The Dark Net isn't what you think. It's actually key to our privacy | Alex Winter | TEDxMidAtlantic

So for most of my life I've been obsessed with a digital revolution which may sound strange coming from an actor director, but I

actually

blame the Bill and Ted movies for my obsession with technology. You see, one day in the late '80s I woke up with my face on a cereal box, yes, when the first villain Ted opened, my life became permanently public. Shopping had to be done in the middle of the night. The crowded subway was a no-go zone and a teenage fan ran away from home and crossed the country. bus and parked in front of my house, fortunately I was out of town, don't get me wrong, I was very grateful for the success of those films, but like many young people thrust into the spotlight, I was not prepared for a life that suddenly he lacked titles. of

privacy

and anonymity and that's when I discovered the Internet, specifically the anonymous online communities that existed in the early days of the web, before the existence of the modern web we know today, believe it or not, there were thousands of people here on everyone gathered together. and online news groups and chat rooms to discuss a wide range of interests and connect with each other.

Many of us use an anonymous username. It is an even encrypted email. There had never been anything like this and it blew my mind. It may have come to the anonymous Internet. for

privacy

, but I stayed for the community, a vibrant network where I could say

what

I wanted and be myself. It was a very liberating experience, whether your face was on a cereal box or not, so I spent a lot of time researching the evolution of online communities, who builds them,

what

motivates their creation, and how these often radical technologies are changing the world. and that led me to make a documentary called Deep Web.

Now this movie mainly examines the Silk Road, which was an anonymous online marketplace and forum that existed in a hidden area of ​​the Internet and used Bitcoin, an unregulated digital currency, now the Silk Road sold many things, but mainly drugs, including illegal drugs, this is a hot topic and for the most part the media covered it in a very salacious way, the headlines screamed about a shadow. Internet full of weapons, drugs and hitmen. The more I looked into it, the more I realized it was largely inaccurate. You see, what compelled me to spend several years immersed in the area of ​​the Silk Road and the hidden Internet was the desire to discover what, if anything, there was.

They mean to the average Joe and it turns out they mean a lot, so let's start with the basics. What exactly is this hidden Internet? Media coverage of the Deep Web generally describes it as a vast hidden area five thousand times larger than the surface. web and is full of criminals, but that is

actually

false, the Deep Web is not a place, it is not hidden and does not actually host criminal activity, it simply represents the unindexed content online, the raw data that Google does not know and they don't care. For example, your online banking details are not stored anywhere on Google and your company may have an internal network that you use to communicate.

This exists on the deep web, but there is a hidden internet, a small area called the

dark

net or

dark

web, and this small corner of the internet is mostly made up of information that is actively hidden from public view and this is the area of which is worth talking about, so the dark web can only be accessed through specific tools like Tor, which is a special browser and service that masks your browsing. activity and taking it to the dark web you will find crime, yes, but not to the extent that the media has claimed and crime is not the primary use of the dark web nor the reason it was created now the Internet was originally funded by the Department of Defense and as a global network was publicly faced, new technologies were created to ensure its use for defense, so in reality the dark web is just another tool and is used by government agencies around the world along with journalists dissidents and countries with hostile governments. and just normal people who want to create and use anonymous online communities like the one I spent so much time in in the late 80's and like any place where human beings congregate, there is illegal activity, so let's see that there is a black market that sells drugs. and many of these, most of them, like the Silk Road, primarily sell marijuana altogether, they represent a small fraction of the physical drug trade.

Yes weapons have been sold on the dark web, they are not effective unfortunately, why would you want to bother with a dark web when? you can buy a semi-automatic rifle anywhere from Walmart to Instagram; There is far less child pornography on the dark web than is available on the surface web and, contrary to popular mythology, there was no tangible evidence that actual services from legitimate hitmen were ever offered. the dark web or that there has been significant terrorist activity, although there is hope that sites will claim these services, it will not be a surprise, but the dark web proliferates deception and scam sites operated by both law enforcement to attract Unsuspecting digital criminals and Internet trolls want to profit from this Deep Web hysteria, so there is dark stuff on the dark web, although considerably less than is reported and law enforcement is all over it. parts.

