


State-level censorship and surveillance has been a primary driver behind the popularity of Tor . At the time of writing, Tor has ∼2.5 million active users world-wide although this has peaked at almost 6 million in the last 24 months. Tor is popular amongst individuals concerned with their privacy and is operated by a non-profit organisation which receives funding from a range of sources, paradoxically including the US Government. The Onion Router (Tor) is a network of routers whose purpose is to anonymise the traffic of a user by mixing traffic with that of others and relaying it through several intermediate hops before forwarding to the destination. IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution.IET Electrical Systems in Transportation.IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications.IET Collaborative Intelligent Manufacturing.CAAI Transactions on Intelligence Technology.The best kinds of dark web content are the privacy and ideological discussions. There are also numerous online boards, wikis, and chats for people trying to divulge information they don't want associated with their identity. For instance, it's the best way for privacy activists to communicate with each other. It wasn't just a way to buy illegal goods, but it also deanonymized web browsing as a political ethos.īeyond illicit marketplaces like Silk Road, there's much more to see. It trumpeted Tor browsing as the best way to avoid online surveillance. Silk Road was the first website to popularize this method. To many, the deep web is simply a place to buy bizarre and potentially illegal things. Instead, the user must obfuscate their online identity in order to be granted access.

Wired describes the deep web most succinctly as a "collection of thousands of websites that use anonymity tools like Tor and I2P to hide their IP address." The key is decentralization, meaning that no regular browser (Chrome, Safari) can access these websites.
