The dark web is too slow and annoying for terrorists to even bother with, experts say

Terrorists are skulking around the dark web, the bit of the Internet that can only be accessed by specific software, propagating messages of hate and extremism, right? Not really, according to data gathered by Thomas Rid and Daniel Moore of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. “The one thing that was surprising was that there was so little militant, extremist presence. Only a handful of sites,” Rid said. The two designed a system to crawl “hidden services” on Tor, the network of computers that obfuscates the identities of those connected to it, to try to categorize the content found on those hidden sites. People who run a hidden service can’t be easily identified either. So why aren’t jihadis taking advantage of running dark web sites? Rid and Moore don’t know for sure, but they guess that it’s for the same reason so few other people publish information on the dark web: It’s just too fiddly. “Hidden services are sometimes slow, and not as stable as you might hope. So ease of use is not as great as it could be. There are better alternatives,” Rid said.