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Archives for the Dark Web: A Field Guide for Study

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Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This chapter draws on interviews, participant observation, and archival research to provide a field guide for other digital humanists who want to study the Dark Web. In order to study the Dark Web, the digital humanist must engage with the technical infrastructures of Freenet, Tor, and I2P. The chapter will also aid researchers who study Dark Web end users, aesthetics, or cultures. To these ends, I offer a catalog of archives and resources researchers could draw on, and a discussion of why researchers should build their own archives. I conclude with some remarks about the ethics of Dark Web research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The connotation of “dark” on which I draw to define the Dark Web is quite similar to that of former FBI Director James Comey. See James Comey, “Encryption, Public Safety, and ‘Going Dark,’” Blog, Lawfare, July 6, 2015, http://www.lawfareblog.com/encryption-public-safety-and-going-dark.

  2. 2.

    For examples, see Ian Clarke et al., “Freenet : A Distributed Anonymous Information Storage and Retrieval System,” in Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies, ed. Hannes Federrath (Springer, 2001), 46–66, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-44702-4_4; Ian Clarke et al., “Protecting Free Expression Online with Freenet,” Internet Computing, IEEE 6, no. 1 (2002): 40–49; Jens Mache et al., “Request Algorithms in Freenet-Style Peer–Peer Systems,” in Peer-to-Peer Computing, 2002 (P2P 2002). Proceedings. Second International Conference on IEEE (2002), 90–95, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1046317; Hui Zhang, Ashish Goel, and Ramesh Govindan, “Using the Small-World Model to Improve Freenet Performance,” in INFOCOM 2002. Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings. IEEE, vol. 3 (IEEE, 2002), 1228–1237, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1019373; Karl Aberer, Manfred Hauswirth, and Magdalena Punceva, “Self-Organized Construction of Distributed Access Structures: A Comparative Evaluation of P-Grid and FreeNet,” in The 5th Workshop on Distributed Data and Structures (WDAS 2003), 2003, http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/54381; Jem E. Berkes, “Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Network Architecture: Gnutella and Freenet,” University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 2003, http://www.berkes.ca/archive/berkes_gnutella_freenet.pdf; Ian Clarke et al., “Private Communication Through a Network of Trusted Connections: The Dark Freenet,” Network, 2010, http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vilhelm_Verendel/publication/228552753_Private_Communication_Through_a_Network_of_Trusted_Connections_The_Dark_Freenet/links/02e7e525f9eb66ba13000000.pdf; Mathias Ehlert, “I2P Usability vs. Tor Usability a Bandwidth and Latency Comparison,” in Seminar, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2011, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/semu/docs/2011_seminar_ehlert_i2p.pdf; Peipeng Liu et al., “Empirical Measurement and Analysis of I2P Routers,” Journal of Networks 9, no. 9 (2014): 2269–2278; Gildas Nya Tchabe and Yinhua Xu, “Anonymous Communications: A Survey on I2P,” CDC Publication Theoretische Informatik–Kryptographie und Computeralgebra, https://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de, 2014, https://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Group_CDC/Documents/Lehre/SS13/Seminar/CPS/cps2014_submission_4.pdf; and Matthew Thomas and Aziz Mohaisen, “Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root,” 2014, 11.

  3. 3.

    Symon Aked, “An Investigation into Darknets and the Content Available Via Anonymous Peer-to-Peer File Sharing,” 2011, http://ro.ecu.edu.au/ism/106/; Hsinchun Chen, Dark Web —Exploring and Data Mining the Dark Side of the Web (New York: Springer, 2012), http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+%26+information+retrieval/book/978-1-4614-1556-5; Gabriel Weimann, “Going Dark: Terrorism on the Dark Web,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2015, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1119546; Clement Guitton, “A Review of the Available Content on Tor Hidden Services: The Case Against Further Development,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 6 (November 2013): 2805–2815, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.07.031; and Jialun Qin et al., “The Dark Web Portal Project: Collecting and Analyzing the Presence of Terrorist Groups on the Web,” in Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 2005), 623–624, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2154737.

