Inside the Dark Web

Inside the Dark Web turns to the topic of internet surveillance concerning the pros and cons of the ability for everything that passes over the immense World Wide Web being able to be watched, recorded, and analyzed.

The first aspect of the conversation examined by the film is Britain's GCHQ - The Government Communications Headquarters - which is a federal security agency whose mission statement reads "[The Agency] is constantly working to keep Britain safe and secure in the challenging environment of modern communication." The reason cited in the film as being the sole one the public has any knowledge of the agency's existence is because Edward Snowden leaked the information in his infamous documents.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited as the inventor of the Internet itself, explains that he sees the dangers being presented as the World Wide Web develops over the time. He makes the point that we have to understand, in regards to surveillance, that it is not people that are monitoring our internet activity in the initial tiers of these security agencies' efforts - it is computers, or the algorithms housed on them, that flag behavior designated as worth looking into further and then alert human security officials that perhaps there is reason to delve deeper.

The film's focus turns from government surveillance to that being conducted by commercial entities - big business acquiring as much information as it can about your search, traffic, and interest-related habits that allow them to target paid advertising into the path of your digital trailblazing for products that you just might be willing to hand over some of your hard earned money for. The aforementioned government agencies often acquire this information for their own monitoring purposes as well.

David Chaum is a renowned theorist on the subject of internet development, and as early as the 1980's was writing papers about the alarming nature of digital privacy and the need to think about these issues before they become the sole conduit to the living of our lives. These ideas led to the invention of encryption, which the remainder of the film explores as it relates to the various forms of our data that is passing across the World Wide Web in droves on a daily basis.

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14 Comments / User Reviews

A suggestion. Watch part 3 of The Virtual Revolution ("Cost of Free") before this. Tim Berners Lee is in that too. Then watch this one and consider that the two are only 4 years apart. If you manage to do that, this one becomes amazingly good viewing.