Using the Dark Web could be the most Patriotic thing you can do
Let’s talk about who has a need for cryptography in their life (hint and thesis statement: you and everyone).
For the uninitiated, cryptography is the practice of making data or a message absolutely meaningless to anyone who shouldn’t be able to. This is slightly different than a secure architecture which is preventing access to the message, cryptography is making sure that no matter who reads your message only the people who should be able to read it can. Usually by making the data meaningless with a pre-specified key or keys to lock and unlock the data.
Cryptography used to be a huge hot button topic, and as a technology only used to be used by governments and guarded under second amendment (restricted as a weapon of war)since it was considered a weapon. Just kidding, it’s still a huge issue. But it wasn’t until one of my favorite court cases where source code and to an extent software gained first amendment protections.
So why is using the Dark Web one of the most patriotic things you can (easily) do? Well, it was an encryption technology created by the US naval research institute specifically to hide the activities of their operatives online and hide where they were accessing the internet. See when you connect to a website to initiate the connection, you have to tell them what your IP address is so they can send the data to you. Your IP address is tied to a physical location. This isn’t a problem when you trust your internet connection (let’s face it, you shouldn’t). But an operative deep undercover in a foreign country can’t really trust their internet connection can they?
No, they can’t.
So the Naval Research Institute created TOR: The Onion Router (No lie, that is literally what it stands for) for the purpose of hiding our country’s operative’s activity online. Except here’s the problem, if TOR was only used by The Navy, CIA, FBI, or other government agencies it would become very clear very soon that if you didn’t know exactly who was connecting to you, you could at least know that it was a government agency of some sort. So to mask their activity online, they gave TOR away free to the public to massively increase the traffic on it.
In simple terms: TOR is a proxy service. All it does is mask which IP address you are accessing a website from. Which is really great. Here’s a simple example of what a proxy is:
With all of these things in mind: Why should you use TOR? (or if you’re an edgy journalist “The Dark Web”)
Simply put, you are being watched online. Even here on Medium, your activities online are being tracked, cataloged, and analyzed by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple and government agencies like the NSA, GCHQ, and others. The fact all of this data is being collected often through very thin consent bothers me, and should bother everyone. While implementing new legislation, legal protections, and governmental controls to prevent and prohibit this awful behavior: we cannot trust our governments and corporations at this point. They have done nothing to deserve our trust online from the creation of the NSA to the destruction of net neutrality. Using services like TOR or other Proxy servers is a great way to prevent a lot of this tracking to occur.
Also, remember how I mentioned that cryptography used to be considered a governmental weapon? When using TOR I imagine to some extent the freedom of arms battle cries of the NRA, but with much more real world applications. (Honestly if our government wanted to mow us all down and control us, every single gun owning American has nothing on the massive armor, air, and naval power of the US military). It’s a way to preserve your freedom online, and fight back against big government and big data.
Second, let’s look back to the original use case for TOR (which is still in place to this day): Hiding the activities of US operatives online. By using TOR yourself, you make it more difficult to tell who’s a US spy, and who’s not. That’s a pretty damn patriotic thing to do on a smartphone.