  4. 4.

    See especially Guitton, “A Review of the Available Content on Tor Hidden Services”; Weimann, “Going Dark.”

  5. 5.

    Nicolas Christin, “Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online Marketplace,” in Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW’13 (New York, NY: ACM, 2013), 213–224, https://doi.org/10.1145/2488388.2488408; Marie Claire Van Hout and Tim Bingham, “‘Silk Road’, the Virtual Drug Marketplace: A Single Case Study of User Experiences,” International Journal of Drug Policy 24, no. 5 (September 2013): 385–391, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.01.005; Marie Claire Van Hout and Tim Bingham, “‘Surfing the Silk Road’: A Study of Users’ Experiences,” International Journal of Drug Policy 24, no. 6 (November 2013): 524–529, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2013.08.011; James Martin, Drugs on the Dark Net: How Cryptomarkets Are Transforming the Global Trade in Illicit Drugs, 2014; James Martin, “Lost on the Silk Road: Online Drug Distribution and the ‘Cryptomarket,’” Criminology & Criminal Justice 14, no. 3 (2014): 351–367, https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895813505234; Amy Phelps and Allan Watt, “I Shop Online—Recreationally! Internet Anonymity and Silk Road Enabling Drug Use in Australia,” Digital Investigation 11, no. 4 (2014): 261–272, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diin.2014.08.001; Alois Afilipoaie and Patrick Shortis, From Dealer to Doorstep—How Drugs Are Sold on the Dark Net, GDPO Situation Analysis (Swansea University: Global Drugs Policy Observatory, 2015), http://www.swansea.ac.uk/media/Dealer%20to%20Doorstep%20FINAL%20SA.pdf; Jakob Johan Demant and Esben Houborg, “Personal Use, Social Supply or Redistribution? Cryptomarket Demand on Silk Road 2 and Agora,” Trends in Organized Crime, 2016, http://www.forskningsdatabasen.dk/en/catalog/2304479461; Rasmus Munksgaard and Jakob Demant, “Mixing Politics and Crime—The Prevalence and Decline of Political Discourse on the Cryptomarket,” International Journal of Drug Policy 35 (September 2016): 77–83, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.021; and Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt, “The Online Stolen Data Market: Disruption and Intervention Approaches,” Global Crime 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 11–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2016.1197123.

  6. 6.

    Monica J. Barratt, Jason A. Ferris, and Adam R. Winstock, “Safer Scoring? Cryptomarkets, Social Supply and Drug Market Violence,” International Journal of Drug Policy 35 (September 2016): 24–31, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.019; Monica J. Barratt et al., “‘What If You Live on Top of a Bakery and You Like Cakes?’—Drug Use and Harm Trajectories Before, During and After the Emergence of Silk Road,” International Journal of Drug Policy 35 (September 2016): 50–57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.006; and Alexia Maddox et al., “Constructive Activism in the Dark Web : Cryptomarkets and Illicit Drugs in the Digital ‘Demimonde,’” Information, Communication & Society (October 15, 2015): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1093531.

  7. 7.

    Monica J. Barratt and Alexia Maddox, “Active Engagement with Stigmatised Communities Through Digital Ethnography,” Qualitative Research (May 22, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794116648766.

  8. 8.

    Robert W. Gehl, “Power/Freedom on the Dark Web : A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network,” New Media and Society (October 16, 2014): 1–17.

  9. 9.

    Barratt and Maddox, “Active Engagement with Stigmatised Communities Through Digital Ethnography,” 6.

  10. 10.

    Hugh Gusterson, “Ethnographic Research,” in Qualitative Methods in International Relations, ed. Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash, Research Methods Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 96, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-58412-9_7.

  11. 11.

    This is definitely not to say that such markers don’t emerge, or that racialized/gendered/classed discourses do not appear on the Dark Web . As I show in my book, such discourses do emerge, highlighting the overall arguments put forward by Lisa Nakamura that the Internet is not a perfectly “disembodied” medium. See Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  12. 12.

    Gusterson, “Ethnographic Research,” 97.

  13. 13.