The truth is that a dark web is a terrible place to commit crimes. It is difficult to enter the darkness. net and it is cumbersome to navigate once you are in and, by nature, digital criminals are among the easiest to track and catch, it is very difficult to remain anonymous on the Internet, where the slightest mistake can expose your entire history of activity, similarly, digital currencies like Bitcoin are. horrible tools of crime, while capable of being anonymous by nature, they are the least anonymous form of currency there is, every transaction is permanently recorded in a digital ledger and the internet never forgets, so why the cyber turn And the hysteria in the media? it sells, it's good at clickbait, it makes sexy TV shows and movies, it sells magazines, but there's another agenda going on to demonize the dark web and scare away the people who would now want to do that, the people in power who believe that.

The privacy and anonymity that the dark web allows will cause them to lose control and that's where the Silk Road comes in because however you choose to judge it, what are the main reasons for its creation was to fight against that control. Now there is a lot about the Silk Road we will never know because it was built and operated in a hidden area of ​​the Internet by anonymous users, but we do know that in 2011 a young physics student from Austin Texas named Ross Ulbricht created this online marketplace. It was a brilliant combination. of Tor that hid the location of the site and Bitcoin now Albrecht claims that he created the Silk Road as an economic experiment, a test case for creating an online marketplace and forum that would allow its users to meet in complete freedom and anonymity, which which is a radical idea, but as a technological service it was a turning point and the Silk Road immediately attracted thousands of users.

It also attracted law enforcement who had infiltrated the Silk Road from the beginning and eventually Ross Ulbricht was arrested, tried and convicted on several charges including computer hacking, drug trafficking. money laundering and even a kingpin charge that is usually reserved for massive drug cartels, there were initial charges of attempted murder, but Ross Ulbricht was never charged with any of those charges and there are no murders believed to have taken place. held on May 29. In 2015, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, there are too many on the outside now. The story of Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht was nothing more than an online drug market that was shut down and its creator severely punished for brazen flaunting. law, but due to the relatively small amount of drugs being sold and the fact that Ross Ulbricht was only charged with non-violent crimes, many people were stunned by the extremely harsh sentence;

However, it didn't seem to fit into the narrative for those of us who were closer to the events that the narrative fits into, it was just a different narrative, you see, another side of the story is that Ross Ulbricht found himself at the intersection of three of the most persecuted areas of law in the United States today: the war on drugs. and financial regulation, i.e. the Silk Road, angered many people in power who feel threatened by the digital revolution in general and the dark web in particular, now that was the narrative I set out to tell in my film and fortunately because of my connections in this space and my experience with encryption I was able to gain unprecedented access to the inner workings and architects of the Silk Road and what I found surprised me.

All the key actors I interviewed came from a political background, highly educated activists, important members of the Occupy movement. radical cryptanarchists, libertarians, etc. None of these people were taking this risk by participating in the Silk Road simply to sell drugs. Some of them had no interest in drugs. They wanted to build the first large-scale anonymous online community. They wanted to avoid entities that violate the law. their privacy they wanted to fight the war on drugs, to put it simply, they were taking this risk, a huge risk to their ideals. The truth about the Silk Road, unpleasant as it may be, is that it was a political engine designed to implement a change that is.

I do not want to exonerate this service that was reckless and beyond the law, but simply to point out that many of These people had such strong feelings about these issues that they were willing to risk their freedom to fight for them, so this is all very interesting, but what does any of this have to do with you? Well, many of you, I'm sure, have heard about recent hacks like Ashley Madison, Target Anthem Blue Cross, and Snapchat, and I'm sure many of you were privately glad it didn't happen to you. but here is another unpleasant truth: we have already been hacked, all of us, our financial information, our medical records or personal photographs, our browsing activity, our phone calls or text messages, all this information is already in other people's hands, how did it get there through an omnipresent government?

