the constant skeptic

Becky Hogge
22 - 8 - 2006

The promotion of “darknets” is one response to corporate surveillance of personal data. But there is a better way to ensure privacy online, says Becky Hogge.

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), when he revealed that the political party dedicated to copyright reform would be supporting a controversial new commercial “darknet”, Relakks. “Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect citizens from the effects of current routine surveillance”, says Falkvinge.

So, for a fee of €5 per month, Relakks offers to provide that protection, increasingly being eroded from our civil liberties. The workings of the system – called a darknet because it obscures identifying information about the origin of the traffic that flows through it – are fairly simple. Subscribers use browser-based software to route their internet traffic through a secure connection to Relakks’s servers, based in Sweden, before they make a connection to the public internet. This makes all their dealings online difficult to trace: the IP addresses associated with the traffic – numerical identifiers for every machine on the network – can be followed only as far back as Relakks, and not to an individual subscriber’s internet service provider.

Asking internet service providers to reveal the name and home address of peer-to-peer file-sharers through their IP address is the tactic rightsholder lobbies like the Recording Industry Association of America and the British Phonographic Industry use in their pursuit of those responsible for copyright infringement online. But although the Pirate Party’s stance on peer-to-peer file-sharing of copyrighted materials has been the focus of the news coverage associated with the launch of Relakks, subscribers could also use the anonymising service for all sorts of online activity: ordinary web browsing; text messaging like instant messenger and internet relay chat, and the fledgling telephony services like Skype that use the internet to make voice calls.

Falkvinge rightly points out that darknets, like Relakks, are more often associated with users taking part in malicious activity, such as black-hat hackers trading stolen credit-card details or paedophiles swapping illegal images of children.

A New York Times reporter recently infiltrated one such circle to reveal how safe paedophiles feel in these anonymised environments – openly discussing their attraction to children, swapping information about how to get jobs working with children through summer camps and foster-care schemes, and supporting one another in getting through moments of guilt about their obsessions. The report makes gruesome reading.