Interested in such a weird and disturbing subject. Ive always been interested in the way of the world and the general idea that people are on the fringe of society. They are often the most interesting and least understood nobody imagined what it would become as far as a think tank ive always been a political extremism and religious movements and try to understand what drives them. There were a growing number of stories about lasting happenings around the internet. Whether it was illegal pornography or more recently faith. We only had something of a glimpse of those communities. I want to understand the extremities to watch people will go when they believe themselves to be operating under their own ideas. I wanted to really understand how people behave online. I also wanted to meet the people of these subcultures. I wanted to know who they were in real life. What did they do during the day . Where did they go for coffee . Were they nice people in the flash and radically different when you met them online . The only way to do that was to go to try to find them. That. That was the idea that i would try to meet the people that were behind the screen. When you started to look into this how difficult was it to find these people because you talk to all sorts of people who are involved in questionable both morally and legally things. How hard was it to find these people and get them to talk to you . I have a lot of unanswered emails floating around somewhere. The strange thing about this is that when you approach people who are doing morally questionable things online they are inevitably just rather hesitant to talk and be honest with you offline. I spent the First Six Months of the 12 months trying to contact them and let me into their digital world. Or into their real world. Once once you do that you know their techniques and they are demonstrating that you can be trusted and giving them various types of assurances about how you treat your information and if you check with them after youve spoken with them. You need to make sure that you are not going to try to identify who they really are in real life. Those that do believe you tend to be incredibly open. Once you get these people to start talking, they wont shut up. Anybody who has an ax to grind or feels they are treated unfairly or their culture is not being given a fair hearing as soon as they think theyve found somebody they will talk to them and report what they have to say they wont leave you alone. It was surprising once i got to that point, a light went off in my head, it was surprisingly easy to get very, very incredibly personal and detailed information about them. Including going into someones bedroom and sitting next to them as they perform things in front of 5000 people watching online. It was unbelievable how much i was welcomed in to someone like that. You kind of explore you talk to a girl who is doing sex acts on camera you talk to people who are dealing and buying drugs, you talk of how people who are English Defense League people who are rallying for their cause, what was it to you that joined all these things. The darknet is also a technical terms that people think of when they think of specific technology but you kind of went broader with that. Honestly joining them all together was just the fact that they were in my book. I could have chosen any number of different sub cultures. There are almost an infinite number of subcultures on the net. Its the bizarre and strange. One of the the most incredible things about the internet is how it allows otherwise impossible small subcultures to come together to create some type of community. What i was most interested in was trying to understand, morally speaking, the, the effects of anonymity online on peoples behavior. It has a single type of theme running through it. It doesnt need to be an amenity protected by multiple layers of complicated encryption systems such as the technical darknet it can simply be by using a fake name on facebook. Its not the real me its a digital version or a digital avatar that i am acting out. The reason i didnt want to just focus on the technical encryption stuff is because when you think your behavior, that your digital behavior is separated from the real version of you, and where that can be, where that freedom of action and behavior can take you. One of the case studies that you used is the silk road and that has been in the news a lot and has been like folktale about anonymity online. The the founder was just sentenced to life in prison and i was curious, i have a kind of personal attachment to that because i was the first one to report on it and actually, from the beginning saw how this was going to and in the spectacular implosion. I was curious what you think about the end result of the silk road because when you wrote about it, i think it was still going. It had started to collapse. I wrote about silk road to which also collapse. There are several other. Net markets that followed the same path. Silk roads conviction was life imprisonment without parole. That is absolutely astonishing. I think one of the reason is because of the threat that Something Like the silk road actually poses. The idea is that it is possible, with modern systems of encryption using the bit claim to obscure transactions between people and using text encryption to send your address to someone essentially meant you could or they thought and hoped and was always the plan or the vision our a dream, create a perfectly uncensored herbal unregulated herbal market. Technically that is quite close to being possible. In many respects had it been a different industry he would have been considered a business genius. Having been in the Business Environment he was able to create a functioning market that was characterized the amazing thing i found about it was it actually, almost reinvigorated my faith in Market Forces as a way of allowing consumers to determine the trade with fellows. The thing about the silk road that everybody i think is slightly wrong about is they imagine its all about clever encryption and the bit coin and masking things. That technical background was necessary to make this site work, but but over the course of two years, thousands of vendors and customers had over 1 billion of dollars of turnover. The reason there was so much of it was because it was such an incredibly good marketplace for a drug user. It was just like amazon or ebay. It was incredibly good service. We we are talking