In the Depths of the Net
(Sue Halpern, Oct 2015)
She wrote a review in the New York Review of Books about The Dark Net: Inside The Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett
(cf ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/405584)
The same article also appeared here a week later, accessible in full (without an account):
▻http://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/in-the-depths-of-the-internet-20150930-gjy14n
It turns out that even without resorting to intensive detective work, Tor’s anonymity can be penetrated. In a paper published online, Paul Syverson, one of Tor’s original developers at the Naval Research Laboratory, along with four colleagues, demonstrated that users who regularly browsed the internet with Tor could be easily identified. “Our analysis,” they wrote,
“shows that 80 per cent of all types of users may be deanonymised ... within six months [and] roughly 100 per cent of users in some common locations are deanonymised within three months.”
More recently, security experts have devised a simple way to distinguish Tor users by their particular style of typing. Add to these a new search engine called Memex, designed specifically to troll the dark net, developed by the Defence Department’s research arm, DARPA. It already has successfully unmasked human traffickers working in secret.
