[ecrea] New book: Weaving the Dark Web

New book

Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P.
Here's MIT Press's website featuring the book:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/weaving-dark-web

An exploration of the Dark Web—websites accessible only with special 
routing software—that examines the history of three anonymizing 
networks, Freenet, Tor, and I2P.


Hardcover
$30.00 S ISBN: 9780262038263 288 pp. | 9 in x 6 in August 2018

Summary

An exploration of the Dark Web—websites accessible only with special 
routing software—that examines the history of three anonymizing 
networks, Freenet, Tor, and I2P.

The term “Dark Web” conjures up drug markets, unregulated gun sales, 
stolen credit cards. But, as Robert Gehl points out in Weaving the Dark 
Web, for each of these illegitimate uses, there are other, legitimate 
ones: the New York Times's anonymous whistleblowing system, for example, 
and the use of encryption by political dissidents. Defining the Dark Web 
straightforwardly as websites that can be accessed only with special 
routing software, and noting the frequent use of “legitimate” and its 
variations by users, journalists, and law enforcement to describe Dark 
Web practices (judging them “legit” or “sh!t”), Gehl uses the concept of 
legitimacy as a window into the Dark Web. He does so by examining the 
history of three Dark Web systems: Freenet, Tor, and I2P. Gehl presents 
three distinct meanings of legitimate: legitimate force, or the state's 
claim to a monopoly on violence; organizational propriety; and 
authenticity. He explores how Freenet, Tor, and I2P grappled with these 
different meanings, and then discusses each form of legitimacy in detail 
by examining Dark Web markets, search engines, and social networking 
sites. Finally, taking a broader view of the Dark Web, Gehl argues for 
the value of anonymous political speech in a time of ubiquitous 
surveillance. If we shut down the Dark Web, he argues, we lose a 
valuable channel for dissent.

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