The Dark Net
Page 2
In 1995, when Bell wrote ‘Assassination Politics’, this was all hypothetical. Although Bell believed his market would ultimately lead to the collapse of every government in the world, reality hadn’t caught up with his imagination. Nearly two decades later, with the creation of digital currencies like Bitcoin, anonymous browsers like Tor and trustworthy encryption systems, it had, and Bell’s vision was realised. ‘Killing is in most cases wrong, yes,’ Sanjuro wrote when he launched the Assassination Market in the summer of 2013:
However, this is an inevitable direction in the technological evolution . . . When someone uses the law against you and/or infringes upon your rights to life, liberty, property, trade or the pursuit of happiness, you may now, in a safe manner from the comfort of your living room, lower their life-expectancy in return.
There are, today, at least half a dozen names on the Assassination Market. Although it is frightening, no one, as far as I can tell, has been assassinated. Its significance lies not in its effectiveness, but in its existence. It is typical of the sort of creativity and innovation that characterises the dark net: a place without limits, a place to push boundaries, a place to express ideas without censorship, a place to sate our curiosities and desires, whatever they may be. All dangerous, magnificent and uniquely human qualities.
* * *
fn1 In 2010 Tor was awarded the Free Software Foundation’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit, in part for the service it provides for whistleblowers, human-rights campaigners and activists in dissident movements.
fn2 September 1993, the month America On-Line started to offer its subscribers access to Usenet, is etched into internet folklore as ‘the eternal September’, when newcomers logged on to the internet en masse.
Chapter 1
Unmasking the Trolls
‘At the top of the tree of life there isn’t love: there is lulz.’
Anonymous
A Life Ruin
‘HI /B/!’ READ the small placard that Sarah held to her semi-naked body. ‘7 August 2013, 9.35 p.m.’
It was an announcement to the hundreds – thousands, perhaps – of anonymous users logged on to the infamous ‘/b/’ board on the image-sharing website 4chan that she was ready to ‘cam’. Appreciative viewers began posting various sexually explicit requests, which Sarah performed, photographed and uploaded.
On 4chan, there are boards dedicated to a variety of subjects, including manga, DIY, cooking, politics and literature. But the majority of the twenty million people who visit the site each month head for /b/, otherwise known as the ‘random’ board. Sarah’s photographs were only part of one of many bizarre, offensive or sexually graphic image ‘threads’ constantly running on /b/. Here, there is little to no moderation, and almost everyone posts anonymously. There is, however, a set of loose guidelines: the 47 Rules of the Internet, created by /b/users, or ‘/b/tards’, themselves, including:
Rule 1: Do not talk about /b/
Rule 2: Do NOT talk about /b/
Rule 8: There are no real rules about posting
Rule 20: Nothing is to be taken seriously
Rule 31: Tits or G[et] T[he] F[uck] O[ut] – the choice is yours
Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw
Rule 38: No real limits of any kind apply here – not even the sky
Rule 42: Nothing is sacred
The anonymous and uncensored world of /b/ generates an enormous amount of inventive, funny and offensive content, as users vie for popularity, and notoriety. Did you ever click on a YouTube link and unexpectedly open Rick Astley’s 1987 smash hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’?fn1 That was /b/. Or receive funny photographs of cats with misspelled captions? Also /b/. The hacktivist group Anonymous? /b/ again.
But anonymity has its downside. Female users are a novelty here, and are routinely ignored or insulted, that is unless they post photographs of themselves, or play ‘camgirl’, which is always a simple and effective way to capture the attention of the /b/ tards. 4chan has a dedicated board for camming, called ‘/soc/’, where users are expected to treat camgirls nicely. Every day, dozens of camgirls appear there and perform. But occasionally one foolishly strays into /b/.
Approximately twenty minutes after the first photograph was posted, one user requested that Sarah take a naked photograph of herself with her first name written somewhere on her body. Soon afterwards, another user asked for a naked photograph of her posing with any medication she was taking. She duly performed both tasks. This was a mistake.
Anonymous said: shit, I hope no one doxxes her. She actually delivered. She seems like a kind girl.
Anonymous replied: dude get a grip she gave her first name, her physician’s full name, and even the dormitory area she lives in she wants to be found.
Anonymous replied: She is new. Any girl who makes signs or writes names on her body is clearly new to camwhoring, so they really don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.
Sarah had inadvertently provided enough personal information to allow users to ‘dox’ her – to trace her identity. Other /b/tards were alerted and quickly joined the thread – on 4chan, doxing a camwhore is seen as a rare treat – and before long, users had located Sarah on her university’s searchable directory, and revealed her full name, address and telephone number. Next, they tracked down her Facebook and Twitter accounts. Sarah was still at her computer, watching helplessly.
Anonymous said: STOP. Seriously. Fucking fat losers
Anonymous replied: good to see you’re still in the thread sarah. You’re welcome btw.
