The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  Each individual responds differently to the power and freedom that any technology creates. It might make it easier to do bad things, but it’s still a choice. Did it give succour to my darker side? Not really. It didn’t make me want to self-harm, watch illegal pornography, or bully someone anonymously. I like to think that I am a well-balanced, sensible person who embarked on this experiment with my eyes open. But I did become accustomed and habituated to horrible and troubling things. I saw how quickly and easily people can get sucked into very dark and destructive places. If I had a propensity towards any of these behaviours, perhaps it would have encouraged me. For some people – for the young, the vulnerable or the inexperienced – freedom in the dark net comes at a price. People have to be prepared for what they might encounter there.

  In the essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War’, George Orwell wrote of being confronted with an enemy who was fleeing while trying to hold up his falling trousers. ‘I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”,’ he wrote, ‘but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself.’ Most of the chief protagonists in this book I met online first, and offline second. I always liked them more in the real world. By removing the face-to-face aspect of human interaction, the internet dehumanises people, and our imagination often turns them into inflated monsters, more terrifying because they are in the shadows. Meeting them in person rehumanises them again. Whether it was anarchist Bitcoin programmers, trolls, extremists, pornographers or enthusiastic self-harmers, all were more welcoming and pleasant, more interesting and multifaceted, than I’d imagined. Ultimately, the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online – but still recognisably us.

  * * *

  fn1 Anders will be frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona, which charges a total of $200,000 ($215,000 for UK residents) for Whole Body Cryopreservation.

  fn2 I cannot say that Zerzan was unwilling to engage with the transhumanists. When he learned that I’d been communicating with Zoltan, he sent him the following, unsolicited message:

  I understand that you are in contact with Jamie Bartlett regarding his book project, dealing with the internet and technology more generally. JB had been in touch with Anders Sandberg, who at first agreed to do a dialog with me for the end of Jamie’s book. He disappeared after the “first round” of our exchange. A few years ago (2008?), producers at the Daily Show, American television, asked me to tape a brief debate with Ray Kurzweil and I agreed. After quite a bit of discussion of details of how and when, etc., the idea was cancelled with no explanation. It is my assumption that Kurzweil changed his mind. My question is, are you up for a public discussion or just another coward who can’t back up the techno-worship you advocate? I would like a serious and widely publicised debate, of your choice of venue, etc. I’d also like a bit of funding so as to be able to come to California, which I’d think would be a good place, somewhere there(?) I await your response . . . Zerzan.

  As this book was going to press, Zoltan and Zerzan were attempting to organise a series of debates.

  Endnotes

  The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  The Dark Net necessarily relies on a large number of online sources, including forum posts, articles and websites. A full list of working links is available at: www.windmill-books.co.uk/thedarknetlinks

  Introduction

  p.2 ‘Tor began a life as a . . .’ https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en; http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-free-software-awards-announced.

  p.2 ‘That’s why the Assassination Market . . .’ There is an interesting parallel to be found in Ancient Greece. The word ‘ostracise’ comes from a strange ritual that occurred every year in Athens during the fifth century BC. Each citizen would anonymously scratch the name of the person they wanted to banish from the city on to a shard of broken pottery or on a scrap of papyrus. When counted up – and assuming a certain quorum had been reached – the person who’d been named the most often would be forced to leave, ‘ostracised’, for a decade. The fear of the vote was thought to keep everyone, especially holders of public office, well behaved. It was democracy without justice: there was no charge, no trial and no defence. Just a vote. As far as historians can work out, poor Hipparchos, son of Charmos, was the first person to be ostracised, for reasons now unknown.

  p.5 ‘The Pentagon hoped to create . . .’ The team responsible for this project was a group called the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which was part of the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) inside the Pentagon. In 1966 Robert Taylor, the IPTO boss, was funding three universities to work on something called ‘time sharing’, which was a way to allow multiple users to access a single computer simultaneously. Each university used its own computer with its own programming language, which meant Taylor needed three teletype terminals in his office to access their work, which was infuriating and wasteful. (Taylor called it the ‘Terminal Problem’.) He worried the problem would get worse as more of IPTO’s research groups were requesting their own computers. Taylor realised the answer lay in trying to tie the computers together into a single network, allowing different computers to speak directly to each other in a common computer language. That would make it easier for researchers to share resources and results more easily. After a twenty-minute meeting with the Director of ARPA Charles Herzfeld, Taylor was given one million dollars to develop this idea. Internet seed funding – and it came from the US Department of Defense. On 3 July 1969, UCLA put out a press release, ‘UCLA to Be First Station in Nationwide Computer Network’. This story is brilliantly told in full in When Wizards Stay Up Late.

