The Dark Net

by Jamie Bartlett

  But if everyone starts using Bitcoin, government’s ability to tax and spend will diminish: healthcare, education and social security will suffer. The things that hold democracies together, and provide support for the most in need. Societies cannot be broken and fixed like computer code, nor do they follow predictable mathematical rules. If genuinely anonymous communication becomes the norm, it’s inevitable that it will be used by criminals too. Some of the progressive groups and individuals that are fighting for digital anonymity are doing it for good reason. They don’t realise they are also pushing the political agenda of a hard-line, radical libertarian from California.

  Tim May doesn’t care what’s propelling it, because he thinks the endgame is inevitable. He tells me the third leg of the trifecta is in place: along with PGP, and anonymous browsing, there is now an anonymous currency: ‘And, man,’ he exclaims excitedly, ‘that’s got to be freaking Big Brother out!’ May anticipates that in the coming decades, governments as we know them will disintegrate – to be replaced by a digital ‘Gulch’, something he calls a ‘cyberstead’. A place where citizens can exist with no state at all, creating online communities of interest and interacting directly with each other. Like Amir, he’s under no illusions that in the short term it will be turbulent for those at the bottom, even if the long-term prospects are good. ‘Crypto-anarchy means prosperity for those who can grab it, those competent enough to have something of value to offer for sale,’ he wrote in 1994. He hasn’t lost his radical edge: ‘We’re about to see the burn-off of useless eaters,’ he tells me, only half joking. ‘Approximately four to five billion people on our planet are essentially doomed: crypto is about making the world safe for the 1 per cent.’ The short term has to be tough, he believes. It’s only by removing the crutches we depend on to protect us – rules, laws, welfare – that we can grow to fulfil our potential.

  I left Calafou admiring what Amir and others are attempting but worried about what it might lead to. Amir is different from May in many ways. He believes places like Calafou offer a better alternative to other ways of living, for everyone – not just for the top 5, or even 1, per cent – which is why it will win out in the end. But like May, he believes crypto will make this happen, without thinking precisely how, or what the consequences could be. A mathematical formula that will, with the relentless certainty of numbers, create a world of Calafous: small collectives that are self-sustaining, self-governing, owned and controlled by the people.

  At Calafou there are ‘people’s assemblies’, where the residents meet to agree common tasks, projects, responsibilities and so on. It’s a sort of Greek agora: a method of collective decision-making that tries to involve everyone in this nascent little community. ‘Us in the hacker space don’t bother with it,’ says Amir. ‘We don’t believe in it. We want to promote individual freedom. If you have an idea, just get on and do it.’ As I was leaving Calafou, crossing back over the concrete bridge to the outside world, Amir told me: ‘There are so many people just complaining and doing nothing about it. We actually make things. We solve problems.’ Cypherpunks write code. And he wandered back into his very own Gulch.

  * * *

  fn1 Despite their heated exchanges, the two would later become friends.

  fn2 Someone told me later he sometimes works forty-eight hours straight, before sleeping for a day to recover. It turns out, when Pablo finally does talk, that he’d been in the middle of receiving the first successful Bitcoin transaction using a ‘stealth address’, one that cannot be traced.

  fn3 Bitcoins can be divided into eight decimal places. The smallest non-divisible unit is known as a ‘Satoshi’.

  fn4 I’ve documented at least 350 publicly announced crypto-parties around the world since 2012, on every continent, with anything from 5 to 500 people taking part.

  Chapter 4

  Three Clicks

  TOR HIDDEN SERVICES are not easy to navigate. In many respects, they are very similar to websites on the surface net. But they are rarely linked to other sites, and the URL addresses are a meaningless series of numbers and letters: h67ugho8yhgff941.onion rather than the more familiar .com or .co.uk. To make matters worse, Tor Hidden Services frequently change addresses. To help visitors, there are several ‘index’ pages that list current addresses. In 2013, the most well known of these index pages was called the Hidden Wiki. The Hidden Wiki looks identical to Wikipedia, and lists dozens of the most popular sites in this strange parallel internet: the WikiLeaks cache, censorship-free blogs, hacker chat forums, the New Yorker magazine’s whistleblower drop box.

  In late 2013 I was browsing the Hidden Wiki, searching for the infamous dark net market Silk Road. As I scrolled down, I suddenly spotted a link for a child pornography website. I stopped. There was nothing strikingly different about it – a simple link to an address comprised of a string of numbers and letters, like every other website listed here. For a while I sat frozen, unsure what to do. Close down my computer? Take a screenshot? I contacted the police.

  The internet has radically changed the way child pornography is produced, shared and viewed. According to the United Nations, child pornography (which some specialists prefer to call child abuse images) refers to ‘any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes’. According to UK law, these images are classified under five levels of obscenity.

