I love those two terms. They sound so mysterious and intriguing. What they represent is kind of mysterious and intriguing, so I guess in that respect, there is truth in advertising.
The deep web, simply put, consists of the parts of the Internet that Google can't reach. It's actually a little more complicated than that, but that's a pretty good summary. By various estimates, the deep web accounts for about 70 to 80 percent of the total content that is attached to the public Internet. All of the cat memes, all of the blogs with their brownie recipes, all of the commercial sites, including eBay and Amazon, and all of Facebook and its couple of billion users only accounts for 20 to 30 percent of what exists out there. Some places use the analogy of an iceberg. What, you say? There are places Google can't reach? Yes. Absolutely. Lots of places. Most places.
Next time you're wandering around on Amazon, consider how big it is, and it really is huge, and then remember that it is only a small fraction of what you could potentially reach if you knew how. It's not as ominous as it sounds, though. The vast majority of the deep web consists of information that is freely available if you know how to ask for it. Consider a trip to the Social Security website. Google can't just tap the Social Security's website on the shoulder and say, "How about passing me all of Steve's data." As well, when you go the the Library of Congress website, it's entire collection doesn't just open up in a panorama of information. You have to ask for something, and Google can't do that. It doesn't know what to ask for, and it can't just ask for everything. So, the deep web isn't quite as ominous as it sounds, it's mostly just innocuous information hiding behind a web form.
However, there is a sizable quantity of nefarious content on the deep web hiding behind a very thin veneer. There are hundreds of file hosting sites. These sites let you upload files and keep them in a more or less secure store. The legality of the content of the files is all over the map. Unless you have the passcode to recover it, for all intents and purposes it is invisible. There are also scores of anonymous message boards that don't link to anything external to them, so a web crawler can't find them. You have to know where to go to access the board. As with the file hosting services, the legality of the content is all over the map.
Where the real mystery lives is on the darknet. Darknets run on what is called a network overlay. That just means that they are another network inside the public Internet. The three main forms of darknet in use right now are Tor, Freenet, and i2p. The technical term for these darknets is mixnet. The idea is that they break up all of your messages into smaller parts and send them all over the place to get to the place you are sending them. When encryption is added to the mix, it becomes all but impossible to track where the messages are coming from, where they are going to, or what they contain, thus the name, darknet.
Most of what is on the darknet is illegal somewhere. Remember that certain types of raw information are illegal in authoritarian countries. Chinese netizens are not allowed to see anything that is critical of the Chinese government. Therefore, all of that kind of information that lives on the darknet is illegal in China. Information is always dangerous to repressive states. Therefore, they always outlaw it. Even in the United States.
The darknet is home to what are known as free marketplaces. The model for them was a hidden site on Tor called Silk Road. Silk Road is/was (in)famous on the darknets. Everything for sale on Silk Road was illegal in most places. The most common product you could buy were drugs, but Silk Road offered everything from military grade weapons, to credit card fraud software, to assassins (yep, you read that right). All transactions were in bitcoin, which is an untraceable online currency. The owner of Silk Road was arrested last year after the FBI hacked the site and figured out where it really was. He had $84 million worth of bitcoins in his wallet, $28 million of which belonged to him. As the site owner, he would hold transactions in escrow until they were complete and then take a commission. Estimates of the amount of money that passed through Silk Road are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It's important to note that the FBI didn't crack the site by hacking the network, they only got there because the owner did something stupid with the site. In the end, though, busting Silk Road didn't actually accomplish much other than seizing a lot of money. Other free market sites have popped up all over Tor and i2p like so many daisies. There is even a Silk Road 2.0 that is rumored to be run by some of the original Silk Road's administrators.
Sites offering illegal porn dot the darknet landscape as well, though they are not well tolerated by their fellow darknet residents. They are continually being busted for making some of the same dumb mistakes that Silk Road did. In the past, some of their darknet neighbors have aided law enforcement in tracking them down. A fairly well known hacker group called Anonymous broke into the hosting server of one of the biggest child pornography web sites in the world. They posted the names of 1500 people who had visited the site and threatened Freedom Hosting, the hosting company, with continuous attacks until they completely cleared their servers of illegal porn. It is rumored that they passed hacking information along to law enforcement, and soon after the original Anonymous hack, the FBI busted the owners of the site. The darknet might be secretive, but it is not completely amoral and unethical.
With all of that, where the darknet shines and earns it legitimate spot as a positive force on the Internet is in hosting services for dissidents and journalists in authoritarian countries. As I mentioned before, China has information flow on the Internet locked down tight. The only way free information can flow there is over the darknet. However, don't expect to get on Tor or i2p and find a Chinese dissident website. Computer ownership in China is tightly regulated. Internet access even more so. It is my understanding that if you are caught running a darknet node on your computer there, you will be arrested and likely never seen or heard from again.You aren't going to jump on Tor and go to chinesedissident.com. Darknet locations consist of anonymous strings of apparently random numbers and letters. On i2p, your real address is a cryptographic key that is 387 characters long. Good luck typing that into your browser's location bar. On Tor, the key is much shorter, but not much easier to randomly find a site. Both darknets have directories where different people post the addresses to their sites. The directories are generally geared toward some special interest, including politics. However, you will still not find the deepest web sites of that type publicly available.
So if you are a Chinese dissident group, how do you find one another? Usually it is done by posting a Tor or i2p key in some innocuous public venue. There are thousands of abandoned and inactive discussion boards on the public Internet. If someone makes a post with an i2p key that looks like random gibberish, it is unlikely that anyone will bat an eye. I am using the Chinese as an example, but there are dissident political boards of all nationalities, including the United States, though the Chinese boards are the hardest to find. I have been on Tor for years and I've only ever seen a couple of Chinese boards. I've been on i2p for several months and haven't seen one yet. The political landscape on i2p seems to be dominated by Russians.
So, the deep net and the darknet are kind of exciting when you think about what's going on behind the scenes, the darknet more so than the deep web. It's easy to get on Tor and look around. Google the tor browser bundle. It's a version of Firefox that is all set up and ready for you to cruise the darknet. Freenet and i2p are a bit more difficult to master, especially Freenet. If you are technically adept, you can easily find out how to get there. If not, stick with the Tor browser bundle.
And have fun!
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