Silk Road Read Online Free

purpose.
    Browsing the Hidden Wiki makes it obvious why many who visit the dark web want their activities to remain anonymous. Even before the Edward Snowden affair, where a former CIA employee leaked details of global surveillance operations by governments, people had become suspicious that authorities could track every site visited and every keystroke made, which could become rather inconvenient for those who wanted to purchase cocaine or heroin online. It was even more awkward for the people selling ecstasy or methamphetamine through the internet.
    That’s where Tor came in. As one of dozens of organisations offering anonymity software that can be downloaded for free, Tor provides ‘hidden services’ – the sites that are invisible to internet search engines. In the case of Tor, that is Onionland. Nobody – including those who work for the Tor Project – can determine who runs them or where they are located. Nor can they close the sites down. Where better to host your murky, illegal business than from premises that are invisible to everybody?
    The dark web is not a single place, but a collective term for the many ‘darknets’, parallel internets that exist alongside the one we know and that facilitate anonymous browsing and publishing. Dark-web sites can be accessed only through special software programs that enable individuals and organisations to host private or illegal material while their identity and location remain secret. It is an environment that is beyond control or intervention by government and law enforcement.
    The positive uses for Tor’s functions of allowing users to publish and read information anonymously and circumventing censorship are obvious – they allow whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, let dissidents in places such as China and Iran gain access to censored information or to circumvent laws against criticism of heads of state, and provide ordinary people with the means to surf the web without their information being harvested for marketers. But the third and smallest feature of Tor – providing hidden services – seems to have the least legitimate application. Hidden services are a way of creating meeting places where visitors can’t discover where the host is and the host can’t see where the visitors are coming from. Perfect for criminal marketplaces, but what other use might they have?
    ‘We produce software that we give away for free to people [so that] anyone in the world who needs their privacy online can have it,’ said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the Tor Group, in an interview. According to Lewman, the hidden services were developed by the US and Norwegian military as a research project to determine whether a completely anonymous platform could exist. Members of the Tor Project worked with experts from leading academic institutions such as Stanford and MIT to test security features and flaws and the ability of Tor to circumvent internet filters. Most of Tor’s funding came from the US government and non-profit organisations and research programs, while around 5 per cent of its funding came from donations, some of which were anonymous. Several of the dark-web sites claimed to covertly direct a certain percentage of their profits towards Tor and some encouraged their customers to donate any spare bitcoins to the Tor Project.
    Did it worry Lewman that some of his funding could be presumed to be coming from criminals? ‘It concerns us, yes. We’ve turned down donations, sometimes sizeable, from organisations. You know when you get the hairs standing up against the back of your neck that there’s just something wrong,’ he said. ‘And it’s sometimes incredibly tough to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars where someone says, you know, “I want to donate to you and thank you for what you do but don’t ask where this money came from”.’
    He confirmed that Tor does accept anonymous donations, though, so it doesn’t