Tor Archives - Don Kasprzak

Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy by Ben Collier.

Ben holds a MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Criminology from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is a Cambridge Cybercrime Centre postdoctoral researcher and long-term collaborator with this interdisciplinary center, focusing on online hacker communities and cybercrime markets. Today he is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh within the Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS).

The Dark Web is a subset of the internet that was designed to be hidden from search engines and requires specific software, like Tor. Well known for illegal marketplaces (Silk Road) for drugs, firearms, murder for hire, stolen data, selling breached data, and hacking services, yet in fact is also serving as a privacy resource. Here forums allow users to exchange data regarding whistleblower platforms and also permits journalists to communicate in countries with strict censorship.

Insert irony: the very markets trafficking in illicit goods today rely on a architecture engineered by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine. This book is an amazing and enlightening deep dive into the history of the US military-driven internet. Google and Facebook have become today the major players of a corporate DARPA.

The message of Surveillance Valley is twofold: the US military has held the key, foundational role of today’s internet. After all, ARPANet, the initial ‘internet’ went into production in 1966.

The second message is the evolution of counterinsurgency from signals intelligence to Google Chrome. This will surprise many. This can be a very interesting read for our times.

At first glance this story is about Google and law enforcement surveillance within the City of Oakland. Yet, Yasha takes the reader all the way back to the Vietnam War. For instance, he lays the foundation for today’s internet to Project AGILE, an early clandestine effort to aid the French to recolonize Indochina after World War II. Likewise we did not learn from their failures.

This highly secret project launched under Truman as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and rebranded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Those early cyclical electronic counterinsurgency efforts in the mid-1950s failed.

In other words, the opening chapters actually provide a very detailed history lesson regarding Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Data harvesting, aka “counterinsurgency” was flourishing in the Cold War. The impact of Sputnik and French defeats in Vietnam drove counterinsurgency efforts.