"How can I sum it up?" "Fear can be a misleading emotion" "Things that are frightening from far away aren't necessarily so when looking closely" "We are often afraid of what we are conditioned to fear people behind masks unknown and dark places" "At first my assignment wasn't looking that difficult describing the Darknet in 3500 words" "Written and directed by:" "Tzachi Schiff Duki Dror Yuval Orr Yoram Schaffer Dror Yaakobovitz" "A film by:" "Tzachi Schiff  Duki Dror" "So how did I end up here ?" "In an unmarked container in the subburbs of Berlin with two faceless crypto-anarchists showing me around their lab" "But who would this chip help in the end ?" "Terrorists, to fly under the radar ?" "Or revolutionaries under dictatorial regimes ?" "1984?" "I was born in 1984 yes, that's me there" "It's the year Orwell imagined would be the beginning of the end of our privacy" "A world in which we were under the permanent surveillance of Big Brother" "But no one really cared" "That same year happy families could install their first Macintosh computer at home" "10 years later my generation would already be dependent on screens" "Little by little we all got hooked" "It started with games, chats, emails even films" "We developed our tastes with the internet" "My first love" "My second love" "My third" "ICQ" "Facebook" "Google" "Twitter" "Once an adult I had spent a lot of my time online but I never thought there could be another side to explore" "The famous Deepweb" "To be honest I had no idea on how to find it" "So I started like everyone else by searching on Google" "DOWN THE DEEP, DARK WEB" "Ok, everything that's not indexed so I won't find much with Google" "The tip of an iceberg" "So the deep web is some kind of unreachable database used by banks, governments, companies and also containing an invisble part" "What's the Darknet ?" "For a long time all those who wanted to do things secretly buy drugs, or stolen goods would find this really difficult to do in the real world" "because in the real world you would have to actually meet the seller then you would have to pay him" "Talking about the darknet is talking about a new form of business" "A new market in which the identities of the buyers of the sellers and of the money itself is out of reach of the police or anyone trying to prevent crimes or other things" "Ok, you see this ?" "It's an operating system developed for hackers nothing like windows or anything like that" "An operating system developed specifically for computer hacking" "Tel Aviv is a hub for cyber security experts so it wasn't difficult to find Danor Cohen" "A White Hat computer hacker one of the good guys" "The fist thing Danor showed me is how vulnerable and exposed the people using the open internet are" "You see this ?" "There's the network password" "Incredible, isn't it ?" "Now imagine that all of your secrets all your banking passwords your gmail, facebook all your private conversations that all that can be seen with just one word and return" "By going around the neighborhood" "Danor could get in almost every computer in a 100 meter radius" "Like hackers, he was able to intercept my information on the internet" "Just like the police could use these tools to track criminals" "If we're on the open internet and we're talking about a drug traffic there are systems that sweep the network automatically there is no human intervention in this and you'll quickly be convocated for an investigation but on the darknet it's impossible to quickly prevent someone from doing what he wants" "I want people to understand clearly what the darknet is" "You install software whose main function is hiding your activities" "It seemed incredible" "Under total anonymity anyone was able to commit the perfect crime from his livingroom between two episodes of his favorite show on Netflix without anyone knowing" "Within a few seconds of download Tor was on my desktop" "The doors of the Darknet were wide open" "The question was where to go ?" "My first stop was the hidden Wiki" "It wasn't very different from a classic wikipedia page" "Only the content was little more..." "well I don't know... see for yourself" "Drugs, a alot of drugs, weed, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth" "Anonymity is something very rare and difficult to obtain" "To obtain that Tor is one of the best ways" "If I were to do something illegal I would use Tor to do it" "And the list gets longer with hitmen, offers to take out politicians 58,000 euros to kill a journalist ?" "Is that all I'm worth?" "The doors are wide open nothing can stop you" "There is no order, no justice, no laws, nothing that's why Tor is dangerous, very dangerous" "However, drugs and weapons were only the surface of the Darknet" "There were a great number of groups and forums to satisfy humanity's darkest desires" "The neo-nazis of course were there" "Then there was those specialized in animal torture" "The ten main reasons to kill a kid" "My god, pedophlia." "The weirdest place I found must be the Cannibal Café, "serving humanity"" "Oh yeah ?" "Really ?" "I could tell you about police meetings where the officers they were going crazy" "We don't know what to do with this, it's a nightmare" "A modern virtual Sodom and Gomorrah, it really looked like a nightmare" "If the rules of the games were changing what did the police do to catch up?" "And did the police stand any chance of catching up?" "Can I begin ?" "I am curious to know how the Darknet changed the face of crime" "The face of crime has changed today we see it shift more and more from the real world to the online world." "Why ?" "Simply because people seem to think that in the online world they're more anonymous and can commit crimes without