The effort of intelligence agencies to infiltrate the "dark web" is being compromised by its own people.
Andrew Lewman, the man behind the anonymous web network Tor, claims that rouge elements in American and British surveillance agencies are deliberately undermining the efforts of their colleagues. Intelligence organizations from the two countries are said to have been searching for vulnerabilities in the Tor network. However, Lewman said that they have been able to quickly plug security holes because agents within the organizations have given them warnings in advance.
In an interview with the BBC, Lewman named the US National Security Agency and the British group Government Communications Headquarters. "There are plenty of people in both organisations who can anonymously leak data to us to say - maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this," Lewman said. "And they have."
Lewman said that his team receives tips from sources within surveillance organizations on "probably (a) monthly basis." This means that the network's sympathizers have a pattern of pointing out vulnerabilities to keep Tor running. However, Lewman said that there was no way of tracing the information that they've received, since the network's bug reporting system is completely anonymous.
"It's a hunch," Lewman said. "Obviously we are not going to ask for any details."
"You have to think about the type of people who would be able to do this and have the expertise and time to read Tor source code from scratch for hours, for weeks, for months, and find and elucidate these super-subtle bugs or other things that they probably don't get to see in most commercial software."
Tor is a free service that makes truly anonymous Web surfing possible. The network was created partly to provide an online outlet for dissidents in authoritarian countries like China and Iran. Recently, however, it has been twisted to serve darker purposes. The network has recently used for the sale of illegal drugs, the distribution of child pornography and money laundering.
According to Lewman, the Tor network continues to grow. Over the past year, the Tor browser has been downloaded 150 million times, with an average of 2.5 million users per day.
