Darknet

Geopolitics and Uses

Laurent Gayard

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781786302021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119522492
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This collaborative research project allows for fundamental advances not only in the understanding of the phenomena but also in the development of practical calculation methods that can be used by engineers. This collaborative research project allows for fundamental advances not only in the understanding of the phenomena but also in the development of practical calculation methods that can be used by engineers.

PART 1
New Frontiers and Governance of Digital Space

1
Fragmentation and Compartmentalization of Virtual Space

1.1. The nymph Carna and Internet census

One day, a computer scientist wondered how many Internet users could navigate this immense digital map, which is today’s global network. Therefore, he created a small and perfectly harmless spy program named Carna Botnet, in honor of the nymph Carna, who became goddess of the cardo, the “hinge” or “axis”, that is to say, the divinity of the gates in Roman rites, a charge that she inherited from the god Janus, who had taken her virginity in exchange.

“The first day [of June] is consecrated to you, Carna, goddess of the hinges. She opens that which is closed, she closes that which is open; these are the attributes of her divinity”¹.

While Janus, honored on January 1, opens the first part of the year, Carna is celebrated on June 1, opening the second half of the year. The anonymous creator of Carna Botnet intimately knew her Latin letters. Carna is indeed a multifaceted goddess. If she was to be given tribute and sacrifice in June, the month in which the days were the longest, it was from her reign of the calendar that the period of the year begins, in which days begin to shorten until the end of summer and slowly turn into winter. The goddess of light, Carna is therefore also a goddess of darkness and concealment, or even a goddess of the underworld, with whom she is associated. This second attribute also makes her worth being considered as the goddess of organs and internal functioning of the human body, the “goddess of the human body viscera”, so says the Latin author Macrobe².

From May to October 2012, the small program named after the goddess of entrails attempted to list all objects connected to the Internet with an IPv4³ address. Out of a total of 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses available, Carna Botnet counted 1.3 billion active addresses in October 2012; 729 million occupied domains and 141 million addresses protected behind a firewall. In a previous “large Internet census” in 2006, 187 million visible users were counted. The latest estimates⁴ put the total number of this era of smartphone users at just under four billion. Nevertheless, from his large “2012 Internet census”, Carna Botnet’s creator drew the conclusion that the development of IPv6⁵ addresses might make any further census attempts in the future impossible. Five years on, in 2017, the growth of the connected objects industry and the ever-increasing number of users proved it right: it is impossible to know exactly how many users, devices, objects or servers are connected to the Internet today. Estimates and statistics continue to be produced, but remain doomed to be approximated.

It is therefore probably impossible to establish a precise geography of the global network today, and this can only be celebrated if we consider that the Internet must remain a virtual space in which privacy, anonymity and user freedom must be preserved. This libertarian concept contrasts with that of states and governments, striving to know and monitor cyberspace zones entrenched behind the barriers of encryption, or even more simply, lost in the ocean of data accumulated since the creation and privatization of the Internet. States are not alone in wanting to know about this new terra incognita of the digital universe, as private and public sector economic operators are also looking for ways to take advantage of them. In the face of various attempts at state regulation and commercial penetration of the “hidden Internet”, communities and individuals are now trying to hide behind the supposed sanctity of encryption keys that allow, as way of an example, two million users to surf the Internet anonymously using the Tor browser (The Onion Router), in the name of protecting privacy and freedoms, and sometimes for less admirable reasons.

The very provocative “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”⁶, issued in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, particularly resonates today. In Barlow’s days, it was a protest against the Telecommunications Act that, according to the author of the “Declaration of Independence”, supplied this virtual space of freedom (that is the Internet) to commercial appetites and the regulatory fury of companies and governments. But in 1996, the Internet was still in its infancy. Twenty years later, in 2017, we are not far off from considering that Barlow’s wish came true. Cyberspace has somehow found its independence through its own extension and the phenomenon of encrypted networks. According to Campbell [CAM 07], author of a report for the European Parliament in 1997, the battle of cryptography was already lost by governments at the dawn of the 21st Century, which leaves room for the expansion of private networks and thus offers the prospect of a World Wide Web that is very difficult to control, a virtual territory largely beyond the reach of legislation; a gray zone between public and private space. The exponential growth of the global network, a vast web of networks and subnetworks numbering in the tens of thousands, in itself guarantees the relative powerlessness of States – which never had the extensive monitoring capabilities that they do today – from controlling Internet traffic. The mass of data represented by the circulation of these immaterial flows is impossible to process. Today, the Internet is simply too vast to be submitted in its entirety to the authority of regulatory bodies, or even to be comprehensively understood and apprehended.

1.2. Dimensions of cyberspace

There is a need for early comprehension on some definitions. The Internet is a global computer network composed of millions of public and private networks, made up of a set of sites, pages and databases accessible via the World Wide Web, invented in the early 1990s by CERN⁷ computer scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. The World Wide Web is only one application among many (among others, the various e-mail systems and peer-to-peer file-sharing systems) that provides access to the Internet. The latter, since its official creation on January 1, 1983, and its opening to commercial exploitation in the 1990s, thus brings together an ever-increasing number of users, but also connected objects and databases, which can be accessed through browsers such as Google Chrome, Yahoo, Internet Explorer, Opera and other lesser-known browsers. According to internetlivestats.com, there were 3,611,467,000 network users on April 14, 2017 and 1,177,754,000 online sites. According to the same site, in April 2017, 2,580,768 e-mails were sent per second (including an overwhelming majority of spam sent by robots), 7,578 tweets, 776 photos uploaded to Instagram, 59,779 Google searches and 43,277 GB of data exchanged per second. In 2016, the International Communication Union estimated that less than half of the world’s population had access to the global network. This leaves the Internet an impressive margin for growth.

This exponential growth seems to remove all significant issues on the size of the Internet. In July 2000, a study by Cyveillance, “Sizing the Internet” [MUR 00], estimated the size of the Internet to be more than 2 billion pages. Five years later, the strategic intelligence company DIGIMIND produced a study showing that the Internet had about 64 billion pages, while an Italian study announced in the same year that 11.5 billion pages were indexed by the main search engines. Nowadays, if we estimate the number of Websites created on the Internet at nearly 1 billion 200 million, it is very difficult to know how many active pages this can correspond to. In terms of data volume, the size of the Internet was therefore estimated at 4.4 zettabytes in 2014⁸, equivalent to a number of digital tablets that would cover two-thirds of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, if they were end-to-end. The same study estimates that in 2020, the volume of data represented by the Internet will have exceeded 44 zettabytes, six times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, using the previous example. The rate of growth of the Internet now makes it possible to reach such orders of magnitude that we can now speak of a true “alchemy of multitudes”, just as the researchers Francis Pisani and Dominique Piotet did [PIS 08, p. 188].

This “alchemy of multitudes”, which brings together 4.4 zettabytes of data, nearly 50,000 different networks, 1 billion 200 million sites and an almost incalculable number of connected objects, constitutes the Internet, where the World Wide Web allows nearly 4 billion users to navigate. However, the vast majority of these users are unaware of most of these vast digital resources and will only vis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Content
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: New Frontiers and Governance of Digital Space
• PART 2: Crypto-Anarchism, Cryptography and Hidden Networks
• Conclusion
• APPENDICES
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement