If you are reading this report then you are in the most public and accessible part of the Internet, but there is another hidden section that is foreign to most users. Do you know what the Dark Web is and what it consists of? We tell you.
Dark Web or dark web is a term that is usually related to crime, with the sale of drugs or weapons, but it is much more than that. Today we are going to delve into its history, the reason for its existence and see if it can contribute something good to society instead of just being the biggest illegal sales market in the world.
However, to understand what the Dark Web is, we must first stop for a moment to recognize the differences between the different parts of the network, from the most accessible to the most hidden section.
We started with Clearnet, the internet you are using at this moment when you read our website, that is, everything you can find in search engines such as Google Chrome, Bing, Mozilla, etc. And although it may seem very large, deep down it only occupies 10 or 20% of the entire immensity of the network.
The remaining 90% is Deep Web, which is often associated with the most dangerous and hidden internet, but that is because it is confused with Dark Web. Deep Web is simply all that part of the internet that you cannot publicly accessible. Your email, your bank accounts, the documents that you have stored in Dropbox, thousands and thousands of pages that are not open for everyone but do not have to hide anything illegal.
Of course, within the Deep Web, there is a little hidden much more hidden, that 0.1% of Deep Web is known as Dark Web and it can only be accessed with a special web browser such as TOR, Freenet or ZeroNet.
As you can see, Deep Web and Dark Web are related, the second is part of the first but not the other way around, so it is not fair to accuse Deep Web of illegal and obscure when only part of its content is of this type.
The beginnings of Dark Web
In the mid-1990s, the United States Government created a technology that allowed intelligence agencies to exchange information in an entirely anonymous manner and thus protect millions of top-secret documents. They called it TOR.
Represented with the image of an onion, Tor has still considered the safest browser thanks to its layer system. And although initially associated with hackers and the Dark Web, the growing need to protect our data against governments and multinationals has made it a very popular browser. Tor does not connect directly to web pages but passes through multiple encrypted servers that make disappear the identity of the person who browses and hide their IP.
But how did Tor get into our lives if it was a project of the American spy agencies? The normal thing would have been to keep it secret, but they decided to launch Tor around the world creating the Dark Web. His explanation was that the more people use this system, the more difficult it would be to separate the messages from the government, from the noise created by the other users. Something like: you cannot go unnoticed in a very small town.
In the end the Dark Web is used from the systems of espionage of governments to political activists who want to escape the control and oppression of certain totalitarian regimes, but, of course, it has also become the ideal tool for all types of criminal activities.
One of the most famous cases is that of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who used Tor to share with the international press hundreds of classified documents of the US secret agency. It is curious that the tool that they had created to spy and protect them at the end will be used to steal them.
So as you can see, Dark Web, in the end, is like everything, it has its good part and its bad part. It is a very necessary tool to protect those whose freedom has been threatened by the repression of their governments, but it has also become a hiding place for criminals where the police have a hard time chasing them.