Overview

The dark web is a decentralized network of internet sites that try to make users as anonymous as possible by routing all their communications through multiple servers and encrypting them at every step.

Given the dark web’s widespread use by people who don’t want their activities known to the authorities, you might be surprised to hear that it was conceived and prototyped by researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, scientists who’d already recognized that the open internet was extremely susceptible to surveillance.

Building on their work, the Tor Network went live in 2002, making the dark web widely available for the first time. Six years later, the Tor Project released the Tor Browser, designed to make the dark web somewhat easier to navigate – through, as CSO Magazine noted recently, it can still be “unpredictable, unreliable and maddeningly slow.” Tor says its network now includes several thousand servers and millions of users, though it’s hard to tell whether its user base is continuing to grow.