  p.6 ‘In July 1973, Peter Kirstein . . .’ Kirstein, P.T., ‘Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK’. This new international version of the Arpanet was being called informally at the time the ‘Internetwork’, and was shortened to the ‘Internet’ in 1974.

  p.6 ‘September 1993, the date . . .’ One Usenet group – www.eternal-september.org – gives the date, as of writing, as September 7247, 1993. Further information about ‘the September that never ends’, in Dery, M., Escape Velocity, p.5.

  p.7 ‘Leading psychologists of the day . . .’ Turkle, S., Life on the Screen.

  p.7 ‘Parents panicked about children . . .’ http://textfiles.com/bbs/fever. A BBS user of the time warned others: ‘If you don’t already own one of those evil instruments called a modem, take warning! Don’t even think about buying one. Modem fever sets in very quietly; it sneaks up on you and then grabs you by the wallet, checkbook or, heaven forbid, credit cards. Eventually your whole social life relies upon only the messages you find on electronic bulletin boards; your only happiness is the programs you have downloaded. (You never try any of them, you only collect them.)’; http://textfiles.com/bbs/danger1.txt. As usual, the police were also way off track, seeking desperately to illustrate ‘warning signs’ of computing obsession. The 1993 list produced by the Philadelphia police read:

  *COMPUTER ADDICTION* (WITHDRAWS FROM FRIENDS, FAMILY, ETC.) MAY LOSE INTEREST IN SOCIAL ACTIVITIES, USE OF NEW (UNUSUAL) VOCABULARY, HEAVY WITH COMPUTER TERMS, SATANIC PHRASES OR SEXUAL REFERENCE (OR SUDDEN INTEREST IN RELATED POSTERS, MUSIC, ETC.) LOOK FOR RELATED DOODLING OR WRITING. USE OF WORDS SUCH AS: HACKING, PHREAKING (OR ANY WORDS WITH ‘PH’ REPLACING ‘F’) LACK OF INTEREST IN SELF AND APPEARANCE OR INDICATIONS OF LACK OF SLEEP (WHICH MIGHT INDICATE LATE NIGHT MODEM-PLAY) COMPUTER AND MODEM RUNNING LATE AT NIGHT (EVEN WHILE UNATTENDED) STORING OF COMPUTER FILES ENDING IN: PCX, GIF, TIF, DL, GL (THESE ARE VIDEO OR GRAPHIC IMAGE FILES AND PARENTS SHOULD KNOW WHAT THEY ILLUSTRATE) NAMES ON COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAMS WHICH SEEM SATANIC OR PORNOGRAPHIC, OBSESSION WITH FANTASY ADVENTURE GAMES (DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, TRADE WARS, SEX
CAPADE, ETC.).

  This misunderstanding and moral panic typically accompanies most new technologies.

  p.8 ‘Whether actual or perceived, anonymity . . .’ ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’, CyberPsychology and Behaviour 7 (3). This article was published in 2004, but Suler had set out his thesis before then, in 2001: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/1094931041291295 & http://users.rider.edu/~suler/vita.html.

  p.8 ‘It’s true that from . . .’ Drew, J., A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media, Routledge, Taylor and Taylor, New York, US; Abington, Oxon, UK, p.92; Bitnet (1980) and Fidonet (1981) soon followed, along with hundreds of smaller community networks: Cleveland Free-Net, WellingtonCitynet, Santa Monica Public Electronic Network (PEN), Berkeley Community Memory Project, Hawaii FYI, National Capitol Free-Net, and perhaps most famously of all for the nascent digital liberties movement, The WELL (1986).

  p.8 ‘Alongside purposeful and serious groups . . .’ Bryan Pfaffenberger, ‘“If I Want It, It’s OK”: Usenet and the Outer Limits of Free Speech’, The Information Society 12:4 (1996), p.377.

  p.8 ‘Bell, a contributor to the list . . .’ Greenberg, A., This Machine Kills Secrets, pp.121–122.

