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Darknet Rising: A Private, Secure and Anonmyous Meshnet Is Emerging
Posted on January 4, 2012
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The muted postal horn was the symbol of Trystero, the private postal system in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, the story centered on a worldwide conspiracy stretching back centuries and which utilized a private postal system called Trystero. And, just like Pynchon’s fictionalized postal network, today in the real world, privacy advocates, pirates, anarchists, outlaws, drug cartels and others have developed their own private networks called darknets to move their information around the globe in furtherance of their own interests.
One of the most striking examples of a darknet comes from Mexico where it was recently discovered that the the Zetas drug cartel has set up several private cell phone and radio repeater systems in the state of Veracruz as well as along 500 miles of the Texas-Mexico border. Some portions of this system were in remote areas and were powered by solar cells, and used commercially available components. And, while it must be assumed that the tech was fairly easy to obtain, the know-how was a bit more specialized. It is suspected that perhaps as many as two dozen communications workers have been kidnapped in Mexico by the cartel and forced to work putting these systems together. While a few were later released, most ended up dead or simply never seen again.
Online, darknets have been around for much longer. The best known among them is TOR. As the TOR website explains:
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor’s hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.
Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they’re in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they’re working with that organization.
Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members’ online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company’s patent lawyers?
A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.
Interestingly enough, the TOR system was originally developed by the US Navy to improve cyber-security and to increase resistance to network analysis. And, while it may be used for legitimate purposes — including increasing and preserving personal privacy — it is also used for illegal purposes such as the infamous Silk Road a site which can only be accessd via the TOR system and which uses Bitcoins as currency. Silk Road is most famous as a marketplace where you can anonymously purchase a wide variety of illegal products most notably narcotics.
While TOR provides resistance to censorship, government monitoring and traffic analysis, a fundamental weakness remains access to the internet. One group that is currently working to ensure privacy and provide corporate-free access to the internet is the Free Network Foundation. Their agenda is a big one, yet still fairly straight-forward:
We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.
We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.
We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.
In other words, what the FNF is attempting to do is to set up an infrastructure that relies on a fundamentally different philosophical, economic and technological approach than the existing internet. Using a peer-to-peer approach FNF (as well as other groups such as Project Mesh Net and Open-Mesh.org ) are working on developing a “mesh” approach to the internet which, theoretically would be free, ubiquitous and anonymous. Others are revisiting older tech such as HAM or CB radio based packet radio systems as stand alone systems or as nodes in an newly emerging alternative internet.
What is coming into focus is that a group of diverse entities and technologies, when taken together, have the capacity to challenge corporate and governmental control over the current form of the internet as well as the information, political and economic activity and freedom of expression found there. If such a “meshnet” does come into existence, we can expect a vigorous reaction by governments the world over. However, where there is no “there” there to regulate, where the transactions are anonymous and essentially untraceable, it remains unclear what steps will be available to a government to assert control over such a system, but we can certainly expect them to try.
