3 The Dark Web Network Builders

This chapter covers Dark Web development from two primary angles. First, drawing on archives such as e-mail lists, IRC logs, and software repositories, I detail the development history of the three Dark Web projects discussed throughout this book: Freenet, the Tor Project, and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). The histories I present here are brief and focus mainly on the development of the specific technologies in question, considering how the projects develop networks that can anonymize both readers and publishers. I also emphasize the early stages of web publishing on these networks, the practice that has become known as Dark Web publishing. Freenet, Tor, and I2P were built in the late 1990s and early 2000s in relation to previous networking technologies, including the World Wide Web. Indeed, the World Wide Web, with its ease of publishing hypertextual media, looms large in the Dark Web network builders' imaginations. These systems were strongly bent toward supporting WWW-like publishing, with the twist of anonymizing both publishers and readers and even decentralizing web hosting. A study of these network builders, even the brief one that appears in this chapter, can shed light on the technical and social roots of Dark Web practices and systems, such as markets, search engines, and social networking sites, which are covered in later chapters.