Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/80-percent-dark-web-visits-relate-pedophilia-study-finds/

by wglb • 12 years ago

44 61 12 years ago

im3w1l• 12 years ago

Whistleblower sites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks, which allow anonymous users to upload sensitive documents to news organizations, accounted for 5 percent of Tor hidden service sites, but less than a tenth of a percent of site visits.

The impact is not proportional to number of visits. One whistleblower has a larger positve effect than one pedo looking at child porn has a negative effect. I wonder if an 800:1 ratio can be justified though.

ethomson2• 12 years ago

Really? That's a stunning claim. You're comfortable making this judgement call that whisteblowers are more positive than child rape is negative?

sirsar• 12 years ago

There is a difference between viewing and creating pedophilic pornography. Certainly, demand drives creation, but one pageview is not one child raped.

One whistleblower pageview is much more likely to be one whistle blown, which can have impact ranging from nothing to an arbitrary number of lives saved.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

The 1:1 comparison is, as your parent points out, ultimatly irrelevant because the reality is not 1:1. So I'm not worried about the 1:1 comparison.

linksbro• 12 years ago

Here's the torproject's response to this article. I think they bring up valid points about not drawing decisive conclusions based on this study.

"Tor hidden service traffic, which Dr. Gareth Owen discussed in his talk this afternooon, is only 1.5% of all Tor traffic. Tor gets about 2 million users per day total.

The researcher ran a set of Tor relays for a six month period, and recorded how many times somebody attempted to look up a hidden service (this lookup is one of the steps in visiting a hidden service). Then at the end of that period, he scanned the hidden services he'd learned about, to find out what sort of content was on them.

Dr. Owen's data shows that there's a lot of churn in hidden services, so nearly all of the sites were gone by the time he did these scans. His graphs only show data about the sites that were still up many months later: so his data could either show a lot of people visiting abuse-related hidden services, or it could simply show that abuse-related hidden services are more long-lived than others. We can't tell from the data.

Without knowing how many sites disappeared before he got around to looking at them, it's impossible to know what percentage of fetches went to abuse sites.

There are important uses for hidden services, such as when human rights activists use them to access Facebook or to blog anonymously. These uses for hidden services are new and have great potential.

PS: Law enforcement agencies use Tor to stay anonymous while they catch bad guys. Law enforcement agencies use and run hidden services, too." https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-80-percent-percent-1-2-...

belorn• 12 years ago

I agree with promoting caution when drawing conclusions on that data. We don't know how much of that data is generated by people, by bots, or what purpose they had. For example, I would assume that any national agency whose job it is identify and catch child abuse would run web scrapers at pedophilia sites.

Wasn't there a article a while back that said around 95% of all internet traffic was imitated by computers and not humans? What would the percentage be for hidden services?

sp332• 12 years ago

I don't see any slides posted, but video of the talk will be here eventually (probably by tomorrow) under the title "Tor: Hidden Services and Deanonymisation" http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014

_wmd• 12 years ago

Their streaming site seems to be having reliability issues, but seems it's still there. You can watch the raw recording at http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6112/ already

minimax2• 12 years ago

The good news is that law enforcement agencies aren't completely helpless in these cases and are actively developing technology (a la Torpedo†) to infiltrate these sites and prosecute their users.

† http://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation_torpedo/

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

This is good news?

modarts• 12 years ago

It absolutely is. I'd be interested to hear a counterargument though.

rubiquity• 12 years ago

Bad news for Tor, good news for humanity, excluding the parts of humanity that are privy on privacy.

Squarel• 12 years ago

Law enforcement are not completely helpless in that they use TOR to access these sites themselves, as per the article: " Law enforcement and anti-abuse groups patrol pedophilia Dark Web sites to measure and track them, for instance, which can count as a “visit.”"

wcummings3• 12 years ago

Good news? If LE can deanonymize pedophiles with malware they can deanonymize dissidents with malware. The capability is the problem, if it wasn't, we wouldn't need Tor.

