Word Notes 8.11.20
Ep 9 | 8.11.20

darknet (noun)

Transcript

Rick Howard: The word is Darknet.

Rick Howard: Spelled: D as in disguise, A is an Arab Spring, R as in routing, K as in keep, N as in Navy, E as in Elliott, and T as in TOR.

Rick Howard: Definition: a subset of the Internet where communications between two parties or client-server transactions are obscured from search engines and surveillance systems by layers of encryption.

Rick Howard: Example sentence: Elliott hacked the Tor exit nodes in order to monitor who was using the Darknet.

Rick Howard: Context: the US Navy designed the original Darknet by developing The Onion Router Network, or TOR, back in the 1990s. Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson deployed the first Alpha implementation in 2002 with some initial funding by the Electronic Frontier Foundation or EFF. The TOR project became a nonprofit in 2006 and is funded by the US, Sweden, different NGOs and individual sponsors. TOR consists of thousands of onion routers. The TOR user sends a message into the network and the system routes the message to at least three randomly selected routers before it releases it to the destination. Each router in the chain only knows the router that sent them the message, but none of the others in the circuit because each wraps a layer of encryption around the message like an onion. For hidden services within TOR, like the Web server, administrators provide public keys to their customers outside of TOR. Through the TOR algorithm, using introductory nodes and rendezvous nodes, users gain access to the hidden service.

Rick Howard: In Mr. Robot, Episode 1, Season 1, The pilot, Elliott, played by Rami Malek, confronts a child pornographer who uses the Darknet to provide services to his clients.

Television dialogue: "When I decided to hack you, I know you run a website called Plato's Boys. Pardon me? You're using TOR networking to keep the servers anonymous. You made it really hard for anyone to see it, but I saw it. The onion routing protocol, it's not as anonymous as you think it is. Whoever is in control of the exit nodes is also in control of the traffic, which makes me the one in control."