about very responsive vendors who are desperate to keep it going because they have 900 or thousand other vendors in which they can buy their drugs. They were given written feedback how good was the product. Didnt arrive on time . Was . Was the vendor responsive when you asked the question . Because of that, it just forced vendors to be acting in the interest of consumers. You had vendors offering loyalty programs, buy one get one free money back if you werent satisfied with their part product. Just like they would in any other market. What happened was that the quality went up and was much higher and predictable and the price was much more competitive. I think its completely right that he was convicted and sentenced because he was openly operating outside of the norm and breaking the law. But it created something of a moral dilemma for people were interested in the way the war on drugs is going. There are still other sites in operations that made more products more readily available to more people more easily. Thats a bad thing. But if you are going to buy them, i think i think they are safer for the user because they are less likely to be cut with mixing ages agents and it removes a lot of the street based crime for the drug market. How do you make a judgment about whether this is a good or a bad thing. Of course its a bad thing because its operating outside of the law but it offers something of a glimpse of an alternative. It would be in unregulated market and it shows how a regulated marketbased system could actually work. Theres one thing i wanted to ask you, do you know the creator of bit coin is . Yes and im not telling you. No i actually have no idea. Can you look into that . I did a lot of looking into the history of it and where it comes from because of course it was always a libertarian hope that we could create a digital cash that was not controlled by a central bank. Central banks who control the money supply in these libertarians cannot stand that. They tried to create the perfectly functioning digital cash and i cant remember all the details but it wouldnt be controlled by government. They also hoped they could make it through transactions linked to individuals or at least identifiable individuals would mean that the government cant tax you. If government cant tax you, they cant control you. Many people thought it was the nsa doing this. Many of the people who were behind the original currency do see it as a political vision that it can lead to the collapse of government and be replaced by some kind of trade utopia. I think that would be exciting but there is a political ideal behind this currency but i dont know who back to the question you asked. This idea of the market outside of any state or any kind of grounding in real life. Yes i wouldnt of been able to write a chapter without your help even know you didnt realize that when you first wrote about silk road, nobody, nobody had even heard of it. Then when you wrote about the fact that these amazing drugs are a click away of a button and of course traffic to that site exploded and everybody wanted to take a look. There was a lot more people at first that went there out of curiosity and there was underlying interest. We are not to be controlled by government. We are not going to be told what we can and cannot do. We must rain free. Now of course it didnt hurt that he was also making 10,000 a day on the site. In my judgment the money came first, the political philosophy came second in the argument that he helped drug users came a distant third. All three of them were part of it and there was an Incredible Community of people. You had these forms in the silk road where users would go and try to help each other. Including a dr. Dr. And i wrote about that doctor x he called himself. He went there and spent two hours a day trying to give people advice about how to manage their addiction. He said drug users dont go to doctors. They dont want to talk about it because theyre ashamed. Get them in and an ominous forum Anonymous Forum and they will talk. This is characterized not only by silk road by actually a lot of different pieces of the internet. I think the idea of anonymity providing some of this safe stage for people to talk about their habit and other suppliers it is an interesting argument. The flip side is, you you have these cases of people getting these drugs teenagers or something, that wouldnt have been able to access otherwise or if they had it wouldve been a process of working their way up to harder and harder drugs but now you can go straight to heroin or this really intense thing. Anonymity can cut both ways by creating Community Online but also detaching you from more meaningful community. Yes absolutely. That sort of thing where it cuts both ways is something that of course the market and every subculture that i tried to visit , probably more than any other word suicide sites. I found them easily the most difficult to write about. You have thousands of these sites that are dedicated, theyre not on the network. These are normal websites that anybody can find. Theyre unbelievably easy to find. They are dedicated to helping young girls aged between 13 and 18 with extreme and dangerous things. Extreme dieting like anorexia. Its probably the most dangerous and most serious condition. What happens in these sites is almost the opposite of what i expected. I thought it would be a place filled with evil people taunting vulnerable young people and encouraging them with destructive behavior. It was almost the opposite of that because these were very helpful and friendly communities. They were run were run by anorexics themselves who are offering support. We are here to help you. We are a community of people. We are your friends. When youre 13 or 1413 or 14 years old its very easy to go and believe these stories they can go to School Search from dieting tips online and think oh my gosh there are people like me who are worried about their weight too. Theyre really friendly and supportive and so its a natural place for me to go. These girls are sucked into a social group where they are all friends and theyre always looking out for each other and theyre always there for you. I had a similar thing when i hurt my knee. I. I fell straight into an online forum. I ended up finding this community of people who had the same injury as me and were all sitting there chatting about it. I thought my my god what are we doing. Its very easy to do. And what happens