As much as people don't want it to be true, this is an all or nothing situation. Tor is secure for everyone, or no one.

You've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet...

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

It's a blunt tool though. If 99% of the time it is used for evil that might suggest we should try to come up with a more precise tool, rather than declaring that all the human suffering it causes is automatically justified by having a safe harbor for dissidents.

minimax2• 12 years ago

This is not a Maude Flanders "won't someone think of the children!" type issue. This is bad guys actively and horrifically abusing children. It's a good thing the LEAs are going after them with technologically sophisticated countermeasures. Good for them and we're all better off for it.

rohit89• 12 years ago

I'm a little wary of having a 100% bullet-proof tool given its potential for abuse. I also feel that anonymity should incur a certain cost. It shouldn't be as simple as simply firing up tor if you want to leak launch codes. It should be one step of a process (like losing a tail) rather than some magic cloak of invisibility.

Issac• 12 years ago

Wow thats truly a bit shocking , I dont think its surprising that visits to Whistleblower sites are less than 1% , if it was more we would live in an other world.

About the high percent of visits to those abuse-related hidden services , which is a horrible fact , is mostly related to the kind of service provided ...

whistleblower sites are veeery special in a way and not that many people even have any motivation to use them . All of those illegal markets get far more visits naturally but those who use them as buyers(which must be the main group of visiters )maybe only check them out like once a week ( maybe like most of us use amazon maybe even a bit less).

But now think of youtube or sex related video Sites ... they naturally get more visits from 1 user in a week than any other service ... so i think thats a huge chunk of it.

So just to get this right , i really think its disgusting and shocking how much visits these sites seem to generate, but i think its not necessary related that most user in the dark Web use these services , but maybe just more like those who use them are using them much more exessive than any other service. Also we have to mind the factors mentioned in the article like DOS attacks etc...

jrochkind14• 12 years ago

Can we kill the phrase "dark web" somehow? It seems to be used to mean at least 4 different things, some of them vague and unspecified.

chobo• 12 years ago

To kill "dark web" we need a good alternative. I'm all ears!

jrochkind14• 12 years ago

Well, I suppose it depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about Tor hidden services, "Tor hidden services" seems like a pretty good alternative.

Yes, non-technical people don't know what this means, but they can learn. Non-technical people don't know what the "dark web" means either, but it sure sounds mysterious, and has the added danger that they often erroneously think they do, but have no idea what they're talking about.

function_seven• 12 years ago

The only thing I've personally heard it refer to is Tor, Freenet, etc. What else has it been used for?

canjobear• 12 years ago

Content unreachable from search engines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Internet

rprospero• 12 years ago

The other definitions that I've encountered are:

- Any part of the internet which isn't indexed by search engines. By this definition, the profiles on a dating site that requires a login are part of the darkweb.

- Any data on the internet not accessible via HTTP/FTP. Copying a file off a server via SCP then becomes a visit to the dark web.

What's most frustrating is when people jump between the definitions mid-discussion.

derefr2• 12 years ago

It does have a coherent meaning, I think; a "dark web" site is any website that—although fully routable from the public Internet—is impossible to stumble upon accidentally without going through some process that could be considered mens rea for consuming that kind of content.

This is useful because it separates the effect (joining a private club) from the mechanism (downloading Tor, but also things like just signing up for a private forum, etc.)

It also implies something about these sorts of privacy-enhancing technologies: if they become part of the "defaults"—if browsers become able to access Tor sites by default, and Google starts indexing them—then a Tor hidden service will no longer implicitly be part of the "dark web." It'll be part of the regular web—just anonymously so.

tomelders• 12 years ago

It's an uncomfortable truth that Tor is enabling people to engage is activities that are the result and cause of human suffering, and it's something that doesn't sit well with me. That's said, Tor is a noble project with a noble cause and these side effects aren't unique to Tor. Anything that gives people true anonymity is going to result in people using it to do things most people would find disturbing.