getting caught" "If you go on the Darknet, which I suppose you have done you will find people looking to buy x, y or z which for the most part are things that are illegal to possess or sale" "It can be drugs, weapons, pedo-pornography, malicious software or certain services starting with computer viruses, hackers for rent and so on, up to murder" "The list of cyber threats was getting longer and longer but I asked myself :" "Is hiding one's identity online a crime in itself ?" "Concerning the anonymity question do you consider that it's something right ?" "something wrong?" "Or do you not care?" "You know our job consists in making sure the law is respected" "In Israel the work of establishing the social norms is that of the legislator" "I don't think it's for me to say if someone should be able to be anonymous or not" "I can say that anonymity drives people to think that if they commit a crime they won't get caught and that's an error." "It's not true" "So it would be illusory to think that we can hide everything online ?" "Could the police really find anyone hiding in the Darknet ?" "I had to ask a lot of and intrusive questions before I could find someone using the Darknet who would accept to meet me in person" "But where to meet in real life ?" "An abandoned warehouse seemed appropriate" "I'm a very normative person, I'm even old enough to be a grand mother" "The fact that it's dark, and all they say about the pornography and the drugs to me, in the end, it's just a tool it's a market like any other one a black market, but it's just a tool" "I see it as something very positive" "As long as you stand by your principles" "You won't see me looking for pornography or online betting sites because it doesn't interest me but hitmen... maybe..." "I was furious not to be able to buy a product that I wanted where I wanted" "I did some research on the internet and learned about the Tor browser" "I went there and saw by myself, it's a fascinating world" "It's a powder for making hash yourself, a lot of people do it" "Cocaine ?" "Cocaine to." "If doctors prescribe Ritalin, why order cocaine illegally ?" "Is that what's upsetting you ?" "There's no reason to be upset" "It's just a store window." "They're only showing their goods" "Of course Shoshi wasn't at all like I imagined" "She looked more like one of my mother's friends, than someone using the Darknet" "Come on, doesn't it scare you, just a little ?" "It's not frightening." "What's frightening is what you make of it" "You can do bad things with it." "But the Darknet in itself is not frightening" "I tend to be a little wary of people that tell me there's nothing to worry for" "Was the Darknet really just a black market equivalent to Ebay ?" "Technology has always had two faces depending on the use we make of it" "Take the 3D printer for instance" "Lower the gun" "Roey Tzezana used one to print a gun in 3D for which he had found the plans on the Darknet" "Then he snuck into a gathering where the most important israelian politicians were present" "He said the funniest thing was that everybody was around him and watching" "What's spectacular is the way you can build something fast and customized" "It's what we call rapid manufacturing in english" "In the past production could only be done in very large factories worth millions of dollars" "Today anyone can have these machines at home." "A 3D printer that can be used to print a gun, people have that at home." "But not everyone can print a gun that easily." "You need to download the plans somewhere" "And where do the plans come from ?" "From the Darknet" "Once someone has downloaded the plans he can watch them on the screen and decide to move the hammer here, the trigger there, and make a slightly better gun" "And if he realizes that he made a better gun than the original, what will he do ?" "He'll upload his plans on the network" "What we are seeing is a deskilling tendency" "A decrease of the competencies necessary to reach a certain objective" "You want to synthesize chemical compounds at home ?" "On the internet you can download the procedure that will tell the printer how to mix the products to trigger a chemical reaction and make" "Morphine, Valium, Marijuana or cyanide powder" "A simple machine will do that on its own, at home" "But I want to show you another side of things" "Pharmaceutical laboratories produce medicines that cost a fortune" "And patients can't afford them" "Those for instance that have the capacity of going from the plans to the the actual making of medicines at home will begin to do so within 10 or 20 years" "A similar process to that of the 3D guns will take place" "They will begin to add improvements" "Everybody on earth will be a part of this giant revolution of information and new ideas exchange" "The Darknet can be the place where all old ideas come together as Matt Ridley said, ideas will begin to have sex together to finally give birth to new and extraordinary ideas" "This exploitation of new ideas isn't happening when using traditional information channels because all true great struggles always go through destructive creation" "And that is the importance of the Darknet, it offers a way to channel information" "And this information can generate a revolution" "Aren't revolutions prepared secretly ?" "Wasn't this the kind of things the powers that be would want to prevent ?" "The Darknet had already drawn attention from the U.S. government" "And the Pentagon brought together a team to list all of the Darknet's illegal activities" "Alejandro and Amanda were part of this team" "It really was the last thing I was expecting to hear from a U.S government employees" "To hear that, somewhere in their brains, there was some kind of Orwellian scenario" "The kind of ideas we usually expect from anarchists" "It's Julia Tourianski, a self proclamed anti-state propagandist" "Wow" "Privacy, control, liberty" "These were the guiding principles of a small group that was militating for new alternatives against a failling system" "These are the crypto-anarchists, a branch of a small group of technophiles that was founded right at the begining of the internet, The Cypherpunks" "The Cypherpunks created the first version of the Darknet, which they called the Blacknet" "If anyone could complete my informations about the Darknet it was them" "They were all gathered in Prague at the institute of Cryptoanarchy" "I really didn't know what I was getting in to, by going to the hackers convention at Paralelni Polis" "I was even so undecided that I took a walk around the block before deciding to go" "And when I finally found some participants to talk in front of the camera, it wasn't without conditions" "Paul Rosenberg, Cryptoanarchist and author of "The Freeman' Perspective"" "Smuggler, Cypherpunk and Cryptoanarchist" "I never was really concerned with privacy" "When I open an app on my smartphone I don't really ask myself where this data will end up" "The idea that people of my generation would stop using social medias seemed a little crazy" "And more or less, my friends agreed with me" "So what should we do to protect our privacy ?" "Wear masks ?" "During this whole show printed in 3D, I couldn't stop thinking how paradoxical it is to believe that hiding would be the only way to be free" "Specifically in western countries where we're used to expose everything" "I was in Cairo during the arab spring, at the same time as Sheera Frenkel who was writing about the events that took place" "She now writes articles about encryption technologies like Tor, for Buzfeed" "Sheera Frenkel, Buzzfeed News" "I could understand the necessity of the Darknet for those living under oppressive regimes" "But isn't freedom one of the pillars of our democratic societies ?" "Today we're at the crossroads of two governmental systems in competition" "On one side that of Big Brother controlling the lives of its citizens" "And on the other side, domination of the masses" "The government tries to secure itself, and to secure its citizens" "In order to do that they must stop the threat that the lone wolves represent" "The terrorists" "Those who would want to bring down the government by force" "And sometimes those who would want to bring it down without using force too" "The people require social justice" "The question is, how can the governments stop criminals withtout impairing the freedom of speech ?" "There still isn't a satisfying answer to that question" "What would you do if you were seeing a major threat and that your job was to protect the population ?" "You'd become paranoid and you'd start watching everybody" "Because one single terrorist that would slip through your fingers would represent such a threat, that you couldn't take the chance of making a single mistake" "If one terrorist was enough to make us hysterical 19 of them distributed in four planes were enough to set the world on fire" "In the months that followed 9/11 the U.S. congress voted the Patriot Act" "And the NSA started the mass surveillance systems that she always wanted to use" "It took over a decade before Snowden revealed that the NSA wasn't only spying on terrorists" "The NSA had been spying on millions of innocent americans" "We can see in internal notes of the NSA, that the government of the USA and the NSA had begun to circulate documents to informs their agents about flaws, not in terrorists, but in muslim preachers" "When the government starts to list muslim preachers, points one out, and says "he watches porn online", all of a sudden the government has the capacity of destroying the reputation and credibility of any person from whom he doesn't approve the message" "Maybe, and I say maybe, that even for the greatest preachers like Martin Luther King who used to smoke grass and was cheating on his wife, which he tried to hide maybe it would be the same, and if he were alive today and would get ready" "to start the same movement to give rights for black people in America, the government could stop him very easily" "And if it's possible to do that to anybody, where can it lead the state to ?" "When opposing voices aren't heard anymore when there is no real democracy to force the government to change course and chose a more stable direction, then this bodes dark times" "If it were the case, where could the next Martin Luther King spread his message ?" "For the cryptoanarchists in Prague the answer was obvious" "In places like the Darknet" "But to them spreading the message was just the first step" "The next step consisted in building systems to replace those of the government" "But how can this separate realm work if we're dependent on the state ?" "Martin Leskovjan, founding member of the Cryptoanarchist institute" "So the alternative to the state in the systems of the Darknet is a call for revolution" "I finally found Julia Tourianski, whose catchy videos on youtube brought me to Prague" "Was there a chance anarchist ideas would be more practical verbally ?" "Julia Tourianski, anti-state activist, Brave the World" "One of the system used by the crypto-activist community is the Bitcoin" "A crypto-money allowing to do online transactions anonymously and it had already made worldwide headlines" "And once you have a virtual money, you're one step away of creating virtual states" "Suzanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, founder of Bitnation" "In parallel of the stateless state, there are online crypto-markets for daily