    Robert W. Gehl, “(Critical) Reverse Engineering and Genealogy,” Foucaultblog, August 16, 2016, https://doi.org/10.13095/uzh.fsw.fb.153.

  14. 14.

    Ahmed Hassan, “Mining Software Repositories to Assist Developers and Support Managers,” 2004, 2, https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/1017.

  15. 15.

    Glenn McGrath, “[Freenet -Chat] Deep Philosophical Question,” January 2, 2002, https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/chat/2002-January/000604.html.

  16. 16.

    Colbyd, “[Freenet -Chat] Terrorism and Freenet,” January 9, 2002, https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/chat/2002-January/001353.html.

  17. 17.

    Roger Dingledine, “[Freehaven-Dev] Re: [Freenet -Chat] MojoNation,” August 9, 2000, http://archives.seul.org//freehaven/dev/Aug-2000/msg00006.html.

  18. 18.

    See https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo for a list of them.

  19. 19.

    See https://geti2p.net/en/meetings/ for the archived chat logs.

  20. 20.

    All URLs marked with an asterisk (*) require special routing software to access them. URLs ending in.i2p require I2P software; .onions require Tor , and Freesites require Freenet . For instructions on how to download, install, and run these routers, see each project’s home page: https://geti2p.net/, https://torproject.org and https://freenetproject.org, respectively.

  21. 21.

    Achilleas Pipinellis, GitHub Essentials (Birmingham: Packt Publishing, 2015).

  22. 22.

    Barratt and Maddox, “Active Engagement with Stigmatised Communities Through Digital Ethnography.”

  23. 23.

    Gehl, “Power/Freedom on the Dark Web : A Digital Ethnography of the Dark Web Social Network.”

  24. 24.

    For an archive of screenshots of many of them, see https://socialmediaalternatives.org/archive/items/browse?tags=dark+web.

  25. 25.

    Annette Markham and Elizabeth Buchanan, Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the Aoir Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0) (Association of Internet Researchers, 2012), https://pure.au.dk/ws/files/55543125/aoirethics2.pdf.

  26. 26.

    “Ethical Tor Research: Guidelines,” Blog, The Tor Blog, November 11, 2015, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ethical-tor-research-guidelines.

  27. 27.

    James Martin and Nicolas Christin, “Ethics in Cryptomarket Research,” International Journal of Drug Policy 35 (September 2016): 84–91, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.05.006.

  28. 28.

    Barratt and Maddox, “Active Engagement with Stigmatised Communities Through Digital Ethnography.”

  29. 29.

    Martin and Christin, “Ethics in Cryptomarket Research,” 86.

  30. 30.

    Barratt and Maddox, “Active Engagement with Stigmatised Communities Through Digital Ethnography,” 10.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 11.

  32. 32.

    Martin and Christin, “Ethics in Cryptomarket Research,” 88.

  33. 33.

    However, I should note that I was interviewing the builders of Dark Web search engines and the administrators and users of Dark Web social networking sites. These formats have different legal stakes than drug markets, the object Maddox and Barratt were studying. Thus, there may have been less anxiety among my participants that I was an undercover law enforcement agent. Again, this points to the difficulty of establishing hard-and-fast ethical rules for this line of research. I should also note that the Dark Web is a highly masculinized space. In the few cases where participants asked for my identity, they learned I identify as a cisgender male. In contrast, Maddox and Barratt discuss the specific harassment they received due to their female gender identities.

  34. 34.

    I. Bogost and N. Montfort, “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers,” in Digital Arts and Culture 2009 (Irvine, CA: After Media, Embodiment and Context, UC Irvine, 2009), 3.

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  1. The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Robert W. Gehl

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  1. Robert W. Gehl
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Correspondence to Robert W. Gehl .

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  1. Levenberg Services, Inc., Bloomingburg, NY, USA

    lewis levenberg

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Tai Neilson

  3. The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    David Rheams

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Gehl, R.W. (2018). Archives for the Dark Web: A Field Guide for Study. In: levenberg, l., Neilson, T., Rheams, D. (eds) Research Methods for the Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4_3

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