The flip side of the surveillance state is the Darknet–an online space where anything goes–which speaks directly to my contention that greater control and greater anarchy will be increasingly at war in the Digital Age. I wouldn’t even know how to get onto the Darknet if I wanted to and neither would most of you. But a lot of people are there, many innocuously and some to do all manner of harm. The opening paragraph of “Darknet: A Short History,” a Foreign Policy piece by Ty McCormick:

“Beyond the prying eyes of Google and Bing exists a vast cyberfrontier — by some estimates hundreds of times larger than the World Wide Web. This so-called “deepweb” is often more humdrum than sinister, littered with banal data and derelict URLs, but it is also home to an anything-goes commercial underworld, called the ‘darknet,’ that will make your stomach turn. It’s a place where drugs and weapons are openly traded, where terrorists link up, and where assassins bid on contract killings. In recent years, the darknet has found itself in government cross-hairs, with the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) cracking down on drug merchants and pornographers. Despite a series of high-profile busts, however, this lawless realm continues to hum along, deep beneath the everyday web. “