SciAm article:
Must get removed really, really fast to beat the crawl-bots... which would make for a rather useless "advertisement for illegal sexual activity," one might surmise.Other deep Web data comes from temporary pages (such as advertisements for illegal sexual and similarly illicit services) that are removed before search engines can crawl them
It's the new peer-to-peer Tor! Combine scary buzzwords, throw in a bit of FUD, & you've got psyops propaganda 101!Some areas of the deep Web are accessible using only special software such as the Tor Onion Router, which allows people to secretly share information anonymously via peer-to-peer connections rather than going through a centralized computer server.
Two-hundred and fifty million dollars in two years, or $125 million per year on these super-transient, non-index "ads" that nobody ever sees? What websites are receiving this massive advertising revenue windfall? Where are these transient ads posted? What is supposed to be the point of non-indexed, transient advertisements in the first place? "Peer-to-peer connection" - what on this green Earth are these idiots talking about? Some super-secret .torrent-based, DHT-mapped advertising network so secret it's never been mentioned before?Evidence of criminals peddling such services online is hard to pinpoint because of the use of temporary ads and peer-to-peer connections within the deep Web. Over a two-year time frame traffickers spent about $250 million to post more than 60 million advertisements, according to DARPA-funded research. Such a large volume of Web pages, many of which are not posted long enough to be crawled by search engines, makes it difficult for investigators to connect the dots.
Aha, yes, the "human trafficking" veneer drops pretty quick and we're back to drugs investigations. That didn't take long.In addition to targeting human trafficking, law enforcement officials are finding that they can tap Memex to crack down on other, related crimes, including trafficking in guns and drugs...
These magical, ephemeral "locations" where people advertise stuff and take the ads down so fast... only their 'customers' ever see the ads!. Magic! But: how do the 'customers' know where to look for these ads... if they appear and disappear so fast, without links and without Google finding them as well? Secret brainwave transmissions? Quantum ansibles? Maybe just pure bullshit - that's more likely. The "Bullshit Network."One type of temporary page could be an advertisement for sexual services set up by human traffickers in a location on the Internet known to their customers but taken down before it can be indexed and found by law enforcement...
Don't you just feel safer already, knowing that the same cops who make a habit of shooting unarmed black men will soon have these spyware tools at their fingertips, with no oversight or need for any pesky warrants or legal framework? Yeah, safer - much safer.When this handover happens, software components like the Web crawler, machine learning algorithms and graph analysis that can scour both the surface and deep Webs will be installed locally at law enforcement agencies. They will be connected to regular browser-based software that agencies and the general public would typically use, such as Firefox and Chrome. This would ensure that law enforcement could access the software from any Internet-connected device...
Why would anyone want to "drag in the specter [sic] of snooping and surveillance" when discussing a secret, government-funded, cops-only snooping and surveillance tool? Really, that doesn't seem likely at all: it'd be like worrying about civilian casualties from mass drone assassination campaigns - pretty much a total mellow-harsher when it comes to unchecked government power. Boo hoo.We didn’t want to cloud this work unnecessarily by dragging in the specter of snooping and surveillance.” White and his team are finding there is more than enough public content to challenge them as they develop their tools to aid law enforcement and prosecutors...
Ah, yes... the "human trafficking" veneer drops again. Careful there, .gov spinmeisters: your bullshit is leaking through the wrapper!People, such as those running the underground Silk Road cyber black market, often use the dark Web to anonymously post content that may or may not be legal.
Yes, "of course," Scientific American the reason DARPA is after Tor is totally because... human trafficking. Is this supposed to be a joke - a dark joke, admittedly - or did the PR shop behind this propaganda campaign do enough A/B testing to confirm that the "average American" is ignorant enough to believe these lies if someone like Scientific American prints them with a straight face? Either way, disgraceful.Dark Web sites have, of course, attracted DARPA’s attention because they are good candidates for human trafficking activity. As a result, White and his team are developing a “Dark Web crawler” that explores the Tor-accessible, peer-to-peer areas of the deep Web and has thus far done much to enlighten the researchers as to the extent of dark Web activity.
[/quote][/quote]DARPA chose law enforcement efforts to disrupt human trafficking as a concrete cause around which it could quickly develop and deploy its new approach to searching the Internet. White is confident that Memex technology can likewise be applied to any type of investigative effort, including counterterrorism, missing persons, disease response and disaster relief.
Not because, you know, spin. Like, well, this article for example. No, not because of that. Because, rather... human trafficking! Right. Don't you feel safer now.
The patronising tone of this kind of bought-and-paid-for government propaganda is particularly difficult to swallow.
Most likely, what we've got here is a nicely-presented tool designed to act as a cleaning service for "parallel constructed" illegal NSA surveillance data that can't otherwise appear from nowhere in non-military, non-national security related domestic cases. So - ta-da! - MEMEX: it didn't come from Bluffdale... honest. It came from MEMEX (which got it from Bluffdale), so it's all cool.
A disgrace.
~ pj
