
Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds - wglb
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/80-percent-dark-web-visits-relate-pedophilia-study-finds/
======
linksbro
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-...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-80-percent-
percent-1-2-percent-abusive)

~~~
belorn
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?

------
tomelders
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.

~~~
drewrv
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.

~~~
derefr
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.")

~~~
zbraniecki
The problem of guns is a bit deeper than iterated prisoners dillema (or
actually, more literate).

If you have a gun and I have a gun I have to take into account that you may
use it. Which motivates me to preemtivly use it to prevent you from killing
me. Of course you can think the same way and I can think that you can think
the same way.

Either way, if we both have a gun and I want to maximize my chance of staying
alive (thus, fulfilling my survivial instinct), I should shoot.

The difference between that and Nash's equilibrium is quite drastic in that:
a) large scale is in play triggering empathic/humanistic thinking b) the
person that is in position to use it is usually less desperate and or in
personal danger, so it's more "you kill my people" than "you kill me".

So, while I understand your logic, I would argue that the purpose of
developing a weapon is to enable killing someone. The purpose of developing
TOR is to enable privacy and anonimity.

~~~
Nelson69
I'm not going to argue with the game theory, it's correct and in essence, guns
create the situation where by things escalate faster, when there are
conflicts. We've seen this is various popular media events over the last few
years, people end up dead when they shouldn't.

What I will say is the intent of the creators is being completely
misrepresented here. Guns are designed to satisfy a feeling of fear that may
or may not be rational. Most guns never kill anyone and most aren't involved
in any conflicts. They are made and sold to satisfy fears, their peddlers
cater to those fears. This is also why ar-15 style carbines and other nearly
useless weapons (you can't hunt with them, they have hardened core ammo that
will penetrate all sorts of things after hitting the target.. ) are so
popular, they are "more powerful" and satisfy a deeper or more broad fear.
Almost nobody buys a gun with the intent to kill someone and I think that's an
important distinction.

I'd argue that tor and pgp/gnupg are used in nearly identical ways for most
geeks, we're afraid to not have access to them but I don't know anybody that
regularly uses tor or pgp for emails and such. It is oddly isomorphic now that
I think about it, if you say the purpose of a handgun is to kill a human, I
wonder what percentage of their regular use for that purpose is by criminals,
it has to be pretty high, much higher than non-criminal use.

~~~
zbraniecki
I think your logic is a little bit overcomplex. I understand what you are
saying - nobody wants to kill, people want to feel safe. They buy guns to feel
safe, not to kill. I believe that to be true.

At the same time, guns are designed to kill, not to satisfy your need of
safety.

There are many other items that work in a similar manner - airbags are
designed to save you in an accident, but you want them in your car to feel
safer. Burgler alarms are designed to react when someone is breaking into your
house, but you install them to reduce the risk that someone will even try,
contracts are designed to cover your ass in case of a court case, but they are
signed in hope that it makes court case less likely etc.

But coming back to wepons, they are designed to kill. You can argue that fake
guns are designed to scare attackers, but real guns are designed to kill.
Their parameters, their tests, their ads, their designs, are all focus on
precision of shooting, targeting, and efficency of the bullet to penetrate the
target. They are designed to be a good tool for killing.

Tor is designed to be a good tool for privacy and anonimity.

You can test it using a simple mental experiment - if the needs of pedophiles
and people needing anonimity diverged and became incompatible, I honestly
believe that Tor would be developed to fulfill the needs of the latter group.
If the need of people looking to feel safe would diverge from the efficency of
a weapon in killing, then I honestly believe that the weapon manufacturers
would keep designing weapons to be efficient in killing.

> but I don't know anybody that regularly uses tor or pgp for emails and such.

That's a fallacy here. You may not know people who use it, because you may,
guessing here, not spend time with people who have a reason to be afraid of
their governments. You may not be part of the wikileaks movement. You may not
know journalists who track mafia in Italy or Russia. Those are just examples.
And, because I work on multiple open source projects, I definitely know many
people using PGP on daily basis.

> if you say the purpose of a handgun is to kill a human, I wonder what
> percentage of their regular use for that purpose is by criminals, it has to
> be pretty high, much higher than non-criminal use.

I guess you are right. :)

But I'm not sure how it relates to the topic of authors intentions.

------
pdeuchler
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

------
sp332
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](http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014)

~~~
_wmd
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/](http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6112/)
already

------
minimax
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/](http://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation_torpedo/)

~~~
wcummings
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...

~~~
rohit89
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.

~~~
wcummings
There is no middle ground, though.

------
Issac
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...

------
jrochkind1
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.

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

~~~
rprospero
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.

~~~
jrochkind1
Yes, that.

And the people jumping between the definitions mid-sentence are doing so
because they don't understand what they are talking about. And by uttering
such sentences, contribute to others misunderstanding too.

------
sildur
The other 20 percent are probably 404 errors.

------
im3w1l
>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.

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

~~~
sirsar
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.

~~~
ethomson
I'm sympathetic to your suggestion that a whistle blow _may_ have far reaching
consequences. But as you suggest, it may not. It may have no impact at all. It
may be wholly inconsequential. It may be a misunderstanding, a hoax.

Meanwhile, a child was abused to make kiddy porn. No equivocation there. To
suggest that the aforementioned whistleblower is _always_ more positive than
the kiddy porn is negative is shocking. To then try put a ratio on it seems
particularly callous.

~~~
paperplane
> Meanwhile, a child was abused to make kiddy porn.

Drawn pictures (e.g. manga) are absolutely considered child porn in large
parts of the world (e.g. the UK).

