Alabama's Morning News with JT
Morgan Wright knows what the Dark Web is all about
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I mean, this is a major part of the internet search engines and is this like the deep state in Washington worse than we could ever imagine? Well, probably, yeah. If you really knew what was going on behind the scenes. So, you know, there's three kind of webs out there. There's the open web that we all have access to courtesy of Al Gore's amazing internet. You know, we all get to those things, the dot com, the dot net, the dot orgs search for things. Then there's what we call the deep web. Things that are behind pay walls like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times or company internets, you know, secure document storage areas. And then you get to the deep web, which can only be accessed. I mean, the dark web. Yeah. Say you're the expert on it, not me. So you can only get to it with specialized software called the tour browser or, you know, tools like that. But here's your trivia contest question for today. Who invented the dark web? George Soros, I'm just guessing. No, but the US government did the Office of Naval Research. The Naval Research Lab created this in the mid-90s to allow naval intelligence officers to be able to communicate in countries to where communications were being intercepted or monitored. So they created this in the mid-90s. Then in early 2000, they released the code, you know, publicly available code. And it kind of languished there. It wasn't really doing much. It was just more like, oh, that's interesting. But then something happened in 2009 that came along that fundamentally transformed the dark web into what it is today into a collection of, you know, a lot of illegal stuff, the worst of the worst. And it was an introduction to Bitcoin. The ability now to be on something anonymously and buy something anonymously fundamentally transformed what the dark web was. All right. Let's talk in layman's terms here and how it applies to our listeners or me or, you know, anybody else is just a novice searching on search engines here. The dark web, is it legal to have the software and to just browse around the dark web any given point? No problem. You can do this. And is anybody keeping an eye? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Is anybody keeping an eye on what you're doing? Well, see, that's the conundrum, right? So it's, how do you, you want to create something so secure that even your own government can't break it because that's the whole point. If we can break into it, somebody else can. So this has been one of the challenges for the FBI and for law enforcement around the world is, how do you conduct investigations over the dark web because there's a lot of stuff going on the open web. I mean, for goodness sakes, you can use Snapchat and Instagram to buy fentanyl. You know, we see kids doing this, but the worst of the worst stuff is happening there. And the only way you can traditionally figure out who's behind it is that person has to make some kind of an operational security mistake like they expose an IP address or they put their email address, which is what happened to one of the biggest sites ever called Silk Road. That dude made hundreds of millions of dollars, but he exposed an email address and they tracked them down. But otherwise, even to this day, even though it's been out for going on 30 years now, it's been 29. It was introduced, I think, in '95. It is still very difficult to conduct investigations over the dark web simply because these sites come up and they go down. They come up and they go down. So every year you probably get 50% churn on the sites that are there. All right. When you talk about the dark web, how much, what percentage do you think is nefarious activity up to no good? Yeah. If you're on the dark web, which by the way, the dark web constitutes less than 1/10, maybe of 1% of what's really going on out there, but in terms of that, it contains the majority of the worst of the worst stuff, even compared to the open web. So I would say 50 to 70% of what may be on the dark web would be considered illegal in almost every country. Wow. I mean, what seems to be the biggest category of bad stuff going on there? Is it trafficking? Is it drugs? Is it embezzlement? What's the big ones? You're going to get a lot of drug trafficking and a lot of child pornography. Some of the worst cases ever investigated and fortunately they caught this guy was happened on the dark web. So you're going to see things that you can, that if it was out on a regular site would get taken down instantly, but it's very difficult to do it on the dark web because by nature, it's anonymous, you know, it's in a sense covert. So you will see, I think that the majority, if you wanted to find the worst of the worst stuff out there, you'll find the worst of the worst on the dark web and unfortunately the way it affects us is maybe not directly, but indirectly, a lot of our personal information may end up there, information about us. If somebody wants to target you, you can actually go to the dark web and get somebody to either do it physically or digitally, you don't have to find you or target you. So ransomware campaigns are run off and then terrorists and cartels running their human trafficking operations, doing their covert communications, this, the dark web has been a way that we know that that they have facilitated planning and communication. You know, it always seems the bad guys are one or two steps ahead of the good guys when it comes to committing crimes and stealing identities and doing bad things. You know, you're a cyber terrorism analyst and expert in this field. Your government agencies, not only in the United States, but globally, on top of this, are they still one or two steps behind the bad guys? You know, by nature, they're always going to be behind because they can't, you know, unless you believe in Tom Cruise, you know, in the minority report and you get into the pre-crime bureau, it's very difficult to know that somebody's going to do X on a certain date. So we're always, by nature, we're always reacted to it. And the other thing here, I got to tell you, there's so much stuff going on in the world. If you look at the number of investigations that are going on in the United States, we've got a decrease in law enforcement. So fewer and fewer cases are getting investigated, increase in homicides. It's just, it's a resource issue. And I'm global. I got friends in the Dutch police, you know, over in England, the London Met, the New Scotland Yard, they're just overwhelmed with all the investigations that are going on right now. And they don't have the number of people anywhere in the world really to do this. So the bad guys, unfortunately, in this area, are always going to have the advantage. These are going to have to rise to the top to become like the number one through number ten targets. Those are the folks that are going to get the attention. Everybody else, they're going to have to do something unfortunately really bad before they get the attention of international law enforcement. It's just amazing how bad it is and how, you know, ahead of everybody that's trying to, you know, put an end to it, these people are. Morgan Wright, thank you. Very insightful this morning. I appreciate you. Hello. It is Ryan. And we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. 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