  Once I’d opened my Tor browser, it took me two mouse clicks to arrive at the page advertising the link. If I had clicked again, I would have committed an extremely serious crime. I can’t think of another instance where doing something so bad is so easy.

  We can now share files and information more simply, quickly and inexpensively than ever before. On the whole, that is a very positive thing. But not always. Is child pornography really this accessible? What does it mean if it is? Who is creating and viewing it? And in an age of anonymity, is it possible to stop them?

  A History

  The prohibition of child pornography is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. During the sexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s child pornography was openly sold over the counter in some countries – most notably in Scandinavia – and in certain US states; an interregnum that is now referred to as the ‘ten-year madness’. By the late seventies many governments started passing tougher legislation to stamp it out, and by the late 1980s, child pornography had become very hard to find. The biggest-selling child pornography magazine in North America had a circulation of approximately eight hundred, and was distributed via a handful of shops to small, close-knit networks of dedicated collectors. In the UK, many paedophiles would travel overseas in order to smuggle it in. Law enforcement agencies in the US considered the matter more or less under control. In 1982, the US General Accounting Office reported that: ‘As a result of the decline in commercial child pornography, the principal Federal agencies responsible for enforcing laws covering the distribution of child pornography – the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Postal Service – do not consider child pornography a high priority.’ In 1990, the NSPCC estimated there were 7,000 known images of child pornography in circulation. Because it was so hard to come by, the numbers that were accessing it were vanishingly small. It required effort and determination, which limited it to the most motivated individuals. Even during the ‘ten-year madness’, you didn’t – you couldn’t – just stumble across it.

  The arrival of the internet changed everything. By the early nineties, the opportunities of networked computing were quickly exploited by child pornographers as a way to find and share illegal material. In 1993, Operation Long Arm targeted two Bulletin Board Systems that were offering paid access to hundreds of illegal images. Anonymous Usenet groups alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.schoolgirls were both used to share child pornography in the late nineties. In 1996, members of a child abuse ring called the Orchid Club were committing and
sharing live abuse using digital cameras connected directly to computers in the US, Finland, Canada, Australia and the UK. Two years later, the police uncovered the Wonderland Club, which comprised hundreds of people in over thirty countries who were using powerful encryption software to secretly trade images over the net. Prospective members had to be put forward by existing members, and possess at least 10,000 unique child pornographic images to join. In total, the police uncovered 750,000 images and 1,800 videos. Seven UK men were convicted for their role in the network in 2001.

  As more countries went online, new production hubs sprang up. The infamous Lolita City in the Ukraine flooded the net with half a million images in the early 2000s, before it was shut down in 2004 – although two leaders of the agency were taken into custody and then released.

  By October 2007, Interpol’s Child Abuse Image Database – made up of images seized by the police – contained half a million unique images. By 2010, the UK police database, held by the specialist Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), stored more than 850,000 images (although they have since reported finding up to two million images in a single offender’s collection). In 2011, law enforcement authorities in the US turned over twenty-two million images and videos of child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  Twenty-five years on from the NSPCC’s estimate, there are today huge volumes of child pornography online, easily accessible and efficiently distributed. Between 2006 and 2009, the US Justice Department recorded twenty million unique computer IP addresses who were sharing child pornography files using ‘peer-to-peer’ file-sharing software. CEOP believes that there are approximately 50,000 people in the UK today sharing or viewing indecent images of children.

  It turns out that I wasn’t alone on the Hidden Wiki. According to hackers that took control of the Hidden Wiki over one three-day period in March 2014, 100,000 other people had also visited the index, and one in ten of them had visited the link that I’d seen. According to the same source, between 29 July and 27 August 2013 there were thirteen million page impressions on Tor Hidden Services – and 600,000 of them were visits to the child pornography pages: the most popular group of pages after the index page itself.

  Given the scale it is not surprising that there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ consumer of child pornography. Although there are some broad trends – nearly all are men and often well educated – they come from all walks of life. One academic has recorded nine different types of offender, including the ‘trawlers’ who seek out images, the ‘secure collectors’ who obsess over secrecy and build large collections, and the ‘producers’ who create images themselves and disseminate them. Many of these offenders would have sought and collected illegal images before the advent of the internet: it’s just that the net is now the most convenient place to do it. But there is now another type of offender, one unique to the internet age: the browser.

  The Browser

  ‘I have absolutely no idea how this happened, I really don’t. In fact, I don’t even understand me entirely.’ Michaelfn1 seems genuinely bewildered as he explains to me how he was recently convicted of possessing almost 3,000 indecent images of children on his computer. Although most of the material was categorised as ‘Level 1’ – the least serious category, which is erotic posing but no sexual activity – his collection stretched into the more serious and obscene Levels 2, 3 and 4, and most was of girls aged between six and sixteen.