Surveillance and mass collection by black hat hackers who collect your online information and information from your banks, insurance companies, and other institutions, and by your Internet service provider, your telephone company, and other security companies. technologies that routinely collect your information with and without your permission. and whose basic functions track your every movement, collect your data and store your speech. I'm not talking about spyware, but rather common applications like Siri and Google Maps. The difficult question in the digital age is not what we do if our personal information comes to light. Because for most of us that is too late, the real question we face today is why should we care, as we are constantly told, if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear.

Here is a personal story like the one many of you have experienced. My credit card information was stolen over the internet and in this particular case it turned out to be a couple of teenagers who were using my bank money to play a lot of Xbox and order a lot of pizzas, that made me a little paranoid so that I scanned. my laptop and I found another loophole in the form of malware, there are many different types of malware, this is what is called a keylogger that records all keystrokes and screen activity, ok I know what you are

think

ing, this guy spends a lot of time. on the Internet, but what about my wife and children's computer?

I scanned those devices and found more malware, so in the end they stopped those Xbox and Pizza kids and cleaned our computers of malware. It's not a big deal, it was just a hassle, but it brought me home. Our vulnerability is that our personal information is out there waiting to be exploited for any reason and those reasons can range from a minor breach to lives destroyed. I don't accept the idea that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear about privacy. it has a purpose that is why we have blinds on our windows and a door in our bathroom privacy is important to us it is something we take for granted it is central to our lives in other words we have a lot to hide and it has always been a right to hide it until now because today there are people who do not want us to protect our privacy and who largely want to have free access to our personal information again.

I'm mainly talking about tech and phone companies, governments, law enforcement, and black hats. Hackers now how do they workto prevent us from accessing our privacy? They spread misinformation about privacy tools and demonize those tools and those who use them. They weaken Internet security with backdoors to gain access to our information. And they lie to the public about what information they are collecting and for what purpose and this behavior has radicalized a generation, a growing movement of hackers, digital activists and cryptographers who are fighting back and some of these radical actors created and operated the Silk Road and Now I'm hearing all this, I'm sure.

Many of you would say that I'm willing to give up some of my freedom for more security, and of course we want law enforcement to be able to catch the bad guys, but there are two problems with this idea that less privacy creates more security. The first is that there is no evidence that this is the case that government surveillance and backdoors that weaken Internet security lead to greater security. It's a needle-in-a-haystack approach and it's highly questionable whether it works better than a specific approach law enforcement already has. With more than enough access to target and catch criminals in the digital space, this is, in many ways, the golden age of surveillance for law enforcement.

The other problem with this idea that less privacy creates more security is that weakening Internet security makes life easier. It's easier for hackers to access your information if you can't protect it, and it's easier for digital criminals to breach banks and government institutions if your overall security has been weakened with backdoors. Law enforcement must be able to do their job in a digital world where citizens have privacy just as they have to do their job in a physical world where citizens have privacy. You wouldn't allow a police officer to come into your house and rummage through your belongings, but that is just what is happening to your computer and your cell phone. phone devices that now contain your entire life for the same reason, corporations must be able to conduct business and process their data with less access and black hat hackers must face airtight, not weakened, security tools, but how the hell do you do it? we make?

To achieve all this requires precisely what these people fear most: we need to go dark. Going dark means that everyone would use privacy and anonymity tools at all times, tools like Tor and virtual private networks that protect your browsing activity just as they do. Protect dark web sites like Silk Road PGP and encryption services that keep emails private and fully encrypted phone calls and text messages. Now these services used to be difficult for the average user, but that is changing. The desire for privacy and security in the digital space is becoming big business. You may not realize this, but Apple's AI messages are now encrypted where they used to be so anyone could access your text messages and now websites often use secure connections by default and that's just the beginning , it has been more than 30 years since the first time.

I discovered the power and value of anonymous online communities, but this journey became urgent, but in my recent exploration of the dark web we need a hidden Internet, just as we need all the tools and services that protect our privacy and anonymity at all. As we move into The Technological Age and our lives and our world continue to change radically. We have to recognize that both our individual and collective existence depend on a basic level of control over our own privacy. Privacy is not a privilege and it is not something we should have voluntarily and casually.

Sacrificed privacy is fundamental to being a human being and it is worth fighting for, thank you.