Darknets and Civil Security

Darknets serve as licit privacy networks, enabling activists, journalists, and others to communicate anonymously and avoid censorship. Furthermore, they serve as a tool for exercising soft power in international relations. Yet, Darknets also allow for illicit file sharing and trafficking. Besides much-discussed narcotics and child abuse material, goods and services offered on Darknet markets include counterfeit currency, forged documents, weaponry, malicious software, zero-day exploits, and hacking services. Hence, Darknets are a significant concern, not only for civilian security institutions like law enforcement but also for national and international security. In the context of civil security, Darknets enable or support several practices: impeding attribution of attacks by fostering anonymity, trading of cyber arms and their building blocks like zero-day exploits, providing simple and sophisticated hacking services, and dissemination of information from secrets to fake news. In this chapter, we explain the technology behind Tor, a widely used Darknet client, provide an overview of common Darknet phenomena. Drawing on the framework of securitisation theory, we discuss them as an issue of civil security.