Anonymous replied: heyyy . . . sarah . . . can I add you on facebook? Just kidding delete that shit before your nudes get sent to your friends
Anonymous said: She literally just made her fucking twitter private while I was browsing her pics. Fucking cunt.
Anonymous replied: It’s K if she does delete it. I’m making notes on the people on her friends list and their relation with her. Will start sending the nudes soon.
Anonymous replied: LOL she deleted her Facebook. Doubt she can delete her relatives though.
Anonymous replied: Eh, just save her name. Eventually once all this settles she will reactivate it and she will have her jimmies rustled once more. She will now never know peace from this rustling. And she’s going to have one embarassing fucking time with her family.
Anonymous said: You fucking nerdbutts got her Facebook? You guys are fucking unbelievable. A girl actually delivers on this shit site, and you fuckers dox her. Fucking /b/, man.
Anonymous replied: get the fuck out you piece of shit moralfag trash
Anonymous replied: How much time do you spend here? You’re really surprised by this?
Anonymous said: Those who deliver nudes deserve no harm
Anonymous replied: hahahahahahaha you must be new here. ‘for the lulz’.*
Anonymous said: I don’t wanna be a whiteknight, but already being one, I wonder why /b/ does this. She provided tits and shit, yet ‘we’ do this to her. Internet hate machine at its best.
Anonymous replied: /b/ camwhoring: 2004–2013. R.I.P. Thanks.
Anonymous replied: The amazing thing to me is how you guys never shut up about how ‘if u keep doxing them we wont have any camwhores left :(.’ notice that you’ve been saying this for roughly a decade.
Anonymous said: Anyway here is a list of all her Facebook friends. You can message friends, and all their own friends, so that anyone with a slight connection to sarah via friend of friend knows
Anonymous replied: So has somebody started messaging her friends and family or can I begin with it?
Anonymous replied: Assume no one else has, because anyone else who responds might be a whiteknight looking to make you think that someone else was already sending the pics out.
Anonymous replied: gogogo
One user created a fake Facebook account, put together a collage of Sarah’s pictures, and began sending them to Sarah’s family and friends with a short message: ‘Hey, do
you know Sarah? The poor little sweetie has done some really bad things. So you know, here are the pictures she’s posted on the internet for everyone to see.’ Within a few minutes, almost everyone in Sarah’s social media network had been sent the photographs.
Anonymous said: [xxxxx] is her Fone number – confirmed.
Anonymous replied: Just called her, she is crying. She sounded like a sad sad sobbing whale.
Anonymous replied: Is anyone else continuously calling?
This was what /b/ calls a ‘life ruin’: cyberbullying intended, as its name suggests, to result in long-term, sustained distress. It’s not the first time that /b/ has doxed camgirls. One elated participant celebrated the victory by creating another thread to share stories and screen grabs of dozens of other ‘classic’ life ruins, posting photographs of a girl whose Facebook account had been hacked, her password changed, and the explicit pictures she’d posted on /b/ shared on her timeline.
Anonymous said: I feel kinda bad for her. She was hot and shit, also cute. Too bad she was dumb enough to leak her name and whatnot. Oh, well. Shit happens.
Anonymous replied: If was clever she would have g[ot] t[he] f[uck] o[ut] she didnt, therefore she deserves the consequences
Anonymous replied: I don’t give a shit what happens either. Bitch was camwhoring while she had a boyfriend.
The operation took under an hour. Soon, the thread had vanished, and Sarah was forgotten.
Doxing camgirls is only one of a growing number of ways that people abuse, intimidate, provoke, anger or ‘troll’ others online. Celebrities, journalists, politicians, sportspeople, academics – indeed, almost anyone in the public eye, or with a large following online – regularly receive insults, inflammatory comments and threats from complete strangers. In 2011, Sean Duffy was imprisoned after making offensive remarks on Facebook, including a post mocking a fifteen-year-old who’d committed suicide. When journalist Caroline Criado-Perez and others succeeded in a campaign to get Jane Austen featured on the new ten-pound note in 2013, she was bombarded with abusive messages from anonymous Twitter users, culminating in bomb and death threats deemed serious enough for the police to advise she move to a safe house. After appearing on BBC’s Question Time, the University of Cambridge classicist Mary Beard received ‘online menaces’ of sexual assault. In June 2014, the author J. K. Rowling was viciously attacked online for donating £1 million to the ‘Better Together’ campaign to oppose Scottish independence.
Some form of trolling takes place on almost every online space. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all have their own species of troll, each evolved to fit their environment, like Darwin’s finches. MySpace trolls have a register and tone perfectly adapted to upset aspiring teenage musicians. Amateur pornography websites are populated with trolls who know precisely how to offend exhibitionists. The ‘comment’ sections on reputable news sites are routinely bursting with insults.
