Deep Web

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The Internet is an interesting space. It is very enormous, beyond our imagination, and almost impossible have its size estimated. Renowned websites such as Facebook, Google and Wikipedia, occupy only less than 1% of the Internet (Pagliery, 2014). Therefore people call the scarcely used part of the internet as deep web (dark web), just like the water beneath the ocean surface. The term ‘deep web’ is created in 1995, when a teenager called Ian Clarke invented a software by which people can anonymously browse, chat, and share files online, and that the IP address cannot be tracked. The software was publicly released in 2000 as Freenet (Beckett, 2009).There were at least 2 millions downloads in 2009, from Freenet’s official site. The number of users shall be a lot more as it can be shared through other means. On Freenet, there are loads of ‘freesites’ available for users. However, the majority of them are illegal and inhuman, which contains content like child porn, drugs, viruses sharing, terrorism, criminal contacts etc. 

Disgraceful activities on the Internet are common. Some users film psycho videos and share them on the net, and there may be some parody works posted based on the video. People could ask for a killer for $400 USD in Mexico (Waugh, 2015). Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin are used as a currency instead of British pound or US dollar for anonymity (and there is no related regulation control). Deep web is just like a black market. It joints people together in doing illegal activities, despite surveillance by the government. There was once a shutdown of 400 deep web sites supporting serious organised crime, as Troels Oerting, the head of Europol's European cybercrime centre, mentioned (as cited in Wakefield, 2014). 

Given the fact that so many crimes (mostly are drugs and child abuses) are committed by deep web users, the UK government has created a new department in the beginning of November called Joint Operations Cell (JOC), which is operated by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and UK Intelligence outfit GCHQ (Osborne, 2015). To help JOC in its running, the government has granted £50 million for child protection. 

Although the deep web sounds like a toxic, providing opportunities for people to commit crimes ‘silently’, it could be still be deemed as an opportunity for which governments may go undercover as criminals for easy carrying out of investigation and acquiring confidential documents. Journalists may also get insider information for the common good via deep web.  There is still an imperative that a high privacy level has to be existed without interference with corporations and dictatorships.

References:  

Beckett, A. (2009). The Dark Side of the Internet. The Guardian. [online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Osborne, C. (2015). UK Gov't Tackles Dark Web with New Cybercrime Unit. [online] ZDNet. Available at: http://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-govt-tackles-dark-web-with-new-cybercrime-unit/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Pagliery, J. (2014). The Deep Web You Don't Know about. CNN. [online] Available at: http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/10/technology/deep-web/index.html [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Wakefield, J. (2014). Huge Raid to Shut Down 400-plus Dark Net Sites. BBC. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29950946 [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].

Waugh, R. (2015). 12 Scary Things Which Happen When You Go on the ‘Dark Web’. Metro. [online] Available at: http://metro.co.uk/2015/07/08/12-scary-things-which-happen-when-you-go-on-the-dark-web-5285640/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2015].