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Georgi Genchev
SES 360B
April 15, 2015
Assignment 13
Perhaps everyone has heard about Edwards Snowden, the employee of the U.S. National
Security Agency who in 2013 leaked classified information. He is now hiding in Russia in order
to avoid twenty to thirty years of jail time. His story has shown to the public how easy can our
information can be leaked from the Web and has risen the question of moral issues around the
Internet privacy from government surveillance to Facebook practices.
Contrary to the common belief that treats to privacy can come only from criminals, we
might also willingly give up our personal data to someone online, biggest examples are Google
and Facebook. In these cases, our data isnt being stolen from us but many public concerns
have arisen over how the data is used. For Facebook, holding the personal data of hundreds of
millions of users has created an expectation among those users that the company should use it
fairly and protect their privacy. In the past few years, users have raised complaints about data
mining, confusing privacy settings that prevented many users from being able to control
effectively their privacy and many others.

Also, one way every Internet users privacy is invaded upon is by government surveillance. The
governments of most nations, including the US and those in Europe, tap Internet traffic as part of
national security programs. It was Snowden who revealed the scale of this international
espionage and exposed the actions of world leaders such as Merkel, Sarcosi and Obama.

Moving forward to something that is probably less known - The Dark Web. This is a
collection of websites that are publicly visible, but hide the IP addresses of the servers that run
them. Thus they can be visited by any web user, but it is very difficult to work out who is behind
the sites. Almost all sites on the so-called Dark Web hide their identity using the Tor
encryption tool. You can use Tor to hide your identity, and spoof your location. When a website

is run through Tor it has much the same effect.

Indeed, it multiplies the effect. To visit a site on the Dark Web that is using Tor encryption, the
web user needs to be using Tor. Just as the end user's IP is bounced through several layers of
encryption to appear to be at another IP address on the Tor network, so is that of the website. So
there are several layers of magnitude more secrecy than the already secret act of using Tor to visit
a website on the open internet - for both parties. In general, it does not compromise the users
privacy on the Web, on the contrary, it offers very hard to trace alternative of the Surface Web
Infamous examples of Dark Web sites include the Silk Road and its offspring. The Silk Road was
a website for the buying and selling of recreational drugs. But there are legitimate uses for the
Dark Web. People operating within closed, totalitarian societies can use the Dark Web to
communicate with the outside world. And given recent revelations about US- and UK
government snooping on web use, you may feel it is sensible to take your communication on to
the Dark Web.
To conclude, I do not think that anonymity is a restriction of freedom. My opinion is that
there should be some government surveillance for the prevention of terrorist attacks and other
crimes, but this has to be done in accordance to the personal right of freedom of everyone else. In

other words said, people that are not endangering the society should be only bothered by
government for their taxes, nothing more.