There's a parallel here with the "guns don't kill people" sentiment that's often brought up when people call for stricter gun controls. And here I fnd myself exhibiting some cognitive dissonance; I could say "Tor doesn't exploit and abuse children, people do" and I believe that, but I also believe that guns are inherently bad and I would like to see stricter controls. I'm not sure there's a solution to this moral puzzle and I find myself actively choosing hippocracy. I'll keep on advocating stricter gun laws whilst vehemently opposing stricter controls on the freedom of information.

So if anyone has a logical or philosophical solution to this mini moral crisis of mine, I'd really love to hear it.

jmgrosen• 12 years ago

I, too, find this hypocrisy within myself. I find myself supporting groups such as EFF (which I believe should be supported) who take on quite radical positions, if not as radical as the NRA's.

I'd like a solution to this problem as well, but one probably does not exist. Perhaps hypocrisy is a fundamental part of humanity...

drewrv• 12 years ago

Tor is designed and engineered to allow anonymity.

Handguns and semi-automatics are designed and engineered to kill humans.

If the creators intent matters, then there is a moral difference between the two.

tdees40• 12 years ago

Well yes, and I'm no gun-rights advocate (quite the opposite), but approximately 0% of guns (in the US at least) are actually used to kill people, and this is telling me that 80% of dark web activity is used for pedophilia. That seems like a very big deal.

derefr2• 12 years ago

I would actually disagree; handguns and semi-automatics are designed to be able to kill humans, but that is not their purpose. Their purpose, like that of many other offensive technologies, is deterrence (i.e. cooperation in iterated prisoner's dilemmas).

In other words: if you know I have a gun, the weights on what strategies you will consider for selfish gain shift away from those where I would shoot you with the gun, and toward those where I wouldn't. A gun can "do its job" while never being fired once over its service life!

The game theory of guns is basically a smaller-scale replica of the game theory of nuclear weapons—except that it's actually really easy, in the modern day, to ensure a power imbalance (no non-military force has a military level of gunpower), so you don't end up in the particular nuclear Nash equilibrium of everyone having the best weapon and nobody using it (you used to, though; "mutually-assured destruction" was previously known as "a Mexican standoff.")

quotemstr• 12 years ago

Your perspective is showing: one could reformulate your post as "Handguns are designed for self-protection. Tor is designed to put internet users above the law."

The whole idea of drawing moral distinctions between objects is a canard. Objects (including atomic bombs and function-enhanced H5N1) lack agency, so they are of course morally neutral. This neutrality doesn't preclude our talking about the morally-relevant effects these objects have on society though.

It's plausible under the utilitarian calculus that a ban on Tor would be in our collective interest. I personally don't think it is, but the question of Tor's overall utility is legitimate and the answer isn't immediately obvious.

stvswn4• 12 years ago

Semi-automatics are not designed and engineered to kill humans more than any other firearm. "Semi-automatic" simply means that you don't have to "re-cock" after every shot. You're probably conflating the term with "assault weapons," which is a marketing term that manufacturers use to mean "hunting rifles with gadgets and cosmetics so that they look military-style." Weapons designed for military use are definitely designed to kill people, that's absolutely true -- but the moral standing of such killing depends on the actors, right? Who is doing the killing of whom and for what purpose is what decides the morals. The firearm is amoral. So is software. Tor and guns do not have a "moral difference" because inanimate objects can't have morality to begin with.

delecti• 12 years ago

Nobody is going to accidentally download 50GB of child pornography, but people accidentally kill themselves or others with guns all the time.

That isn't a perfect or ironclad resolution to the hypocrisy, but it does highlight an important difference in the intent behind the two things. Guns are weapons, and while they have perfectly innocent uses and users (shooting ranges), they are primarily created to cause harm.

chc2• 12 years ago

I don't think they're that similar. Tor doesn't actually enable harm the way that guns do, and it certainly doesn't do it as specifically as guns do. Guns enable you to shoot things, and that's pretty much all they can do. Tor doesn't enable you to abuse a child, and it's capable of much more. Nobody abuses a child through Tor — they commit the abuse in person. Tor is sometimes used to access the artifacts of that abuse, but the core harm is unrelated to Tor and does not occur through it.

davidy123• 12 years ago

What about child pornography rings that generate "fresh" content within their membership? Reading about busts, that seems fairly common.

sitharus• 12 years ago

Well, guns - especially handguns and military-style assault rifles as opposed to hunting rifles - are designed and built to kill. If you only have a gun for personal defence its only purpose is to kill a human.

