help with?) -- both are problematic, and IMHO harmful.
There's another similarity between Tor and guns (at least in the US). Neither can be eliminated anyway, it's better to discuss how to manage their existence. Tor has no central server that can be shut down. Guns are durable hunks of metal that can be easily hidden, and they exist in huge quantities across the US and could never be confiscated.
I'd like a solution to this problem as well, but one probably does not exist. Perhaps hypocrisy is a fundamental part of humanity...
The value of privacy goes beyond that, to the balance beween state authority and individual autonomy, to freedom of speech and expression. If you argue against Tor you argue in favor of surveillance and against democratic control over institutions.
Handguns and semi-automatics are designed and engineered to kill humans.
If the creators intent matters, then there is a moral difference between the two.
In other words: if you know I have a gun, the weights on what strategies you will consider for selfish gain shift away from those where I would shoot you with the gun, and toward those where I wouldn't. A gun can "do its job" while never being fired once over its service life!
The game theory of guns is basically a smaller-scale replica of the game theory of nuclear weapons—except that it's actually really easy, in the modern day, to ensure a power imbalance (no non-military force has a military level of gunpower), so you don't end up in the particular nuclear Nash equilibrium of everyone having the best weapon and nobody using it (you used to, though; "mutually-assured destruction" was previously known as "a Mexican standoff.")
If you have a gun and I have a gun I have to take into account that you may use it. Which motivates me to preemtivly use it to prevent you from killing me. Of course you can think the same way and I can think that you can think the same way.
Either way, if we both have a gun and I want to maximize my chance of staying alive (thus, fulfilling my survivial instinct), I should shoot.
The difference between that and Nash's equilibrium is quite drastic in that: a) large scale is in play triggering empathic/humanistic thinking b) the person that is in position to use it is usually less desperate and or in personal danger, so it's more "you kill my people" than "you kill me".
So, while I understand your logic, I would argue that the purpose of developing a weapon is to enable killing someone. The purpose of developing TOR is to enable privacy and anonimity.
What I will say is the intent of the creators is being completely misrepresented here. Guns are designed to satisfy a feeling of fear that may or may not be rational. Most guns never kill anyone and most aren't involved in any conflicts. They are made and sold to satisfy fears, their peddlers cater to those fears. This is also why ar-15 style carbines and other nearly useless weapons (you can't hunt with them, they have hardened core ammo that will penetrate all sorts of things after hitting the target.. ) are so popular, they are "more powerful" and satisfy a deeper or more broad fear. Almost nobody buys a gun with the intent to kill someone and I think that's an important distinction.
I'd argue that tor and pgp/gnupg are used in nearly identical ways for most geeks, we're afraid to not have access to them but I don't know anybody that regularly uses tor or pgp for emails and such. It is oddly isomorphic now that I think about it, if you say the purpose of a handgun is to kill a human, I wonder what percentage of their regular use for that purpose is by criminals, it has to be pretty high, much higher than non-criminal use.
At the same time, guns are designed to kill, not to satisfy your need of safety.
There are many other items that work in a similar manner - airbags are designed to save you in an accident, but you want them in your car to feel safer. Burgler alarms are designed to react when someone is breaking into your house, but you install them to reduce the risk that someone will even try, contracts are designed to cover your ass in case of a court case, but they are signed in hope that it makes court case less likely etc.
But coming back to wepons, they are designed to kill. You can argue that fake guns are designed to scare attackers, but real guns are designed to kill. Their parameters, their tests, their ads, their designs, are all focus on precision of shooting, targeting, and efficency of the bullet to penetrate the target. They are designed to be a good tool for killing.
Tor is designed to be a good tool for privacy and anonimity.
You can test it using a simple mental experiment - if the needs of pedophiles and people needing anonimity diverged and became incompatible, I honestly believe that Tor would be developed to fulfill the needs of the latter group. If the need of people looking to feel safe would diverge from the efficency of a weapon in killing, then I honestly believe that the weapon manufacturers would keep designing weapons to be efficient in killing.
> but I don't know anybody that regularly uses tor or pgp for emails and such.
That's a fallacy here. You may not know people who use it, because you may, guessing here, not spend time with people who have a reason to be afraid of their governments. You may not be part of the wikileaks movement. You may not know journalists who track mafia in Italy or Russia. Those are just examples. And, because I work on multiple open source projects, I definitely know many people using PGP on daily basis.
> if you say the purpose of a handgun is to kill a human, I wonder what percentage of their regular use for that purpose is by criminals, it has to be pretty high, much higher than non-criminal use.