is there all encouraging each other for this destructive behavior. They present being skinny as the most admirable goal. They put lots of glamorous photos of supermodels out there and they keep putting tips and motivational quotes of how to get there. Thats not your stomach rumbling thats dash when i was on there it became quite natural. Everybody was saying the same thing. What happens is there sucked into the social life and then they begin to define themselves as a pro and a person. They i tshirts and bracelets. They become a onedimensional version of yourself within this one Little Community and all the other bits of you, all your other friends and all the other sides of you and the things you enjoy doing are all gone. There replaced by this very dangerous, single dimension of your character. Do you think Something Like pro anna which seems like a reoccurring issue on every single social network, as soon as something new comes out you can expect the report is that using snap chat or instagram. Do you think having met with these people and talk to them did you meet pro anna people . I did. Sometimes it might be that that one aspect becomes more visible. Its something youre posting about but when it comes down to it its just something you do at night as a hobby. You think this is an accurate representation of who these people are . The number of people suffering from anorexia has not increased greatly. What has changed is how it is expressed on line and the community of people talking about this online. Theyre getting younger as well. Theyre getting much younger. They start in these online forums very young. The average age that people start battling anorexia is a lot younger than it used to be. The extent to which they like to be part of an Online Community and its hard to be for sure and to know what to do about it. The french government recently ruled that they were going to prosecute people who were running pro anna sites. Are you going to go after these people and prosecute them . Its ridiculous. What these people need is medical help. Very difficult to break into these communities. Until Health Professionals start going in there and trying to offer something else, something better, the problem is something better, the problem is going to remain. It wont go anywhere. I think that kind of gets that what the role of these communities and technologies have in the lives of people who are engaged in them and the question that kind of hangs over every single one of these cases is what is the darknet causing . Is it causing this phenomenon . What answer have you come to . Its a strange thing. You would expect me to have an answer for that wouldnt you. That was the question i was trying to answer. To what answer. To what extent is the internet changing our behavior or to what extent is it simply a reflection of our behavior that was taking place offline and this is just a new environment. I still dont know. I think certainly it depends on the individual. Certainly for some people, take the case of viewing illegal pornography. There are some people that without these barriers they felt they could watch illegal pornography without being caught and so they did it. If it was not so readily available they may not have done it. So then you say it enabled it or facilitated it or encouraged it, but it didnt cause it to happen, in my view. Then there are other things take internet troll. People love to argue about this term. For many people who are self described trolls, they say their long culture is artistic and creative and its about insulting people to make some sort of point about hypocrisy or free speech. Many that i found were actually quite funny and they sought as a very strategic way of making a point. I think there are a lot of people who are offensive and abusive to strangers online because what they wouldve done ten years ago is shout at the television. Rather than shouting at television, they just go online and write to anyone. The differences its its more visible. It still the same amount of via vile but now can be recorded and reposted and everybody can see it and talk about it. Its just now more visible than it was before. So every time the question is posed up out how the internet has changed xy or z, i think i think it really depends on the individual. Perhaps this was just merely an expression of what they were doing before and now this is a new platform. Perhaps perhaps it hasnt changed anything at all. One thing we were talking about before was this idea of an increase in this kind of anonymity and post Edward Snowden there was a big push to encrypt everything to make sure everyone can be anonymous on the internet essentially from the government. Im just curious what you think about this idea on the one hand we have activists who say we need to encrypt things and increase privacy and then on the other hand you have government and Law Enforcement who say this is making it harder to tax catch terrorists and child pornographers. They are both right. They are both right because encryption systems and technology do increase privacy online but its used by both the good guys and the bad but guys in a very similar way. You cant undermine undermine the systems that are used. For example the browser or text based encryption without undermining the ability of the good guys to stay hidden as well. Now i think Edward Snowden, since then there has been a dramatic increase not only in the number of people think about increasing their privacy settings on facebook, just Little Things like that to the people using the encrypted browsers to go about their ordinary business because they dont like the idea of being watched. Its a classic problem that happened in the 90s as well. They felt the u. S. Government was overreaching to try to monitor things. You have an explosion of privacy activists Building Software that would allow people to stay hidden online. It allows their privacy to remain hidden and avoid censorship. I think think youre seeing the same thing now. These tools are being used to keep your privacy intact. That will be a very good thing for freedom of democracy around the world, i hope although sometimes im too optimistic about what can happen there. It will also be a good thing a good thing if youre a child pornographers or a terrorist or a organized criminal because its going to get harder for your activity not impossible, but harder for you activity to be monitored and traced and be caught. I think. I