Naval Research Laboratory, its initial purpose was to protect the communications of the U.S. Like the Internet itself, Tor was created by the government. 'And the website that you're visiting will see that someone in Russia is visiting, not you in D.C.' and send your traffic through Germany, Sweden and Russia, for example,' she says. When you connect to a site through Tor, your computer goes through a series of other computers and bounces around anonymously until it reaches a destination. It's a simple site that looks like a Web browser, but if you take the right steps, it's quite different.

'Tor' is an acronym for The Onion Router the onion refers to the layers you go through to disguise your identity.

Tor is the main browser people use to access the part of the Web where anonymity reigns.

Zeeter says the Darknet has another purpose that doesn't usually make the news: It helps political dissidents who want to evade government censors. One such black-market site, Silk Road, got attention last fall after a crackdown by the FBI. Without being tracked, people can access websites that sell drugs, weapons and they can even hire assassins. Then, there's the Darknet, a specific part of that hidden Web where you can operate in total anonymity. 'The Deep Web is anything not accessible through the commercial search engines,' Zetter says. Wired reporter Kim Zetter tells NPR's Arun Rath that the show kind of got it right, but that there should be a distinction between what's called the Deep Web and what are known as Darknet sites. Most of it's useless but it's where you go to find anything and everything: child porn, Bitcoin laundry, narcotics, hackers for hire. 'Ninety-six percent of the Internet isn't accessible through standard search engines. The character Lucas, a newspaper editor who was trying find a hacker, gets a little crash course from one of his reporters: The tools to get to there are just a few clicks away, and more and more people who want to browse the Web anonymously are signing on.įans of the series House of Cards might recall the Deep Web being worked into the plot of latest season. These parts of the Internet are known as the Deep Web. But there's also an entire world that's invisible to your standard Web browser. The average computer user with an Internet connection has access to an amazing wealth of information. Tor is the main browser people use to access Darknet sites, allowing users to remain completely anonymous.

Tor dark web search engines