Donald N. Barclay III
Donald Barclay is a Resident Forum Blogger who examines current legal issues in the field of modern computer technology.
The totality of the Internet does not promote good. This may be known, but most people may not understand the magnitude of evil that has exploded since the dawn of the Internet. While the term “black market” is regularly used, what this market truly contains is reprehensible. Criminal acts such as child exploitation, human trafficking, and the illegal sale of human organs have exploded in magnitude over the last twenty years.
The truth is that not everything on the Internet can be found on Google. You may have heard of ‘Silk Road’ before, as it has received some well-deserved mainstream press attention for being an online illegal goods marketplace. The federal government prosecuted the creators of this safe haven for their illegal activity. But have you heard of ‘Playpen’? This was a website that, for nearly two years, was a forum for pedophiles to trade child pornography. The FBI has since made some headlines by taking it down, but at its peak there were over 200,000 members. This is only a fraction of the market for child exploitive materials. The FBI secured 1,500 indictments so far, which is less than 1% of all of the pedophiles using Playpen.
How are the prosecution numbers so low? It is because Playpen existed on what has come to be known as the “Dark Web”. You can’t ask Siri to take you there, and it won’t display in Safari on your phone. This is a good thing to keep Dark Web viewership down, but it is one of the factors making shutting down illegal activity on the Dark Web harder. To understand what the Dark Web is, you need a basic understanding of how the Internet works. In the simplest of terms, the Internet is one large network of computers. Websites are unique addresses that take you to a server that hosts and tells your computer how to display a website. The World Wide Web is the public network of computers we call the Internet. But similar to how a local network connects computers within a school or business to one another; there exist private external networks for computers to communicate with one another, hiding their existence to outsiders. The Dark Web is an encrypted private network. Being encrypted means that even though users may know of its existence, they cannot view the site without the key breaking the encryption. Most of these keys are distributed via the Tor network, which is an encrypted networking system used specifically for the encryption of websites.
Playpen was a Tor website that pedophiles used for a long time to trade their child porn, but unbeknownst to the 1,500 prosecuted and more than 185.000 members, it was being controlled by the FBI. For a period of time before the take down of the site, the FBI was able to track the owners of the site and was subsequently able to take ownership from them. They ran the site for a period of time and obtained the IP of everyone who accessed it. Through this move, the FBI exposed Darknet members and was able to take action. While this is a good outcome, the FBI and other federal agencies want easier access to the encrypted Darknet, as obtaining ownership of all illegal privatenets is not reasonable. This is the debate that has been raging in Washington in the last year or so, and will continue for a few years to come. There are many good reasons to host a private website, but these agencies feel that there are more poor reasons to do so. This is the debate we may be apart of as young lawyers, and it is important to be informed of the consequences of restricting the government’s access.
Published on January 25, 2016.