think we just have to get used to that. I think we should probably open it up for some questions now. Does anyone have any questions . High, i dont wish to switch the attention away from the interviewee to the interviewer, but id like to ask given the weaponization of anonymity of the agents in russia and i also put out a call on twitter today to ask whether anybody knew of the same thing happening in the United States or any other country. Im wondering whether, during your research into the dark net did you ever have a similar situation which you found yourself questioning an act or whether the people you are speaking through to were really the people they said they were . I would like to hear your view on that as well because i think you just as qualified as i am. It really is an interesting question. Yes one of the most difficult things, whenever youre doing internet based journalism in your interviewing people you havent met and cannot verify the story is the extent to what they are saying at face value. There are various ways of trying to get around that. You interview other people to see if it seems to add up. Sometimes you make your best guess judgment on that. Sometimes youre using a story to illustrate a wider point. For example in the chapter i wrote about legal pornography and he told me how we got into it and why he did. It was basically his argument was that he had incrementally watched worse and worse pornography over a time period of two years. He almost felt like each time it wasnt getting much worse but then he ended up somewhere he wouldnt talk about. I thought of course, youre just saying that because thats very convenient. I happen to interview a lot of people who interview and investigate sex offenders. They they said that is actually a very common way that that happens. So i tried to verify the general story to do research on the subject in general. You can try to understand why people behave the way they do in an Online Community and the journalistic approaches that you use dont always readily apply. If if there are journalists in here and writers its a really important area for people to start trying to understand how we understand it better. I think its just going to grow as an area. You can see digital journalism courses starting up across the universitys and hopefully through those will get some decent practice about how we do this better. I dont know what you think about that. I think youre basically asking how do you uncover people who are anonymous on the internet and i think that has become a genre of journalism itself where somebody does something bad and becomes a notorious figure online and people unmask them which is called doc thing in internet slang and i have always found that when the point it starts becoming me trying to figure out who somebody is when they dont want me to that becomes the story. So, if youre trying to find somebody for a case study for somebody who uses the drug market, if you have to start trying to verify what theyre saying its usually just a hopeless task because it becomes a whole drama onto itself. I think there is a lot of interesting work being done in people trying to use data to connect the dots between people who have logged into a drug forum and maybe signed up for a newsletter in their neighborhood i think that kind of almost like data mining technique will be, a lot more popular among journalists in the future. The difference between my life and yours as i was never trying to uncover anybody. In almost every case i promised i wouldnt try to uncover them or identify them. That wasnt what i was in the business of doing. I was striving to tell stories about people. I still had to try to make sure the story was accurate and no one was lying to me, but i didnt need to concern myself about who they really were. I promise that i wouldnt. It was also helpful in i wouldnt. It was also helpful in getting them to tell me their story. Do you think any role in trying to identify and control the dark net in terms of identifying terrorist use of the internet . The government . Absolutely. How do you suggest the government go about doing that . Well, im not someone who believes in the absolute anonymity. There is a very broad distinction, i think on this subject about the right of privacy. There are activists who believe that the right to privacy is so important that you need to build encryption systems that are more or less unbreakable because governments can never be trusted. The only way you guarantee that right to privacy is by having the systems in place. Then there are others and i tend to this ideal of what you might think is more of a social democrat where government should have access to more or less everything that i want that power to be very controlled and used in a number of limited circumstances. Its always going to be misused and it always has been misused but with some justification. I think there is a very broad view about this in which it will come very important on whether or not the patriot act is renewed or not renewed and government surveillance to which the extent of individual privacy can be reasonably mitigated through law or rely on Technical Solutions with all this encryption. I dont know who will win that argument. The truth of the matter is im very worried im worried and excited by this encryption system that people are using because its going to be wonderful if youre a Syrian Democrat and are in russia. In the end, how we manage that have to be a question question that we collectively, as a society, determine. Thats why i think there is a very Important Role for whistleblowers because then we get to understand what some of the parameters of that debate actually are. If i may just add one tiny thing to that. I believe that the last ten or 15 years have been dominated by collection and data spotting. Lets get everything and work out whats going in and hone in on art target and subject them to more invasive questioning. I think more and more corruption means that type of surveillance work will just not work like it has on the last ten years. As a result i think the intelligence agencies will have to go back to more oldfashioned techniques of infiltration. The way that the silk road was taken down was really good old Fashion Police and of infiltrating the site working your way up, beginning to and thats the way they were able to uncover them. I think think there will have to be a lot more of that and less of the mass data collection. A