Surprise, Most Dark Web Content Is Legal
November 21, 2016
If you have been under the impression that Dark Web is that big chunk of the Internet where all activities and content is illegal, you are wrong.
In a news report published by Neowin, and titled Terbium Labs: Most of the Dark Web Content, Visible Through Tor, Is Legal reveals:
Contrary to popular belief that the majority of the dark web, accessible through Tor is mostly legal… or offline! With extremism making up just a minuscule 0.2% of the content looked at.
According to this Quora thead, Dark Web was developed by US Military and Intelligence to communicate with their assets securely. The research started in 1995 and in 1997, mathematicians at Naval Research Laboratory developed The Onion Router Project or Tor. People outside Military Intelligence started using Tor to communicate with others for various reasons securely. Of course, people with ulterior motives spotted this opportunity and began utilizing Tor. This included arms and drug dealers, human traffickers, pedophiles. Mainstream media thus propagated the perception that Dark Web is an illegal place where criminal actors lurk, and all content is illegal.
Terbium Labs study indicates that 47.7% of content is legal and rest is borderline legal in the form of hacking services. Very little content is technically illegal like child pornography, arms dealing, drug dealing, and human trafficking related.
The Dark Web, however, is not a fairyland where illegal activities do not occur. As the news report points out:
While this report does prove that seedy websites exist on the dark web, they are in fact a minority, contradictory to what many popular news reports would have consumers believe.
Multiple research agencies have indicated that most content is legal on Dark Web with figures to back that up. But they still have not revealed, what this major chunk of legal content is made of? Any views?
Vishal Ingole, November 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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