Illegal Activities

Torrenting is one of the most popular illegal activities in the world that internet users do. Simply torrenting is when a user downloads a movie that one person has bought and shares that same movie to millions of others. Websites such Pirate bay are famously known for hosting a website where users can post a link to share their movies and programs for free where millions of other people can download from each other. When one user downloads a movie off of the original owner, that user is committing piracy as that movie is intended for personal use only and not to be shared freely. Yet, with torrenting, once a user downloads for example, a movie off of the original user, they then are essentially sharing their copy with whoever wants to download. So as time goes on, that one person sharing can turn into thousands of others having the same copy of the movie and then they are able to share it to others. This is the main problem that governments are trying to prevent.

Deep Web

Another illegal activity that has been mostly hidden yet catching the government’s eye, is the Deep Web. We use Google and other search websites such as Yahoo exclusively for finding anything we need on the internet. To understand the deep web you have to imagine a deep ocean with search engines as a boat dragging a net across the depth of the water (Kumar) and what the search engines catch “the fish” is the information that comes up when searching for anything on them. An alternative way to see it is with a big iceberg (See figure 1) (Su and Ph.D) . The tip of the iceberg is small and poking out of the surface of the water represents the surface web, while the big bottom piece covered by water is the deep web which is not accessible. Search engines are only able to catch or index a fraction of the information that is in the sea and so the deep web is all the information that is not indexed by normal search engines (Kumar). Information that is in the deep Web cannot be collected and accessed from the surface internet search engines and only through an application called Tor (Kumar).Tor grants the access to deep web sites by making the user anonymous through a system of servers hiding all information (Kumar). It is estimated that the Deep Web contains “7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web” (Bergman).

 

            Figure 1- Deep Web Representation

The problem of the deep web.

What is interesting about the deep web, is that because the client used to access it hides the user’s personal information, the deep web it not policed or regulated to an extent.  This allows the sharing of literally anything. This installs a problem. By having no regulation to what gets put on the deep web people are able to post illegal things that would never be found on the ‘surface web’.  One of the most famous problems that recently got shut down on the deep web was a website called the Silk Road. This website on the deep web was a huge marketplace for buying drugs without even submitting information that could be used to identify yourself.  Yet the government on October 15^th, 2013 (Kar) intervened and finally found the person behind the running of the website. As a consequence the Silk Road 2.0 had been launched on November 6^th, 2013 (Kar)   with a revamp on selling drugs illegally online.  This is a very big problem because many people are able to buy large amounts of any drug while only paying a small commission of 4-8% to the sites owner. Not only are you able to easily find drug sales on the deep web, even more scary are the hit man websites where you can pay a large amount of bit coins (anonymous currency) to  the website and someone will kill whoever you want (Brown).

The major dilemma is, should we let these websites stand without being regulated? The risk of letting these illegal websites stand is far from practical. On one hand is it very hard to actually know if the hitman websites and other counterfeit websites are actually real. In addition, because they are on the deep web, they are very hard to track and find because of the anonymous setting. Does that mean that they should go ignored? The Silk Road 2.0 was up and running within a month and had 7,000 registered accounts (Kar). This is in comparison to a mini drug cartel, where if it did get bigger the government would have a massive problem on their hands of illegal drugs entering countries. On the contrary if these illegal websites are nothing more than gimmicks that were put up to be viral or as a joke, then diverting resources from the government to try and track down the website hosts would be a waste of time. The only way the drug market was able to be tracked and had later lead to an arrest is because it was a high traffic site. Both arguments take very different stances. In my opinion, I think that the government should be allowed to intervene in circumstances like this and police it to an extent.  I think that the government should be able to intervene just like it did by shutting down the original Silk Road before it gets to big leading to more and more people finding it and flushing more illegal drugs into countries like the US that are using a lot of resources trying to keep illegal drugs out. I think that instead of the government imposing bills that limit access to the surface of the internet, I think that we should be asking the government to police the deep web illegal areas better because they could get out of hand very fast.