Our browsers only show us a small section of the internet. Beneath the visible sites of the internet lie a series of encrypted sites making up what you know as the Dark Web, a catch-all term for sections of the internet inaccessible without specific software. In the 1990’s, a group of researchers for the Department of Defence wanted a way for spies across the globe to communicate. They imagined an anonymised and encrypted network, an internet hidden beneath our current one, unknown to all, which would serve the intelligence community. But, in order to do that, they needed other noise, other civilian traffic, to hide the spies’ communications. The Naval Research Laboratory freely released the core principle of open-source software like The Onion Router (TOR) which randomly bounces encrypted traffic around the globe. If you asked The Tor Project, the non-profit now responsible for maintaining the TOR network, they would say the goal is allowing activists and dissidents to access material through a firewall. The anonymity granted by TOR attracted not just dissidents and activists but criminals. Within a short time the Dark Web was a haven for illegal activity across the world, offering a platform for drugs, weapons, ransomware, and human trafficking. Whether TOR is a good or a bad is an academic question according to Dr. Gareth Owenson, CTO and co-founder of Searchlight. “At the end of the day there is a substantial and malicious criminal element that society needs to be informed of and protected against.”
Protection drove Searchlight’s founders from the start of their careers. Ben Jones, the CEO and co-founder of Searchlight, spent years as an aerospace engineer working with military defence aircraft but soon realised the field did not align with his personal desire to ..
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