How Do I Access The "Deep Web""TOR"technology

Suppose I decide I do not want the NSA reading my emails. There is a so-called "Deep Web"that is immune from hacking and spying-how do I access and use it?
Or has congress already restricted access, so that our Constitutional rights can continue to be violated?

  1. The “deep web” has nothing to do with Tor.
  2. Tor is not immune from hacking and spying.
  3. You already know there is something called Tor. LMGTFY.

Tor is designed to obscure the origin and destination of (primarily) HTTP traffic. Border nodes on Tor are as vulnerable to packet sniffing as any other router or server. And any numbnuts can set up a hidden service on Tor; what makes you think that Uncle Bob’s Really Secret Illegal Guns, Ammo, Absinthe & Fireworks Store isn’t actually run by the FBI?

The only way to have an “internet” free of hackers and spying is to physically build your own fiber optic trunk line and physically guard it against unwanted taps.

Bad news for you - 80 percent of TOR development and research funding comes from, … wait for it … the US Government.

Nitpick; the TOR network is a portion of the “deep web”. Every TOR network is part of the deep web, not every deep web functions through TOR.

All deep web means is that it is not readily accessible to the general public. How far you go down the rabbit-hole is your choice, but once you have a toe in the water, you are in the water.

Anyway, you can access TOR easily by downloading TOR portable browser. It will automatically install and configure to give you basic protection. Find links by googling and enter those into the browser. It isn’t 100% safe, but it is a lot more secure than browsing the web. Again, it doesn’t guarentee your safety, but it makes it a LOT less likely that

A: your data will be intercepted
B: your data will be understood
C: your data will be complete

Careful!

Then anonymity is nice, but what you really want is encryption. Use PGP and TLS.

Once it’s out of your control, though, anything goes… and to access the internet you have to peer with someone.

Tor is superb for sending data anonymously. While theoretically hackable, it would require vast resources and isn’t likely to happen unless it threatens the security of the country.

However, it’s more about preventing someone from seeing where the data came from and is going to. As was said, if you don’t want them to be able to read the data, look at GPG or something along those lines. Also note that some websites block Tor users from fully using the site.

To keep your computer **really **secure, use it in a locked room (a Faraday cage would be better), and do not, under any circumstances, connect it to the internet.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but TOR has nothing to do with ‘deep web’. TOR does nothing except scrub your IP address so nobody can identify the originator (though, of course, if you use TOR without encryption, anyone can sniff your traffic which will probably contain identifying information). You can access ‘deep web’ just fine without either TOR or TLS, though if you visit Silk Road without them, you’re inviting a visit from the FBI in fairly short order.

The Silk Road doesn’t exist anymore, but if it did, you could only access it by using Tor or through a proxy website. Maybe the latter is what you meant, but I wanted to make it clear that you could just type the url in your browser and see it. All the domains have a .onion suffix which will confuse your browser.

The Silk Road 2.0 has just launched, set up by some of the admins from the old site. 'Silk Road 2.0' Launches, Promising A Resurrected Black Market For The Dark Web

What the OP really wants is what the Dark Mail Alliance is working on. End to end encrypted email made easy to use for consumers. Here:
http://darkmail.info

Nope, it permits you to access websites that you couldn’t visit with a normal browser making it part of the deep web. The deep web is just any website that isn’t considered readily accessible by the general public.

I tried Tor recently, found it rather frustratingly slow (could just be my connection). But I don’t see how it allows access to anything special, how do you engage “deep web” surfing?

I haven’t used TOR beyond a few hours of cursory use, because it’s too much hassle since I don’t need drugs or guns and carry out all my wetwork myself. Some websites use .onion addresses which use a special protocol that only TOR can understand. As far as I was told (meaning: take with a grain of salt), it’s implemented through some sort of distributed system where no single server or IP has the web data, but rather you get pieces bounced from all over the internet. It’s not like bittorrent where everybody has a piece of the data and shares it, but it’s not exactly like a normal website either. It’s really just a case of using TOR and knowing the right URL, as I recall it at least. All the fun of finding Geocities pages before search engines took off.

I did go to a couple deep web sites, there are some that aren’t nefarious and just there because hey, why NOT have a deep web website? Two my friend sent me to was a perfectly innocent and normal My Little Pony deep web site, and an average anime web site. Truly the most important use of this technology is to hide your love for brightly colored ponies and cartoons from Japan.

Making a TOR hidden service site(with an .onion url) has two advantages.

1.No one can tell where the server is located

2.No one can prove you accessed the server

There are caveats to both of these, like if they find your computer and see the site on your screen, but they hold in general.

Actually one of the articles I read said that a lot of the TOR nodes are huge, thousands of dollars per month type servers and that there’s some speculation that they’re actually run by the NSA or other intelligence agencies. The rationale being the question of who’s going to spend that much money on an anonymous node?

That agrees with what I was saying in that he wasn’t able to tell where the data was coming from but since it wasn’t encrypted was able to read it. If anonymity was lost, it was because of details in the data itself, not a trace of the traffic. On the other hand, if you’re on Tor but the destination isn’t, the destination can be seen. In my previous post, I was assuming Tor-to-Tor traffic which is much more secure. Still, if the data itself is sensitive, use encryption. If you just want to anonymously browse the internet, Tor is fine.

What I meant when I said it was theoretically possible to figure out the source and destination for traffic on the Tor network is if the traffic is completely within one country and the government is running the majority of the nodes on the Tor network, they can analyze it to see that every time a Tor node sends or receives a packet, an actual IP address sends or receives a packet via the Tor protocol and link the two. As you can probably imagine, it would require huge resources and isn’t something the government is likely to do to catch people buying weed on the internet if they’re even capable of it, but it is theoretically possible.

There is no doubt whatsoever that some of them are run by the NSA and various other groups. But the Tor network is designed to preserve anonymity even when nodes are compromised.

Here’s a detailed analysis. In short: the NSA has successfully used various methods for defeating Tor and tracking down specific users. But it’s difficult and expensive for them to do, and the sort of thing that can really only be deployed against specific targets - not wholesale monitoring of everything and everyone. This leaked document they say they can only de-anonymize a very small fraction of its users.

Oh, I meant to add: some Tor nodes are run by universities, ISPs, web hosts, and various pro-privacy groups with the means to maintain them.