products" "Kind of the family version of what I had already seen on the Darknet" "Pavol Luptak, Cryptoanarchist" "Collapsing governments, parallel systems to replace it" "The Cryptoanarchists were on the same page as the Cypherpunks and what they wrote in 1988" "To read their writings seemed a bit like reading a sci-fi prophecy" "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age" "Everything they predicted more than 30 years ago was happening today" "Bitcoin, building anonymous systems with electronic money" "Wikileaks, cryptoanarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely" "Darknet, systems which allow anonymous transaction to take place" "Cryptomarket, an anonymous computerized market that will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded" "They even predicted the way governments would respond to these developments" "The state will try to slow the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns" "Let's see, wikileaks government of the United States" "Silkroad has been associated with the Darknet until the U.S. government closed it down" "It was the biggest market of its kind, with movements of funds reaching up to 1.2 billion dollars" "Essentially drug products" "For almost everybody I met in Prague, Ross Ulbricht was anything but a drug lord" "He's been the most visible casualty of the government's efforts to eliminate the cryptomarkets from the Darknet, by making an example out of him" "No more state, no more central administration or banks" "What would happen if we'd press the red button ?" "Absolute chaos ?" "Or a new start ?" "I left Prague feeling as if I was coming back from the future" "But a rude awakening was awaiting me in the present" "Two terrorists attack in Paris, one in the U.S." "A plane shot down in Egypt" "Didn't we need more protection from these people ?" "Even at the price of a little confidentiality ?" "It's easy to use the Darknet as a scapegoat" "To say that if it didn't exist our lives would be safer, better protected" "But the Darknet always existed, in a way or another" "I'll tell you about the first time I went into the Darknet" "I was 4 years old, and each time my parents didn't want me to understand something they would speak in yiddish." "The yiddish was their Darknet" "At the age of four I lived in two parallel networks." "In the open network in hebrew" "And in the yiddish network, where I could feel emotions, see looks, and feel anger, among other things, but for me everything was encrypted" "So the Darknet is not only a place." "It corresponds to a need we have" "According to Yanki Margalit an evangelist for the reconcile man with evolution movement" "Our way of thinking needed a reset" "The Darknet is a very interesting place" "The people that maintain the Darknet, the ones who build it" "The idealists that operate it, are the kind of persons that strongly believe in privacy, and in the capacity of keeping it" "All I know is that our fight for our privacy as we have known it, is pathetic" "It's pathetic because it's a struggle we lost a long time ago" "We have to completely redefine it" "If you take what happened in the last few years, and turn yourself a little towards the future, you realize that mankind is changing." "We are submitted to fast changes" "We connect biology and technology, we connect biology and electronic, and I think we are creating a new human species" "We create an upgraded and more connected human species" "What we also do is that we take indiviudals, and we connect them to something bigger than them" "It reminds the process whereby individual cells created a man" "Think about the cells that created you, the billions of cells that created you" "These cells lost their individuality, they lost their privacy" "But in the end they created a human being" "My feeling today, is that we are taking all of mankind, exactly like those cells, and we create something better." "When you build something like this" "Something greater than the sum of its parts, the question of privacy intersting because do you know which are the most intimate cells of the human body ?" "The cancer cells" "So then this is it ?" "Privacy is not really dead ?" "It just has a few cancer cells ?" "Maybe" "With the number of insane people running around, the world order seems too fragile to trust the vision of the Cryptoanarchists and Cypherpunks, specifically those that won't show their faces, isn't it ?" "Just when I was about to finish my article, Smuggler came out the shadow" "In a private irc chat he took a big step forward, for a privacy extremist" "He tells me I should come visit" "Driving around the streets of Berlin with two masked guys made me feel a little uneasy" "Even if we had already met once." "I wonder what the taxi driver thought ?" "But fear can be a misleading emotion." "What was I supposed to be afraid of ?" "Cancer cells ?" "Or giving up privacy and individuality to become one great organism ?" "Despite all our progress, despite all our interconnected world, would history still be doomed to repeat itself ?" "When I left the container, I turned on my phone and found my way on Google maps" "I opened Gmail to send the article to my editor, asking myself what conclusion to draw of all this" "Where had this exploration of the rabbit hole led me ?" "The Darknet wasn't the evil monster I imagined" "It seemed to be the last place we had to escape Big Brother's careful watch" "A place where we could get rid of our old identities and create new ones, and even build new worlds" "A place where we could have real freedom" "I thought about what Smuggler told me when I left the container, that most people aren't looking for real freedom, what they want is enough freedom to feel ok."