The dark web tower · the atrium

The dark web: the tower, floor by floor

This is the entrance to the dark web tower. It is the most mythologised subject on this island, and most of the floors above are occupied with taking the myth apart rather than feeding it.

Roughly speaking, what people believe about it comes from three places: television, companies selling monitoring subscriptions, and articles written by people who have never opened it. What is left once those are set aside is a small, slow, largely dull corner of the internet that is genuinely important to a few people and genuinely dangerous to the merely curious. Every floor says which of the two it is describing, because conflating them is how the whole subject went wrong.

The tower is also deliberately incomplete. There are no addresses on any floor, no directories, and no instructions aimed at reaching anything illegal. What is here is explanation and protection: what the words mean, how the mechanism works, what the real risks are for an ordinary person, and what to do when a company writes to say your details have turned up somewhere.

Three levels, and you are on the first. The atrium lists the floors; each floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

It is worth saying who this tower is for, because the honest answer is not the audience the subject usually attracts. Most people who end up reading about the dark web are not planning to visit it. They are here because a bank, an employer or a subscription service has sent them a message saying their information has been found somewhere, and they want to understand what that means and how frightened to be. That question has a clear answer, it is mostly reassuring, and the practical steps that follow from it are short and free. The monitoring wing is written for exactly that person, and if it describes you, you can skip the rest of the building entirely.

The second audience is people who need this for work — journalists, researchers, anybody trying to reach a source in a country where reaching one is dangerous. That is a legitimate and important use of the technology, it predates the criminal reputation, and it is the reason the network exists at all. Those floors are written carefully and they say where our competence ends.

What this tower will not do

It will not link to anything. No addresses, no directories, no mirrors, not even as an illustration. Explaining how onion routing works is education; handing somebody a door is not, and the difference is not subtle enough to need debating.

It will not sell you monitoring. Those subscriptions occupy the top of every search in this category, they are extremely profitable, and the honest floor about them explains what they can see, which is considerably less than the advertising implies, and what free alternatives exist for most of the same job.

And it will not make it sound exciting. The mythology is the product being sold on almost every other page about this subject, and it is precisely the thing that gets people into trouble. A reader who leaves this tower less interested than they arrived has been served correctly.

A word about sources, since this is the subject where they matter most and are supplied least. Where a floor states how the network behaves, it points at the documentation of the project that builds it. Where it states what happened to a marketplace, it points at the announcement by the authority that closed it. Where a figure is repeated everywhere and nobody can say where it came from, the floor says that instead of repeating it once more. A surprising amount of what is confidently written about this subject fails that last test, which is the main reason this tower is being built slowly. What holds instead is simple: this tower explains and protects; it publishes no addresses and helps nobody reach anything illegal.