Non-automatic rifles and shotguns do have a use for hunting, though I'm of the belief that you should only hunt if you intend to eat what you shoot.

Tor has purposes other than propagating harm. It can be used to share information which otherwise would cause punishment or harm to the persons supplying or reading, such as whistle-blowers or political dissidents.

Now you can argue that those people are committing crimes and should be responsible for their actions, but that gets in to much murkier territory than killing or pedophilia.

stvswn4• 12 years ago

"Non-automatic rifles" is a misleading term because it's technically correct but should also include the set "semi-automatic rifles" which are also non-automatic. I think your point, however, was to weigh in on the idea that "semi-automatic rifles" should be the subject of more regulation, so it might be helpful to understand the terms:

Automatic: hold the trigger, bullets keep firing, also called a machine gun. They've been illegal to import or manufacture for civilian use since 1986, but you can still get one if it was made before 1986. Legally-owned machine guns have been involved in 2 murders in the US since 1934 when they were first regulated.

Semi-automatic: Not a machine gun at all. It just means that you don't have to "re-cock" the gun after each time you fire. If you aren't familiar with guns, you probably think that all guns are semi-automatic, because in movies they always are. The vast majority of gun crimes happen with semi-automatic handguns. This is because these are simply the most common types of guns out there.

Rifles and shotguns can also be "semi-automatic." "Semi-automatic rifles" aren't especially scary, though. They are just the same old rifles with a pretty common feature. They account for, at most, 2% of all murders in the US.

Finally, you seem to argue that a tool for killing is therefore used for evil -- in other words, killing is inherently evil. Men with guns have done great evil and also great good. Similarly, Tor itself is amoral, and can be used to both good and evil ends.

ddod• 12 years ago

I can't help your moral quandary, but the rationalization should really go both ways in that both technologies give the populous some measure of control against a possibly oppressive government (be it minuscule and ineffective or not). The right to bear arms in the constitution wasn't written for hunters-- it was written as another check and balance for the government.

stvswn4• 12 years ago

Agreed, and this point is often misunderstood by gun control advocates in the US (it's completely unfathomable outside of the US). Saying "I don't like that guns are used to kill people, therefore I'm okay with guns meant for hunting but these guns designed for people should be regulated or banned" completely misses the point. The Lockean philosophy behind the 2nd amendment is that individuals should have the means to protect themselves independent of (and even from) the state. We need guns in case we need to lead another revolution. Similarly, the state should always be aware that its citizens have the capacity to revolt effectively. We know that having this right means bad things will happen -- guns will be available for criminals to use, for example. If you believe in Liberal gun rights, you think that the evil that happens when guns are freely available is an acceptable price to pay for an important freedom.

In the same way, that's why we need Tor -- because citizens need to be able to communicate and organize absent of government surveillance and interference. Tor is not important "even though" it can be used to avoid law enforcement. It is important "because" it can be used to evade law enforcement, because one day we may have to.

I mean, of course, a purely hypothetical revolution. I am serious when I say, however, that the framers of the Constitution wanted future US governments to be constrained by the power of the citizens, and so they gave the citizens guns. They also guaranteed the right to assembly and free association (1st amendment) and the right to be free from search or seizure (4th amendment). Inter-citizen communication free from government surveillance is implied there, I think.

jqm• 12 years ago

That same argument could be made against the internet in general.

My philosophical solution is never to blame tools.

MetaCosm• 12 years ago

Good luck. I can say I sympathize with the pain that applying consistent logical principals can have on beliefs. The longer you have believed something, and the more intense the emotions around it are, the harder it is to give up on it. The more times you have defended your opinion, the more you feel you have to maintain it, you feel invested.

