Nitin Patel

MIST 355 Article Review

The Deep Web vs. The Dark Web

The article I have chosen to discuss is one that explains what exactly the deep web and

the dark web are and the differences between them. The largest distinction between the deep and

dark web is often misunderstood as people use the deep web every single day even without

realizing it. The deep web is anything that cannot be found by a regular search engine such as

google so sites such as Netflix, email, or online banking websites would classify under the deep

web as you can only access them with the use of a password or account, so they are not able to

be reached by any search engine directly. The dark web is a very specific, small segment of the

deep web that can only be accessed with the use of a third-party anonymous browser such as Tor.

As the internet grew in the mid 1990’s, it transformed society as we know it on a very

large scale as there was never a method of instant communication quite like it. The biggest issue

for the internet in the early stages however was that it was not designed with anonymity and

privacy as top priority so anything you said, did, or explored on the internet was able to be

tracked and traced back to you, and often times, it was. Not only was this a concern for ordinary

citizens of society using the internet, it was also a concern for the United States government

because they wanted to make sure their privacy was also intact. Thus, the development of a

technology known as Onion Routing began by the Naval Research Laboratory, a branch of the

United States Navy. Onion Routing allowed for anonymous, bi-directional communication

between a source and destination that could not be determined by a mid-point with the use of an

overlay network, the Tor browser being an ideal example of this technology.

As the goal of creating this technology was anonymity, it could not be fulfilled if the only

people that had access to it was members of the United States government so in order for the

technology to work as designed, it would need to be made available to the public and so it was.
Nitin Patel
MIST 355 Article Review

This allowed anyone to be able to use and allowed those that were part of the government to mix

into the large crowd of users and fulfilling their requirements for absolute anonymity. Although a

majority of Tor users simply use the platform to protect their privacy and be able to browse the

internet anonymously, the rate of online criminal activity has skyrocketed due to this technology

and there has been an ongoing battle on stopping it. The very simple solution would be to shut

down the technology as a whole, the issue is that the United States government needs this

technology for anonymity just as much as the criminals that it has attracted, and it would be

counterintuitive to restrict something that was meant to be unrestrictive by its very design so at

the end of the day, this technology will always play a large role in modern internet as we know it

whether that may be for the good or for the bad and that is the price that you have to pay when it

comes to anonymity on the internet.

Source: Cihodariu, Miriam. “Deep Web vs. Dark Web: What Is Each and How Do They

Work.” Heimdal Security Blog, 18 June 2019, https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/deep-web-

vs-dark-web-what-is-each/.