The Darknet: Your One-Stop Shop for Weapons, Drugs, and Illegal Pornography Ty McCormick - Foreign Policy
go to original December 13, 2013

Beyond the prying eyes of Google and Bing exists a vast cyberfrontier - by some estimates hundreds of times larger than the World Wide Web. This so-called "deepweb" is often more humdrum than sinister, littered with banal data and derelict URLs, but it is also home to an anything-goes commercial underworld, called the "darknet," that will make your stomach turn.

It's a place where drugs and weapons are openly traded, where terrorists link up, and where assassins bid on contract killings. In recent years, the darknet has found itself in government cross-hairs, with the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) cracking down on drug merchants and pornographers.

Despite a series of high-profile busts, however, this lawless realm continues to hum along, deep beneath the everyday web.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

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