Over the last five years, there seems to have been a dramatic increase in this type of behaviour. In 2007, 498 people in England and Wales were convicted of using an electronic device to send messages that were ‘grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or of a menacing character’. By 2012, that number had risen to 1,423. Almost one in three eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in Britain knows someone who has been a victim of anonymous online abuse. In a poll of almost 2,000 British adults on the subject, 2 per cent said that they had insulted someone, in some form, online – which, when extrapolated, would amount to some one million trolls in the UK alone.
‘Trolling’ has today become shorthand for any nasty or threatening behaviour online. But there is much more to trolling than abuse. Zack is in his early thirties, and speaks with a soft Thames Estuary accent. He has been trolling for over a decade. ‘Trolling is not about bullying people,’ he insists, ‘it is all about unlocking. Unlocking situations, creating new scenarios, pushing boundaries, trying ideas out, calculating the best way to provoke a reaction. Threatening to rape someone on Twitter is not trolling: that’s just threatening to rape someone.’
Zack has spent years refining his trolling tactics. His favourite technique, he tells me, is to join a forum, intentionally make basic grammatical or spelling mistakes, wait for someone to insult his writing, and then lock them into an argument about politics. He showed me one recent example that he’d saved on his laptop. Zack had posted what appeared to be an innocuous, poorly written comment on a popular right-wing website, complaining that right-wingers wouldn’t be right wing if they read more. An incensed user responded, and then posted a nude picture that Zack had uploaded to an obscure forum using the same pseudonym some time before.
The bait had been taken. Zack hit back immediately:
You shouldn’t deny yourself. If looking at the pics makes you want to touch your penis then just do it . . . if you want I can probably find you some more pictures of my penis – or maybe you’d like some of my ass also? Or if you want we could talk about why regressive ideologies are a bad idea in general and why people who adopt them are likely to have a much harder time in understanding the world than someone who’s accepting of progress and social development?
Zack then began posting a series of videos of his penis in various states of arousal interspersed with insults about right-wingers and quotes from Shakespeare and Cervantes. ‘Prepare to be surprised!’ Zack said mischievously, before he showed me the posts.
For Zack, this was a clear win. His critic was silenced by the deluge, which occupied the comments section of the website for several hours. ‘He was so incapable of a coherent response that he resorted to digging into my posting history for things he thought might shame me – but I’m not easily shamed.’
‘But what was the point?’ I asked him.
There’s a short pause. ‘I dunno, but it was fun. It doesn’t really matter if it was otherwise fruitless.’
For Zack, trolling is part art, part science, part joke, part political act, but also much more. ‘Trolling is a culture, it’s a way of thinking’ – and one, he says, that has existed since the birth of the internet. If I wanted to discover where this apparently modern problem came from, I had to go back to the very beginning.
Finger
The internet’s precursor, the Arpanet, was, until the 1980s, the preserve of a tiny academic and governmental elite. These ‘Arpanauts’, however, found that they enjoyed chatting as much as exchanging data sets. Within four years of its creation the Arpanet’s TALK function (originally designed as a small add-on to accompany the transfer of research, like a Post-It note) was responsible for three quarters of all Arpanet traffic. TALK, which later morphed into electronic mail, or ‘e’-mail, was revolutionary. Sitting at your computer terminal in your department building, you could suddenly communicate with several people at once, in real time, without ever looking at or speaking to them. The opportunities afforded by this new technology occasionally made the small group of world-class academics behave in strange ways.
One research group, formed in 1976, was responsible for deciding what would be included in an email header. They called themselves the ‘Header People’, and created an unmoderated chat room to discuss the subject. The room became famous (or infamous) for the raucous and aggressive conversations held there. Arguments could flare up over anything. Ken Harrenstien, the academic who set up the group, would later describe them as a ‘bunch of spirited sluggers, pounding an equine cadaver to smithereens’.
In 1979, another team of academics were at work developing a function called ‘Finger’, which would allow users to know what time other users logged on or off the system. Ivor Durham from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a widget to allow users to opt out of Finger, in case they preferred to keep their online activity private. The team debated the merits of both sides, but someone leaked the (internal) discussion to the rest of the Arpanet. Durham was attacked relentlessly and mercilessly by other academics from across the US, who believed that this compromised the open, transparent nature of the Arpanet.
Most of these academics knew each other, so online arguments were tempered by the risk of bumping into your foe at the next computer science conference. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and righteous indignation spread across the Arpanet. One participant in the Finger episode thought that tongue-in-cheek comments were usually misread on a computer, and proposed that sarcastic remarks made on the Arpanet be suffixed with a new type of punctuation to avoid readers taking them the wrong way: ;-) But even the first emoticon wasn’t enough, because users just started slotting them after a sarcastic put-down, which was somehow even more annoying. (‘The f***ing a**hole is winking at me as well?!’) Worried that the network was quickly becoming an uncivil place, Arpanauts published a ‘netiquette’ guide for newcomers. Satire and humour, it advised, was to be avoided, as ‘it is particularly hard to transmit, and sometimes comes across as rude and contemptuous’.