I guess you are right. :)
But I'm not sure how it relates to the topic of authors intentions.
The whole idea of drawing moral distinctions between objects is a canard. Objects (including atomic bombs and function-enhanced H5N1) lack agency, so they are of course morally neutral. This neutrality doesn't preclude our talking about the morally-relevant effects these objects have on society though.
It's plausible under the utilitarian calculus that a ban on Tor would be in our collective interest. I personally don't think it is, but the question of Tor's overall utility is legitimate and the answer isn't immediately obvious.
Tor gives people a way to anonymously download child porn. These are probably people who would download child porn anyway and, while I certainly don't approve of even a single intentional download, I do wonder how much harm is caused by a single download. It's not zero, but it's a lot less, I think, than the harm of shooting someone.
On the other side, it is also, apparently, much less likely that any given gun sale is going to lead to a murder. But it's possible that the moral arithmetic still works out to significantly greater average harm.
We should also think about the potential benefits in the same way. Both Tor and guns supposedly have some capacity to protect/foster democratic government. One should also compare the probability of these positive outcomes.
Non-automatic rifles and shotguns do have a use for hunting, though I'm of the belief that you should only hunt if you intend to eat what you shoot.
Tor has purposes other than propagating harm. It can be used to share information which otherwise would cause punishment or harm to the persons supplying or reading, such as whistle-blowers or political dissidents.
Now you can argue that those people are committing crimes and should be responsible for their actions, but that gets in to much murkier territory than killing or pedophilia.
Automatic: hold the trigger, bullets keep firing, also called a machine gun. They've been illegal to import or manufacture for civilian use since 1986, but you can still get one if it was made before 1986. Legally-owned machine guns have been involved in 2 murders in the US since 1934 when they were first regulated.
Semi-automatic: Not a machine gun at all. It just means that you don't have to "re-cock" the gun after each time you fire. If you aren't familiar with guns, you probably think that all guns are semi-automatic, because in movies they always are. The vast majority of gun crimes happen with semi-automatic handguns. This is because these are simply the most common types of guns out there.
Rifles and shotguns can also be "semi-automatic." "Semi-automatic rifles" aren't especially scary, though. They are just the same old rifles with a pretty common feature. They account for, at most, 2% of all murders in the US.
Finally, you seem to argue that a tool for killing is therefore used for evil -- in other words, killing is inherently evil. Men with guns have done great evil and also great good. Similarly, Tor itself is amoral, and can be used to both good and evil ends.
People who do bad things can use Tor to hide better, but the same is true of a hole in the ground. That is not in itself a harmful thing.
That isn't a perfect or ironclad resolution to the hypocrisy, but it does highlight an important difference in the intent behind the two things. Guns are weapons, and while they have perfectly innocent uses and users (shooting ranges), they are primarily created to cause harm.
In the same way, that's why we need Tor -- because citizens need to be able to communicate and organize absent of government surveillance and interference. Tor is not important "even though" it can be used to avoid law enforcement. It is important "because" it can be used to evade law enforcement, because one day we may have to.
I mean, of course, a purely hypothetical revolution. I am serious when I say, however, that the framers of the Constitution wanted future US governments to be constrained by the power of the citizens, and so they gave the citizens guns. They also guaranteed the right to assembly and free association (1st amendment) and the right to be free from search or seizure (4th amendment). Inter-citizen communication free from government surveillance is implied there, I think.
My philosophical solution is never to blame tools.
Ignoring all hits that went to sites dead after six months (an eternity for hidden services) is akin to the weight loss studies that throw out the data points representing people that dropped out when they didn't lose weight. Almost blatantly dishonest and shows a pretty superficial understanding of that which they are trying to study.
Beyond that there are still so many statistical fallacies and logical leaps going on in this article it's pretty astounding... for instance the author editorializes that:
>>> What they may instead show is that Tor users who seek child abuse materials use Tor much more often and visit sites much more frequently than those seeking to buy drugs or leak sensitive documents to a journalist.
Completely ignoring the possibility that these pedophilic sites are comprised of images, which could artificially increase the amount of requests (i.e. one person looking at 10 images = 10 unique hits in the study). I could go on and on here, but I think this money quote from the study principal sheds some light upon the true objectives at play:
>>> “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing,” says Owen. “But it’s hampering the rights of children and creating a place where pedophiles can act with impunity.”
