(Yes, I know: deeply misleading. Possibly incriminating. Definitely click-bait-y.)
Before you panic: I am not about to teach you how to illegally sell drugs, disappear into a cyber bunker, or upload anything you shouldn’t. A Canvas blog post would be a wildly inappropriate (and stupid) venue for launching a criminal enterprise. Instead, we’re talking about the dark web in the way it’s studied: who uses it, what they use it for, and how it even functions in the first place.
For those of us who lean more toward communication and culture than hardcore technology, the tech-heavy corners of this program can feel intimidating. Walking into my cybersecurity class was slightly unnerving, especially when the freshman next to me casually mentioned she knows three coding languages. Shortly thereafter, the lecture began discussing hacks and complex attack processes, and I was sitting there thinking about how the most illegal internet activity I’ve ever committed was connecting to a restaurant’s Wi-Fi without permission (in my defense, maybe my local Italian restaurant should come up with a password stronger than ILovePizza).
But later in the semester, when we began discussing the dark web, it piqued my interest. If someone can hide behind layers of encryption and anonymity, how do you actually hold them accountable? How do you catch someone in a crime when you can’t definitively prove who “someone” is? Part of the issue is that the dark web floats around in our cultural imagination as this nebulous, almost sci-fi concept: something evil people use on TV shows, not something structurally embedded in our real world. As Jean-François Blanchette describes, cyberspace is often portrayed as “an ethereal escape from the filthy, hopeless ‘meat’ world’” (p. 1044). We tend to assume that if something is made up of 1’s and 0’s, it somehow isn’t physical, isn’t material, isn’t real. It feels “metaphysical: by annihilating space and time, it allows humankind to escape physical limitations” (p. 1043).
But beyond the dramatic headlines and hacker-movie aesthetics, the dark web is less of a secret villain lair and more of a technological space with real structures, real users, and very real consequences that are integral to understanding. As Blanchette warns, “these dilemmas, these compromises, these struggles will increasingly matter, as the software infrastructure comes to mediate a breathtaking proportion of social relations” (1056). We can’t let the scary science of things like the dark web intimidate us into disengaging.
So! Let’s actually dive into what the dark web is, and I’m going to try to explain it in a way that makes sense to those of us who did not grow up coding for fun.
The most common way to access the dark web is through something called The Onion Router, or TOR. The name is already trying to be helpful with its metaphor: layers of an onion. Very cute, but slightly unhelpful if you don’t actually understand how internet servers work in the first place. At its core, TOR is just a browser. Like Safari. Like Chrome. You download it onto your computer. You open it. It looks… normal. Simple enough so far, right?
What makes it different is what’s happening behind the scenes. TOR lets users “access a network that anonymizes web traffic to provide private web browsing. Often used to access the dark web, Tor Browser hides IP addresses and browsing activity by redirecting web traffic through a series of different routers called nodes.”
Tor Browser sends web traffic through an entry node (blue), middle node (green), and exit node (orange) to encrypt and decrypt traffic.
Woof. That got complicated fast. What’s an IP address? What’s a node? What even is the internet?
Let’s slow it down.
Think of the internet as a mail delivery system. Every time you send an email, Google something, or open a website, your computer is basically putting information into an envelope. On the outside of that envelope is the destination address (the website you’re trying to reach) and your return address (your IP address). An IP address is just a string of numbers computers use to identify each other, kind of like a home address. It’s not a permanent identity marker, but it’s often enough to narrow you down to a physical location or internet provider. It tells the internet where to send the response back.
The problem? If someone breaks into the mailroom, they can see where your letter came from and where it’s going. And if security is weak, they might even peek inside and see the contents: what you searched, what you wrote, what you clicked.
Now enter TOR.
We’re going to keep the mail analogy going. Imagine you want to send a message to Johnny B, but you don’t want anyone to know it came from you; not the mail carriers, not outside observers, not even Johnny B himself.
Instead of putting your message in one envelope, you put it inside three. In reality, those “envelopes” are layers of encryption. You seal one inside the next, layer by layer, like a Russian nesting doll. The entire package is addressed to Mailman A (Node 1), and off it goes into the mail.
Mailman A receives the package, and he can see your return address on the outermost envelope. He opens that first layer and finds instructions to send the package to Mailman B. But, he cannot see what’s inside the remaining envelopes, and he has no idea who the final recipient is. So, he delivers the package of envelopes to Mailman B.
Once Mailman B (Node 2) gets the package, he sees that there’s no return address for him; Mailman B only knows that the package of envelopes came from Mailman A. He opens his layer and sees instructions to pass it to Mailman C. Still no idea what’s inside. Still no idea where it ultimately ends up. Off the package goes to Mailman C.
Mailman C (Node 3) opens the final routing layer and sees that it must be delivered to Johnny B. He knows only that it came from Mailman B and has no knowledge of who originally sent the letters.
Johnny B finally receives the innermost envelope and reads your message. All Johnny knows is that Mailman C delivered it to him.
The brilliance of this system is that no single mailman knows everything. No one point in the chain can see the origin, the destination, and the contents all at once. The information is fragmented by design, and there aren’t just three mailmen total. TOR operates with thousands of possible relays (often up to around 12,000 at a time). Every request is routed through at least three nodes (mailmen) before reaching its destination. That’s how the dark web preserves anonymity. Even if someone intercepted the message at one relay or from one mailman, they wouldn’t have the full picture.
Of course, like all metaphors, this one simplifies. The mailmen aren’t actually opening paper envelopes; they’re decrypting layers of mathematical encryption. And TOR doesn’t make someone invisible or untouchable. It makes it significantly harder, but not impossible, to trace activity back to a single user.
One major misconception is that the dark web exists only for criminal activity. While it’s true that a vast majority of activity there is illegal (about 57%), and in some cases, seeing, even accidentally, certain content can be illegal, not everything that happens on the dark web is inherently “dark.”
Think about moments when pure anonymity would actually be helpful. If you’re a journalist communicating with a source in a country with strict censorship laws or if you’re a political dissident facing persecution. In those cases, anonymity isn’t about evading accountability: it’s about survival. The technology itself can be neutral: it’s the intent behind its use that determines whether it’s protective or harmful. And that nuance often gets lost when we reduce the entire dark web to a villain in a crime drama.
As Cathy O’Neil explains about algorithms, technologies are incredibly powerful in shaping our daily lives. The dark web and cybersecurity systems are no exception. But there’s a massive barrier between the people building these systems and the people affected by them, especially in tech-heavy spaces like cybersecurity. And for women, in particular, those spaces can sometimes feel closed off or intimidating.
That’s why we need to “inject ethics” directly into the process of building and using these technologies. As Cal Newport writes for The New Yorker, “Once we’ve taken the time to open up the black box and poke around the springs and gears found inside, we discover that programs like ChatGPT [and the dark web] don’t represent an alien intelligence… instead, they turn out to run on…well-worn digital logic.”
In other words, we need to stop blindly trusting technologies to be fair or neutral and start examining what they’re actually doing. They’re a lot less scary once you open them up, and a lot more accountable once you understand them.