A lot of folks don’t know there is more than one internet. What we know as “The Internet” was invented as a way for university wonks to log into each other’s mainframes. Much of the propagation of the backbone infrastructure was the result of the US Military creating a failsafe way to exchange redundantly packeted communications: email.

Yada yada. The military is now creating a second, secure backbone infrastructure that doesn’t touch the existing internet at any point. Ergo, Internet 2. Internet 2 isn’t even finished and there is already a list of non-military entities lining up to use it. Infrastructure-critical business like power plants and telecoms are looking for a firewall between necessary communications and dangerous hackers (aka China and Iran) trying to bring them down.

And then there’s the internet within the Internet. The Darknet.

At the very top of the Internet as-you-know-it is a translation traffic cop service called DNS. Domain Name Service. This is how your computer knows that “www.hotredheads.com” is actually a specific computer at IP address “35.127.216.4.”  Because the master DNS server is regulated by the governments of several countries, it’s also how China prevents its citizens from connecting to chineseanarchystrategies.org.  (I’m making that up, obviously.)  If I put bomb making instructions on a web site that is hosted out of the office of my home, the Federalis may or may not pay me a visit at my door, but they will very likely “clip my DNS.” They will erase my server from the map of cyberspace so nobody else can find my host computer.

The kingpin of the Darknet is/was a protocol program called Tor. Whenever a Tor user connects to Tor, the user’s IP is written to a database of node IPs and they are assigned a “fake IP” for how they present to the “real” Internet. In a nutshell, it creates a private DNS service that bypasses the government-regulated DNS.

Tor is slow, but it is very, very hard to trace traffic bouncing all over the world through an ever-changing private network.

Tor was as close to government-proof as a network could be. Ergo, it tended to attract a criminal element.

But apparently the Feds have cracked the mystery of Tor, because the guy who invented Tor was arrested for transmission of child pornography.

Yesterday, the proprietor of Silk Road, the drug selling mecca of the Darknet was “v&” as the kids say. Vanned. As in “the FBI van came for Ross Ulbricht.”

I don’t see how this is anything other than the end of Tor and the death knell of the Darknet.

This leaves me with mixed feelings. Yes, the Darknet became a digital underworld for those engaging in illegal activity. No, the scum element will not be missed. But there are parts of the world where free speech constitutes “illegal activity.” There was some comfort deep in my Libertarian heart knowing that organized anarchy had a frequency channel left open for communication if The State and the NSA and the IRS went Orwellian on us.

Nobody will miss the child pornography. Some will miss their hookup to buy weed. Everybody will miss the opportunity to speak freely if we need to or want to.

I like cat-and-mouse stories; the give-and-take of ingenuity trumping authority and then back again has been an interesting subtext to the digital revolution. But somewhere along the way I’ve lost track of who represents the “good guys” and who represents the “bad guys.” I used to root for the Feds until I learned that the NSA had impunity to browse through my unfinished novels on my Google cloud drive.  Until State Supreme Courts confirmed that I have to hand my iPhone over to any cop who pulls me over so he can browse through cheesecake pictures of my wife while I stand on the side of the highway and watch him leer and swipe.

Sorry. I’m violating my “No politics, none of the time” pledge. </rant>

I cast the Darknet as the villain of my novel Selfie. Now that it is headed the way of the newsgroup, I’m a touch wistful.  Dunno. From those shades of grey come the undulating shadows of Good Turned Bad and Bad Turned Good.

There’s a story waiting to be written.