question. You said in part of this book you identified people but change names. If you did identify names of specific people who did criminal acts like child predators, what do you think your obligation is to bring them to the law . In writing the law, i broke the law myself because i purchased marijuana from the silk road. That caused me some concern. It was a very small amount and there is a Public Interest defense i can make on that which i cannot make on other things. I could not make that defense if i was browsing around child pornography sites. I had to be careful myself to make sure there was nothing that was going to land me into trouble. Most of the people i interviewed started off with the proviso with do not tell me anything that suggests of serious criminal activity or imminent violent activity because i will be under obligation to report you to the authorities. In a way i dont want to know about that. My job is not to investigate you. The police can do that better than i can do that. There was one case where i got very, very close and i was very worried. I was very worried. I was spending a lot of time with and activists who was a notorious online neonazi who i had met in person and spent a lot of time in person discussing where and how he got to where he got to. After about three months of talking to him offline and online, he suddenly disappeared. I couldnt get in touch with him. He vanished. His social media count fell silent and i was getting very worried because thats what happens when people are very vocal online and go quiet. Anybody who works in counterterrorism will tell you that when you worry when suddenly an account goes quiet because what are they planning . Where . Where have you gone . I started thinking to myself what if hes planning some kind of attack. His language online was very suggestive of that type of behavior. Offline he was very friendly and nice. I thought what a my going to do . I spoke to journalist friends of mine, should i go to the police and i have to worry about the integrity of my promise and my career. My career would be finished if i reported him and Nothing Happened and it would be finished if i didnt report him and something happened. He he didnt give me any specific piece of information that was suggestive of a violent act. I thought if he did i will go to the police, until that point i wont and ill protect his identity. Im glad i did it because he didnt do anything. After about. After about six weeks of worrying, he turned up again and said he had been getting so angry and frustrated in his digital universe that he no longer trusted himself and he thought he needed to remove himself from the digital word world to prevent himself from doing something. This time time he reemerged as a woman online. He was going to a website and posting right wing comments on a left wing website. He was a little bit like the russian troll you investigated. There. There were certain moments certainly moments overriding my obligation of course but i would start with that proviso. When you were talking about the utopian market system im presuming you are characterizing the view of its creators and not articulating your own position. I was taken back and i would not sure if youre familiar with the book camara . His depiction of them is they are sort of a vignette on capitalism. Everything is market ties and everything is business strictly. Its a pretty utopian picture and i was struggling with that. When those systems are uncovered they give way to questions about what does that embody. Im wondering about your characterization of the characters are creators of that and what you thought. Lets go back to 1994 and there was a libertarian called tim may and before any of this stuff was envisioned, all these encryption system and he saw in encryption away to reduce government oversight. He said i think 99 of percent of the World Population is doomed. We need a burn off of the oxygen and we need to create that genius 1 where the people will survive. This is a way we are going to get to that with the software. That was his vision. That vision sort of translates into the silk road as far as this is where could lead to. This is where the libertarian paradise that they hoped for would lead to and it would lead to a wonderful flourishing community. Who knows. But, it was a very strong sense of Community Among these libertarians where they look out for each other. I think that was because there a fringe group. It sort of like they are fighting together against common enemy which is evil big government. Theyre all looking out for each other and they have a very close relationship with each other which was formed in opposition to the big bad guy which is the government and corporation. The minute that that collapses, theyll start hating each other. But that doesnt matter at the moment because it never happened. I do think, very generally speaking, generally speaking, i found it very useful and enlightening to look at we worry a lot about privacy and encryption but contained within it is often quite a radical philosophy about the future. That is derived, in the end from the harsh libertarian harsh libertarian view of the world and how it might wind up. People who subscribe to that view are not lovely friendly social democrats who want social welfare for people. They are often just not. I think its interesting when you think about these questions about what the philosophy is behind us and where might it take it. I dont think a lot of people to talk about that. Im worried about privacy and i care about that and it could lead us somewhere else. I think we have to finish. Thank you [applause]. Thank you very much. You are free to go. Is there a Nonfiction Author or book you would like to see featured on the tv . Send us an email at book tv. Org. Tweet us at book tv or posted on our wall at facebook tv. Tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what theyre reading this summer. Thanks for asking. As you know i taught economics for that past many years and i went to seminary before that. I like to read about economics and ethics. Some people some people thought that was a humorous joke but i take it pretty seriously so im reading Peter Wallace and hidden in plain sight. Thats the latest definitive it account of the financial crisis. If you dont have an account of the causes of the crisis its kind of hard to solve that issue going forward. We dont want that happening again and there are some