although you may think of people using the dark web for buying and selling
shady wares as a recent phenomenon it actually has its roots all the way back
to the very genesis of the internet in fact during the early 1970s a group
of students from stanford used the department of defense designed arpanet
the predecessor to the internet to sell some marijuana to other students at mit
it's actually believed that this was the first ever instance of someone buying
something online way before jeff bezos sold his first book so it turns out that
the idea of a cyber underground is as old as the internet itself and as the
world became more interconnected the first data haven started to appear in
the 1980s down in the caribbean the idea here was to house information in
countries that had looser laws surrounding privacy kind of like tax
haven countries with looser laws about how much the government can skim off the
top of your paycheck but data havens were still an imperfect solution for
those seeking them out as most countries still had restrictions on common uses
for these services such as gambling plus housing information and services
anywhere that was subject to one jurisdiction's laws wasn't enough for
some uh freedom-loving netizens so a more decentralized solution called
freenet was launched in the year 2000 a dark network designed to provide
anonymity over encrypted peer-to-peer connections without relying on a central
repository of information because it's not connected to the world wide web it
remains a rather niche service but it's still around if you're curious but this
doesn't mean that everyone just kind of gave up on housing tons of sensitive
information and trying to make a buck off it probably the best known example
of this is havenco also formed in the year 2000 by some libertarian-minded
folks that wanted to put information out of the reaches of any government the
plan was to host servers on sea land a self-proclaimed country off the coast of
the united kingdom that has a colorful history of its own it's actually an old
air defense platform left over from world war ii that was seized by roy
bates a pirate radio broadcaster who
took it by force from other pirate radio broadcasters he
declared his little patch of concrete in the middle of the ocean as its own
country and the uk's own courts even ruled at one point that it was outside
of british territory so the uk government just kind of gave up on
trying to take it back naturally a rogue state run by
descendants of a pirate would seem like a good place to host a dark net the plan
was for a haven code to attach servers to the concrete pillars that held up
sealant and fill them with nitrogen to discourage interlopers not to mention
the fact that sealand was already difficult for outsiders to access and
easy to defend unless someone tried to invade with like actual warships and
bombers unfortunately for havenco they couldn't end up getting a reliable
connection and were stuck with a satellite link that wasn't much faster
than a dial-up modem plus it turned out that no matter what kind of content you
needed to host you could find some country to do it in meaning that there
just wasn't much interest in havenco services outside of a few gambling sites
to make matters worse heavenco and sealand's government got into a spat
involving copyright infringement as the sealand royal family didn't want to
anger their close neighbors the uk too much
so havenco eventually shut down but the dark web has ended up thriving without
sealand's help in 2002 around the same time that clan decided to buy out
havenco the tor network first came online you can learn much more about tor
up here but it's another decentralized network ironically first developed by
the us government to protect dissidents and is now used for all sorts of
purposes and bitcoin's launch in 2009 helped the
dark net grow even more since now there's suit anonymous ways to transact
shady business and enable the founding of whole marketplaces but if you're
interested just make sure you don't get into the business of buying and selling
the wrong stuff you should stick with the right stuff
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