Where Have All the Tor Sites Gone?

by CSCII

When I was in middle school, I stumbled upon a curious piece of anarchy in an increasingly-authoritarian world: the Tor network.

Tor (short for The Onion Router) is an Internet protocol that relies on private exchanges between many nodes to serve information to Tor clients, like your browser.  Originally built for the military, the private way to browse the Internet quickly became a haven for criminal activity.  It was in the golden age of this era that I began to explore "The Dark Web."

Tor's side of the Internet was not nearly as horrifying as news articles and cringe-inducing YouTube horror videos suggested, but it was not the cleanest part of the Internet.  I do not know why my goody-two-shoes self kept coming back to Tor.  I was horrified by pornography and have never tried illicit drugs (though it was readily available), but it was thrilling.

Since the browser was readily available, I had no illusions about its exclusivity, but it still felt like a secret club.

I dabbled in cryptocurrency tumbling and message boards, but in general I kept to lurking: looking in on the speakeasy through the peephole.  Eventually, new priorities came into my life and I stopped going on Tor.  After all, I had more important things in my life to waste time on, but Tor would still come into my mind from time-to-time, but from a more "adult" perspective of improving the protocol and contributing to the project (which I never got around to).

When I bought my laptop for college, one of the first things I installed was Tor, but I never used it, even though I majored in computer science.  That changed a few months ago when I updated and ran the Tor browser for the first time in a long time.  I wanted to see how the marketplaces were doing.  I remembered Silk Road being taken down by the feds, but surely other markets took its place, right?

The first marketplace I visited loaded up fine, but something was different.

The front page, which in years past was full of illicit drugs like weed, ketamine, and Adderall (but mostly weed), was now dominated by supposed COVID vaccines and fake vaccine cards.  This was strange, but somewhat made sense, however, something else didn't feel right.  It didn't feel dynamic.

There were no live conversations going on between illegal ads or fretting about the marketplace's management scamming vendors/buyers out of their crypto.  The community was dead.  I had no plans to do anything illegal then, but I could almost feel the boomer federal agent meme "watching me through the screen."

I went to another marketplace, but was greeted by a full screen image full of government agency seals from various countries, most prominently a German police bureau.  I went to another old marketplace, and this time was greeted by the seal of the FBI detailing the site's seizure.

I Googled .onion addresses of more current marketplaces and each time was greeted by taunting government entities, even the Department of Homeland Security.  The overall feeling was irony, as Tor was more-or-less created by the U.S. military, and now its domestic partners were cleaning up its mess, years late to the party.  However, I felt more than anything else an overwhelming sadness.

This reaction may seem childish to most readers of 2600.  You would probably call me a LARPer.  That's fine.

I would admit as much, but the health of such a liberating (imperfect) tool such as Tor should cause concern in all 2600 readers.  It is up to us to hack our way through the new barriers to ensure privacy for all.  An easy way we can do this is by providing computing power.  Blockchains (I know - controversial), Internet archiving teams, and the Tor network all rely on a distributed network of servers.

It is not terribly difficult for many in our community to start serving these networks, and a Tor bridge requires even less.  2600 contributors generally have a healthier-than-normal distrust of corporations and governments, so let's put our money where our mouths are by supporting these decentralizing entities.

And thank you, to those who already do.