  Michael is in his fifties, smartly dressed and clean-shaven. He strides confidently into the room and greets me with a friendly handshake. Until recently, he had a busy job at a medium-sized business just outside Birmingham. A married man with one grown-up daughter, a football fan who enjoys an active social life. ‘A very ordinary, heterosexual bloke,’ he tells me. ‘I was never – never! – remotely curious about young girls. It never even crossed my mind.’ He started watching pornography occasionally in his twenties, and dipped in periodically in his thirties. ‘But it was only in my forties that I started watching pornography online habitually, for sexual relief.’ He claims that the death of a close friend and a flagging sex life provided the prompt, but that his habit was nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from a preference for teenage girls. ‘I was just attracted to the youth; younger faces, younger bodies. I just find teenage girls more physically attractive than women my age.’

  The slightly unsettling truth about sexual desire is that the law and social preferences don’t neatly converge. In the UK, although the legal age of consent is sixteen, any pornography that includes someone under the age of eighteen has been illegal since the Sexual Offences Act of 2003. Yet there is a very significant and sustained demand for pornography featuring female teenagers. ‘Legal teen’ content has always been the most competitive and populated niche market in the adult industry. According to the Internet Adult Films Database, a central repository of commercial adult films online, the most common word in film titles is ‘teen’. In 2013 two American academics, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, analysed almost fifty million sexual search terms that internet users had made on a popular search engine between 2009 and 2011. One in every six related to age, and the most popular by far was ‘teen/teens’, followed by ‘young’. Ogas and Gaddam also collected instances where a specific age was included in the search. The three most commonly requested ages that men search for online are, in order of popularity, thirteen, sixteen and fourteen.

  Sitting alongside this vast ‘legal teen’ content is an enormous grey area of pornography known to experts as ‘pseudo child pornography’ (although the sites themselves usually call it ‘jailbait’ or ‘barely legal’ pornography), which features teenagers that are, or appear to be, around the ages that Ogas and Gaddam found. The reason it’s a grey area is not because the law is unclear, but because it’s extremely difficult to determine how old teenagers are, especially as some try to look younger and others try to look older. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a UK-based organisation that works with the police and internet service providers to try to remove online child pornography. It was set up in 1996, after the Metropolitan Police told UK internet service providers to close down around one hundred Usenet groups that they suspected of sharing child pornography. The providers proposed the IWF as a system of industry self-regulation. Every day the IWF receives dozens of reports from people who have come across what they suspect might be illegal content online. On receiving a report, each analyst carefully studies the URL content to determine whether the site contains images or videos that are likely to be illegal. The analyst will attempt to grade the severity of the material into one of the five levels. If it is judged to be illegal, the analyst will alert the police and contact the internet service provider or site administrator and request that the material be swiftly removed. If it’s based in the UK, the IWF can usually get material taken offline within an hour. If the site is hosted overseas, which it nearly always is, they will do their best to work with the local internet provider or police to get it removed. They also maintain a list of blacklisted URLs to help internet service providers keep the material off. As a rule of thumb, however, the IWF can only process a referral if they believe the subject of a photograph or video is aged fourteen or under. No one knows precisely how much of this jailbait material there is, but according to Fred Langford, Director of Global Operations at IWF, they have received an increasing number of reports of it over the past ten years.

  Langford claims that it is surprisingly easy to get from legal to illegal pornography simply by following website links and pop-ups. Click a link on a legal site – such as the sprawling set of ‘Tube’ video sites – to a slightly more shadowy teen page; this in turn offers a link to a ‘jailbait’ page; and there you might be offered yet another link . . . In this way, jailbait pornography acts as something of a gateway, both metaphorically and practically. According to research conducted by the charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, nine out of ten internet sex offenders did not intentionally seek
out child images, but found them via pop-ups or progressive links while browsing adult pornography.

  It is extremely difficult to verify these accounts. It might be an attempt by an offender to distance himself from his crime. But this is, Michael claims, exactly what happened to him. He began to visit teen pornography sites more and more regularly. And whenever he clicked on a new link – especially a free site – he provoked a ‘pornado’ of other unrequested sites opening on his computer, caused by ‘pop-up’ or ‘pop-under’ sites and advertisements. These pop-up sites offered him an almost infinite array of fetishes and fantasies – and he was drawn to the jailbait categories, girls of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He started to click.

  Michael says that, after a while, he found he was spending more time in the jailbait category, and less in adult, mainstream porn sites. He never used Tor, or encryption software – his searches were all on the surface web. But he started to save and keep the images or links to sites he’d found. He felt guilty after masturbating – but never enough to delete what he’d found. They were under eighteen, but they weren’t children, he says. He struggles to explain what happened next. ‘I can’t tell you precisely when it happened, although I absolutely accept there was a point when I did cross a line.’ He had moved from viewing photographs and videos of teenagers, to images that, he says, were clearly of children. ‘It happened in tiny increments,’ he goes on. ‘I really don’t remember when I moved from teens to children. But I did.’