An innovative search engine being developed by DARPA, aims to
shine a light on the dark web and reveal patterns and relationships in online
data to assist law enforcement and others track illegal activity.
The project, dubbed Memex, has been in the workings for a year and is being developed by 17 different contractor teams who are functioning with the DARPA. Google and Bing, with explore results influenced by popularity and ranking, are only intelligent to capture just about five percent of the internet. The objective of Memex is to make an enhanced map of more internet content.
“We are trying to undertake a problem that is ‘one size fits all’ approach to the internet where ‘search results are’ based on customer publicity and position,” says program manager for Memex, who gave a presentation of the engine to the 60-Minutes news program. To accomplish this goal, Memex will not only scrape content from the millions of regular web pages that get ignored by commercial search engines but will also chronicle thousands of sites on the so-called Dark Web—such as sites like the former Silk Road drug emporium that are a part of the TOR network’s Hidden Services. These sites, which have the .onion web addresses, are accessible only through TOR browser & only to those who know a site’s specific address. even though sites do exist that index some buried Services pages—often about a precise topic—and there is already a search engine called Grams for bringing to light sites trade illegal drugs & other smuggled goods but majority of secreted Services stay on well under the radar.
White says part of the Memex project is targeted at determining just how a large amount of TOR traffic is linked to Hidden sites. It is said, “Previous were in solo digits—in the 1k,” “But we believe there are, at any specific time, between 30k and 40k Hidden Service Onion sites that have content on them that one possibly will index.” The content on Hidden Services is actually unrestricted—in the intellect that it is not secret code protected—but it is not readily easy to get to through a business-related search engine. White squad’s said “We are working to reallocate towards a planned method of finding [Hidden Services sites] & making the public content on them obtainable”. The Darpa panel also requests to find a means to better be aware of the yield of such sites.
In the presentation conducted for 60 Minutes, White’s squad showed how law enforcement could trace the movement of folks—both trafficked and traffickers—based on the information linked to online ads for sex. However, the 60 Minutes piece was not clear about how this was done but it appeared to focus on the IP address of where the advertisements were hosted, implying so as to trace where an advertisement moves from one IP address to another could reveal to law enforcement where the trafficker could be located. White says the IP address is the least important information that they analyze and rather focus on other data points.
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“Sometimes it is a task of IP address, but sometimes it is a task of a phone no. or address in the advertisement or the geo-location of a device that posted the particular ad,” he says. “There are sometimes other attributes that contribute to location.” For example, an ad attempting to sell the sexual services of a woman or child in one locale might pop up in another location and include a regional address or phone number. White says this kind of data has previously been used by private investigators to find women who were being trafficked.
He notes that the connection from the online ads to the real world is not always precise but yet there are investigators and prosecutors implanted to do its interpretation and make importee decisions. DARPA simply creates the tech, and any association or organisation can implement the technology to use it.