Edit: In my mind, the real takeaway from this article is that the FBI/Interpol seem pretty content leaving these sites up for extended periods of time while they go after the drug marketplaces, carders, and counterfeiters
As much as people don't want it to be true, this is an all or nothing situation. Tor is secure for everyone, or no one.
You've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet...
Tor is pretty good though, and few attacks relate to its core functionality.
About the high percent of visits to those abuse-related hidden services , which is a horrible fact , is mostly related to the kind of service provided ...
whistleblower sites are veeery special in a way and not that many people even have any motivation to use them . All of those illegal markets get far more visits naturally but those who use them as buyers(which must be the main group of visiters )maybe only check them out like once a week ( maybe like most of us use amazon maybe even a bit less).
But now think of youtube or sex related video Sites ... they naturally get more visits from 1 user in a week than any other service ... so i think thats a huge chunk of it.
So just to get this right , i really think its disgusting and shocking how much visits these sites seem to generate, but i think its not necessary related that most user in the dark Web use these services , but maybe just more like those who use them are using them much more exessive than any other service. Also we have to mind the factors mentioned in the article like DOS attacks etc...
This is useful because it separates the effect (joining a private club) from the mechanism (downloading Tor, but also things like just signing up for a private forum, etc.)
It also implies something about these sorts of privacy-enhancing technologies: if they become part of the "defaults"—if browsers become able to access Tor sites by default, and Google starts indexing them—then a Tor hidden service will no longer implicitly be part of the "dark web." It'll be part of the regular web—just anonymously so.
- Any part of the internet which isn't indexed by search engines. By this definition, the profiles on a dating site that requires a login are part of the darkweb.
- Any data on the internet not accessible via HTTP/FTP. Copying a file off a server via SCP then becomes a visit to the dark web.
What's most frustrating is when people jump between the definitions mid-discussion.
And the people jumping between the definitions mid-sentence are doing so because they don't understand what they are talking about. And by uttering such sentences, contribute to others misunderstanding too.
> refers to any or all network hosts on the Internet that no-one can reach.[1] According to some estimates, only 0.03% of the web is searchable, hence leaving almost 100.00% of all data being dark Internet
Apparently the wikipedia authors think that "network hosts that no-one can reach" is the same thing as "not searchable". I mean, a network host that no-one can reach is obviously not searchable (if really no-one can reach it, is it a 'network host' at all?), but a lot more is too, and of course it depends on what mechanisms you are using to search. Those estimates that "only 0.3% of the web is searchable" are surely not saying that 99.7% of the internet is "network hosts no-one can reach".
The wikipedia article goes on:
> Failures within the allocation of Internet resources due to the Internet's chaotic tendencies of growth and decay are a leading cause of dark address formation. One form of dark address is military sites on the archaic MILNET. These government networks are sometimes as old as the original ARPANET, and have simply not been incorporated into the Internet's evolving architecture.
I am not sure what they are talking about, and introduce a new term without explaining what it means, "dark address", what? If they really don't have routable IP addresses, are they part of 'the internet' at all, let alone 99.7% of the internet?
Hosts 'not incorporated into the internets evolving architecture' seems to be yet another thing again, although perhaps it's a subset of "network hosts that no-one can reach", but is an entirely different thing from Tor hidden services, and probably not a part of "websites not searchable [by Google?]" because they probably aren't "websites" at all, and arguably aren't on "the internet" at all if they were "not incorporated into the Internet's evolving architecture", whatever that means.
Really, the entire wikipedia article makes almost no sense from a technical perspective.
My non-technical friends hear various things about the 'dark net', and conflating different vague definitions, tell me they heard that the vast majority of the internet (nearly 100% according to wikipedia!) actually consists of pedophilia that you need special technical measures to access, or something like that.
Um.
Yes, non-technical people don't know what this means, but they can learn. Non-technical people don't know what the "dark web" means either, but it sure sounds mysterious, and has the added danger that they often erroneously think they do, but have no idea what they're talking about.
The impact is not proportional to number of visits. One whistleblower has a larger positve effect than one pedo looking at child porn has a negative effect. I wonder if an 800:1 ratio can be justified though.
One whistleblower pageview is much more likely to be one whistle blown, which can have impact ranging from nothing to an arbitrary number of lives saved.
Meanwhile, a child was abused to make kiddy porn. No equivocation there. To suggest that the aforementioned whistleblower is always more positive than the kiddy porn is negative is shocking. To then try put a ratio on it seems particularly callous.
Drawn pictures (e.g. manga) are absolutely considered child porn in large parts of the world (e.g. the UK).