  p.9 ‘In 1995 he set out his idea . . .’ There is some dispute as to whether ‘Assassination Politics’ was first posted on the cypherpunk mailing list, or on the Usenet group alt.anarchism.

  p.10 ‘The organisation that ran the market . . .’ Bell, ‘Assassination Politics’, part 3; http://web.archive.org/web/20140114101642/http://cryptome.org/ap.htm. Besides, Bell added, the organisation could ‘adopt a stated policy that no convicted or, for that matter, even suspected killers could receive the payment of a reward . . . but it has no way to prevent such a payment from being made’.

  p.10 ‘The worse the offender . . .’ The term ‘Assassination Market’ is never used in ‘Assassination Politics’; I refer to it as the most common contemporary descriptor of the system that Jim Bell proposes.

  p.10 ‘Chances are good that nobody . . .’ ‘Assassination Politics’, part 2.

  Chapter 1

  Unmasking the Trolls

  p.13 ‘A Life Ruin . . .’ This is a true story, which I collected and documented in full. The name has been changed, as has the date.

  p.13 ‘It was an announcement to the hundreds . . .’ Encyclopedia Dramatica – an offensive Wikipedia for trolling culture – lists camgirls as ‘camwhores’, and describes a camwhore as ‘a variety of attention whore, typically a young and very stupid woman who will do anything on a webcam for attention, money, items from online wish lists, or just to be generally slutty’. On 4chan and elsewhere there are several infamous camgirls. Professional camgirls are discussed in chapter 6. It’s impossible to be sure how many people are ever on 4chan because the number of people viewing a page is not recorded.

  p.15 ‘The hacktivist group Anonymous? . . .’ Users of /b/ also act responsibly, and have, in the past, worked to identify users who they believe pose a genuine threat. In 2006 one user posted on /b/: ‘Hello, /b/. On September 11, 2007, at 9:11 am Central time, two pipe bombs will be remote-detonated at Pflugerville High School. Promptly after the blast, I, along with two other Anonymous, will charge the building, armed with a Bushmaster AR-15, IMI Galil AR, a vintage, government-issue M1 .30 Carbine, and a Benelli M4 semi auto shotgun.’ Users of /b/ informed the police immediately and the poster was arrested.

  p.18 ‘One user created a fake Facebook account . . .’ Some users were trying to offer (pretty reasonable) advice, believing that Sarah was still on the site, ‘lurking’. One user commented: ‘SARAH YES YOU ARE LURKING I’m sorry this had to happen to you, but it happens to any girl who posts nudes here. This is why girls shouldn’t post nudes here. There is a board specifically for that. In the future, do not give so much information about yourself to random strangers on the internet. I know it is fun for first timers and you want to be chatty with everyone to please them, but just send a message to your friends and apologise to them because some of them will be contacted by fake profiles who will send them your nudes. Just say this to them. “So I posted nudes somewhere on the internet. And some of you may get them from a couple of gay dudes who want to spite me. I apologise for that.” You pretty much have to make it seem like you don’t give a fuck about it and have nothing to lose.’

  p.20 ‘After appearing on BBC’s Question Time . . .’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/10218942/Twitter-trolls-mess-with-Mary-Beard-at-their-peril.html.

  p.20 ‘In June 2014, the author J. K. Rowling . . .’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scottish-independence/10893567/JK-Rowling-subjected-to-Cybernat-abuse-after-1m-pro-UK-donation.html.

  p.20 ‘In 2007, 498 people . . .’ http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/beware-of-the-troll#image-rotator-1; http://www.knowthenet.org.uk/knowledge-centre/trolling/trolling-study-results; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233428/Police-grapple-internet-troll-epidemic-convictions-posting-online-abuse-soar-150-cent-just-years.html#ixzz2Xtw6i21L. Section 127(1) and (2) of the Communications Act 2003 from 498 in 2007 to 1,423 in 2012; also http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/keir_starmer_warns_against_millions_of_trolling_offences/.

  p.20 ‘In a poll of almost 2,000 . . .’ http://yougov.co.uk/news/2012/06/29/tackling-online-abuse/.

  p.22 ‘Within four years of . . .’ Hafner, K. and Lyon, M., When Wizards Stay Up Late, p.189.

  p.23 ‘Durham was attacked relentlessly and . . .’ Ibid, pp.216–7.

