Joseph Cox: The Deep Web Isn't All Dark

The Deep Web is the new Wild West, a vast foreboding World beneath the surface of the searchable web we know and love. Accessed through special software and anonymized at every stage, this murky underworld brims with sordid secrets and terrifying tales. It's scale (several magnitudes larger than the searchable web) is astonishing, it's a place you can buy drugs, weapons, contract a killer, all completely untraced. It's also the birthplace of the Silk Road, a website named after the historical trade routes, founded by the Dread Pirate Roberts. It's the Ebay of the drug world offering everything from acid to heroin. Joseph is an investigative journalist who is a resident there. A world expert in this cyber underworld, currently working on a film about the topic with Vice

Joseph offers a brief survey of the Deep Web's varied offering: crowd-sourced hit men, jihadists and esoteric drugs. Yet he invites us to look beyond the pixels, and sensationalist newspaper articles, at some of the people who are shaping this new and expanding space. Within it, lies a passionate, highly ideological community; hackers who wage war on child porn, doctors who try to prevent drug abuse and even book club aficionados. As Joseph puts it, "The Deep Web is not dark, it's very colourful".

Image Credits: Audrich Lawson and Jason Reed

• Category

  • Entertainment

• License

  • Standard YouTube License