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50 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS aimed at paralyzing companies, including PayPal and MasterCard, that refused to process donations for WikiLeaks, which these Anons believed were stifling the freedom of the Internet. Because hacktiv- ists often use illicit means to redress their grievances, such as denial- of-service attacks, theft of passwords, and hacking into computers, they must conceal their true identities to avoid the retribution of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. This requires them to operate on the dark side of cyberspace, which has become known as the dark net. Fortunately for hacktivists, the dark net is accessible to anyone. It is a place frequented by those who want to avoid laws, regula- tions, and government surveillance. Its denizens include cyber sabo- teurs, industrial spies, purveyors of illegal contraband, spammers, pranksters, identity thieves, video pirates, bullies, slanderers, drug dealers, child pornographers, money launderers, contract killers, inside traders, anarchists, terrorists, and the intelligence services of many countries. Sue Halpern, writing about it in The New York Review of Books, ) noted, “My own forays to the dark Net include visits to sites offer- © ing counterfeit drivers’ licenses, methamphetamine, a template for a US twenty-dollar bill, files to make a 3D-printed gun, and books describing how to receive illegal goods in the mail without getting caught. There were, too, links to rape and child abuse videos.” To operate effectively on the dark net, one often needs a mask of anonymity. But it is not easy to completely hide one’s tracks in cyberspace. The way that the Internet ordinarily works is that whenever an individual sends e-mails or instant messages or visits a website, his or her identity can be referenced by the IP address assigned to him or her by the Internet service provider. If dark net users’ IP addresses are discoverable, they obviously cannot remain anonymous. So, to evade this built-in Internet transparency, dark side users have come to rely on ingenious software to hide their IP addresses. The most commonly used software for this purpose is Tor, which was first called the Onion Router, because it moves IP addresses through multiple layers. Tor software hides the IP address by routing messages through a network of Tor-enabled relay sta- tions, called nodes. Each node further obscures the user’s IP, even | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 50 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019538