Into The Web’s Murky Lairs
What secrets lurk behind the shadows of the digital
world?
The internet
has undoubtedly become an all-too-familiar facet of everyday life, but when people
like 41-year-old Sydney man Liam Gordon Murphy makes headlines, it seems the
digital realm still has plenty of hidden things not for the faint of heart.
In 2015,
Liam Gordon Murphy, the online bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism
(BDSM) star nicknamed “The Wolf” got acquainted with a 21-year-old woman
through a fetish website. A year after they met at a hotel in Kings Cross,
Murphy was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault. He
pleaded not guilty to the charges at court.
Murphy
has thousands of followers on FetLife, a website catering to the BDSM, kink,
and fetish community. Though it has more than five million users who remain anonymous,
the profiles give out the age, gender, and the role members want to play, that is,
whether they want to be submissive or dominant in a BDSM relationship.
Just
like any website requiring membership, this social network has terms for its
users. Those who choose to be slaves must agree to the invasion of their
privacy while their masters must promise to avoid abusing their power.
Such
relationships may sound bizarre, but they are surprisingly common place for
those who know their way around the underground world of the internet—where
possibilities are just as exciting as they are dangerous.
Digital unknown
Murphy’s
arrest calls attention to only one of many sexual niches that thrive in the web,
from sugar baby-sugar daddy/mommy relationships to erotic “furries” that
involve anthropomorphic animal costumes. Outside conventional networks like
Facebook, these websites enable what the public would call deviants to form
their own communities under their own rules, free from judgment.
But
these communities are still somewhat accessible to the public with the right
keywords. Delving deeper, a vast portion of the web—like the underwater part of
an iceberg—are websites that are unreachable via Google Chrome or Firefox.
In what
is called the Deep Web, unindexed digital content such as medical records and
government databases lie beyond ordinary search engines; entry would require a specific
type of software called Tor, which originally started out as an intelligence
project by the US Navy. With this tool, users can explore the net while
remaining anonymous.
Because Tor
provides anonymity, the Deep Web has become a haven for drug transactions,
hackers, and even assassins, creating a shadier section of the online world aptly
named the Dark Net. Pirated libraries and political activism have also made
their home here.
These
activities in the Dark Net do not go unnoticed by the authorities. One such
case was the 2014 arrest of Ross Ulbricht, owner of the famed online drug
market called Silk Road. This did not stop drug dealers, however, from finding other
ways to trade narcotics free of censorship.
Going
mainstream?
In a TED
Talk exploring this digital underbelly, Jamie Bartlett, author of the book The
Dark Net, explained that while these sites are always at risk of being shut
down, their creation is a staggering and phenomenal achievement.
According
to Bartlett, the Dark Net is the future of the internet because of increasing
concerns on privacy. There are now about two to three million Tor users who use
the browser for legitimate purposes. This growing number will further push the Dark
Net into the mainstream, Bartlett said.
Soon,
more social media companies, news outlets, and ordinary internet users will be
on the Dark Net, Bartlett predicted—a development that gives triumph to freedom
fighters and drug dealers alike. This will make the internet more exciting, but
perhaps not without consequences.
This
complex world of the internet comes to light in the TV series Dark Net, an
eight-part documentary that tells the stories of people caught in bio-hacking,
digital warfare, online romances, and cyber crimes among others. Dark Net
premieres on January 8, 9:35PM first and exclusive on RTL CBS Extreme.
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