The so-called “dark web” is where the visible Internet – easily accessible
by public search engines and web crawlers – ends, and, everything else
begins.
The dark web is an unseen iceberg composing more than 95% of the real
activity of the web, where databases, password-protected websites, official
records from federal, state and local governments, various intranets,
messageboards, website archives, forums and vast catalogues of data all
reside.
White and black hat hackers, law enforcement agencies and criminal
networks all operate there in the shadows.
And now, DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, has developed a surveillance tool known as “Memex” that can
be used to reveal what is hidden on the dark web, and pursue criminal groups
of interest – and perhaps control or even kill the dark web for good.
CBS 60 Minutes reported on DARPA’s Memex,
interviewing the project’s director and some of the principles involved.
Ostensibly, the effort is focused on tracking and stopping sex trafficking…
but obviously so much more is part of this secret military surveillance
project. Watch the video report here.
Dan Kaufman, the director of information innovation office at DARPA said:
“The easiest way to think about Memex is: How can I make the unseen
seen?.”
“Most people on the internet are doing benign and good things,” he
continued, “But there are parasites that live on there, and we take away
their ability to use the internet against us — and make the world a better
place.”
Curtailing the Wild West of the Internet – whether or not it illegal
activity is involved – is clearly within the scope of its possible
applications.
Leslie Stahl: Why is DARPA looking at sex trafficking?
Chris White (Inventor of Memex): “We see that with human
trafficking, the kinds of groups that do human trafficking are often using
the proceeds of that to fund other things are counter to our national
security interests. And we also find that people willing to traffic in women
are also willing to move drugs and guns, and other sort of contraband.
Chris White: “The internet is much, much bigger than
people think. By some estimates Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo only give
us access to around 5% of the content on the Web.”
Author Cassius Methyl raised questions about this secret
project’s ominous potential for the future of Internet freedom, noting that
it can “probably do a lot more than they say it’s capable of”:
As the Scientific American noted, DARPA has said very little about Memex.
What does it tell about a person, a group of people, or a program, when they
are secretive and operate in the shadows? Why would a body of people doing
benevolent work have to do that? I think keeping up with the projects
underway by DARPA is of critical importance. This is where the most
outrageous and powerful weapons of war are being developed.
She notes a Scientific American article about Memex:
“DARPA has said very little about Memex and its use by law enforcement and
prosecutors to investigate suspected criminals.” and ““Memex”—a combination
of the words “memory” and “index” first coined in a 1945 article for The
Atlantic—currently includes eight open-source, browser-based search, analysis
and data-visualization programs as well as back-end server software that
perform complex computations and data analysis.”