  p.24 ‘But even the first emoticon wasn’t enough . . .’ In 1982 Scott Fahlman reproposed it, as it was clearly not catching on, although nastiness obviously was: ‘I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use: :-(.’ Vertical emoticons are believed to have originated in an 1881 edition of Puck magazine.

  p.25 ‘Dedicated groups started to appear. . .’ In one 1980s user guide to flaming on BBS, the author concludes: ‘If American politics and advertising have taught us nothing else, they have shown that intelligence and honesty have nothing to do with being persuasive. Stated another way, personal attacks can be just as good as facts. In recognition of this universal truth, it is up to all BBS users to upgrade the quality of their “flames” so they can take their place as a valid form of BBS communication. Remember: If George Bush can do it with Willie Horton, so can you!’

  p.25 ‘Abusers would torment the sysop . . .’ http://textfiles.com/bbs/abusebbs.txt. ‘The Abusing Handbook’, written by ‘The Joker’. There is no date, but the style places it in the late 1980s. It reads as if it was written by a thirteen-year-old, and the entire text is in capital letters (quoted here without corrections).

  ABUSERS DO ANYTHING TO MAKE THE BBS A WORSE THING THEN IT IS AND TO MAKE IT HARDER ON THIS SYSOP, MOSTLY THE REASONS ARE IS BECAUSE THE SYSOP IS A MAJOR ASSHOLE. THE FIRST THING IS TO DISPLAY WHAT TYPE OF THINGS ABUSING STARTS WITH LOG ON, IF YOU GET ON USING THAT TYPE OF NAME THAT I TOLD YOU ABOUT. IF THE SYSOP IS WATCHING, EITHER THEY’LL HANG UP AND LOCK YOU OUT OR BREAK IN FOR CHAT, IF THEY BREAK IN FOR A CHAT, HEARS SOME IDEAS WHICH YOU CAN SAY. 1, I’M BUSY, FUCK OFF. 2, I’M GOING TO TRASH YOU BAD! 3, LET ME OUT I HAVE ABUSING TO DO! 4, I HAVE TO CRASH YOUR BOARD NOW, SORRY, UNOIN RULES! 5, CAN I HELP YOU! 6, CAN YOU GIVE ME SYSOP ACCESS 7, WANT TO TRY A NEW VIRUS A MADE

  p.27 ‘A 1990s Usenet troll . . .’ Here is a slightly extended snippet: ‘You are a fiend and a sniveling coward, and you have bad breath . . . You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just knowing that you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. You are jetsam who dreams of becoming flotsam. You won’t make it. I beg for sweet death to come and remove me from a world which became unbearable when the bioterrorists designed you.’ www.guymacon.com/flame.html.

  p.28 ‘Any who replied . . .’ http://ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html#item2.

  p.28 ‘In 1999, one use
r called “Cappy Hamper” . . .’ A very lengthy and valuable resource documenting early trolling is available here: http://captaininfinity.us/rightloop/alttrollFAQ.htm. ‘Dalie the Troll Betty, Joe Blow the Troll, Otis the Troll-in-Denial, and everyone from AFKMN’ contributed to the document.

  p.29 ‘The Meowers began setting up . . .’ http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.html.

  p.30 ‘Alt.syntax.tactical attacks were carefully planned . . .’ Alt.syntax’s own guide to their methods was made available by users who I think may have hacked into their account, and then posted the results for others to be more aware of. Here it is: ‘Waves would generally break down into this kind of structure: (a) Reconnaissance (RECON): These people will go in early and usually set up camp as “friends of the newsgroup”. They will also act as “double-agents” to counter-flame the other waves as the invasion progresses. The key is building a bit of credibility. (b): Wave One: Wave one will usually be what starts the flame war. Those involved in this wave can go on and each have a different flame, or go on and flame in unison. They can bring in a subject of their own or flame a previous discussion. This wave calls for extreme subtlety. The quality of the flame MUST be at its highest point here. (c) Wave Two: Wave two will consist of tactics to attack the people who were sent in as recon and attempt to start totally new flame threads. The key here is that even if we attack a group of people restrained enough to resist our flame-bait, wave two will stir things up and get others to join in. (d) Wave Three: Wave three will generally change depending on the campaign, but will generally be added to push the confusion and chaos over the top. Flame the recon, flame the first wave, flame the second wave. These guys are our balls out, rude SOB’s. Mop up and clean out.’ http://ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/trollfaq.html#item2.