I would just point out that you owe zero loyalty to what you thought yesterday (or 30 seconds ago). Maintaining views despite new information and logic is just dogma. Once you make things dogma and they conflict, you can either be a hippocrit (which at least makes you self-aware) or create ridiculous tortured logic to try to self-justify (which seems to be what you are asking for help with?) -- both are problematic, and IMHO harmful.

pdabbadabba• 12 years ago

Others have suggested interesting and valuable possibilities. Here's another: Why think about this so categorically? Mightn't the degree and type of harm also be a factor?

Tor gives people a way to anonymously download child porn. These are probably people who would download child porn anyway and, while I certainly don't approve of even a single intentional download, I do wonder how much harm is caused by a single download. It's not zero, but it's a lot less, I think, than the harm of shooting someone.

On the other side, it is also, apparently, much less likely that any given gun sale is going to lead to a murder. But it's possible that the moral arithmetic still works out to significantly greater average harm.

We should also think about the potential benefits in the same way. Both Tor and guns supposedly have some capacity to protect/foster democratic government. One should also compare the probability of these positive outcomes.

WalterSear• 12 years ago

Tor doesn't kill people - demonizing someone with a pathology rather than seeking to help them does.

stvswn4• 12 years ago

I think you're correct in recognizing that inanimate objects like guns or software do not have agency and cannot have moral value. The actors who use them should be judged on the morality of the ends to which guns or Tor are the means. This doesn't mean that you can't advocate for the free use of one inanimate object and simultaneously advocate for the regulation of another. Just because I'm in favor of gun rights doesn't mean I have to be OK with nuclear-weapons rights or dangerous-exotic-animal rights.

There's another similarity between Tor and guns (at least in the US). Neither can be eliminated anyway, it's better to discuss how to manage their existence. Tor has no central server that can be shut down. Guns are durable hunks of metal that can be easily hidden, and they exist in huge quantities across the US and could never be confiscated.

iwwr• 12 years ago

Well, you've got the benefit of free access to content and live in a free society with stable institutions. Most people in the world don't have that. Tor provides a uniquely valuable communication tool and mechanism to coordinate for social change, even if it allows some extremists or creeps to use it too.

The value of privacy goes beyond that, to the balance beween state authority and individual autonomy, to freedom of speech and expression. If you argue against Tor you argue in favor of surveillance and against democratic control over institutions.

sildur• 12 years ago

The other 20 percent are probably 404 errors.

pdeuchler• 12 years ago

As ~linksbro points out, hidden sites have a huge amount of churn. In fact, back in the days when I used to frequent the darker side of things most hacking forums would change addresses monthly/weekly/sometimes daily. A lot of various hidden sites are ad hoc communication platforms, put up and taken down as needed. And yet, even still, there is a large amount that are incredibly well hidden and require several jumps/prior knowledge to get to (i.e. not just hitting a certain url).

Ignoring all hits that went to sites dead after six months (an eternity for hidden services) is akin to the weight loss studies that throw out the data points representing people that dropped out when they didn't lose weight. Almost blatantly dishonest and shows a pretty superficial understanding of that which they are trying to study.

Beyond that there are still so many statistical fallacies and logical leaps going on in this article it's pretty astounding... for instance the author editorializes that:

>> What they may instead show is that Tor users who seek child abuse materials use Tor much more often and visit sites much more frequently than those seeking to buy drugs or leak sensitive documents to a journalist.

Completely ignoring the possibility that these pedophilic sites are comprised of images, which could artificially increase the amount of requests (i.e. one person looking at 10 images = 10 unique hits in the study). I could go on and on here, but I think this money quote from the study principal sheds some light upon the true objectives at play:

>> “Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing,” says Owen. “But it’s hampering the rights of children and creating a place where pedophiles can act with impunity.”

Edit: In my mind, the real takeaway from this article is that the FBI/Interpol seem pretty content leaving these sites up for extended periods of time while they go after the drug marketplaces, carders, and counterfeiters

Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds

Related Stories