What will change for users the recognition of illegal use of the dark web

Anton Gorelkin, Deputy Head of the State Duma Information Policy Committee (United Russia), proposed to recognize the use of the darknet as illegal. He made such a statement during a speech at the Youth RIGF 2023 forum.

“I am discussing with lawyers as one of the options to recognize the use of the dark web as an illegal activity,” he said. Fragment of the MP’s speech published in your Telegram channel. The darknet is “a haven of anonymous scoundrels” and “there is nothing for a law-abiding citizen to do there,” he stressed.

Later, Gorelkin clarified that “according to some estimates”, of all countries in the world, Russia has the most users of the “shadow sector” of the Internet. According to him, the territory of freedom has turned into a territory of permissiveness and a den of cybercriminals. “Let’s add to this opinion the fact that the darknet arose on the basis of the US military development, and Tor Browser (banned and blocked in Russia – Vedomosti), the main tool for accessing the darknet, no longer hides that it is financed, including, State Department [США]”, – wrote the deputy.

Gorelkin did not answer calls and messages from Vedomosti.

Darknet is a segment of the Internet that is hidden from public access. The connection is established between trusted peers (participants) in encrypted form, using non-standard ports and protocols. Own domains and address space are used. You can get into the darknet with the help of special software. According to Kaspersky Lab, the number of illegal transactions on the dark web during 2022 will has grown doubled from 19,500 in June to 40,000 in December.

In the shadow Internet, in particular, they sell personal data of citizens, information about various companies (databases of employees or customers, corporate information, etc.), sell malware, services for collecting confidential information, withdrawing stolen money, conducting DDoS – attacks. The Tor browser allows you to encrypt traffic, making it impossible to track user requests.

The browser site was included in the register of those banned by Roskomnadzor in 2021, since the information posted on the site “ensures the operation of tools that provide access to illegal content.” In 2022, the Russian court acknowledged information in Tor Browser banned in the country, banned the Tor Browser application hosted on Google Play, and also restricted access to the Tor Browser program.

To put the proposal into practice, Internet providers should be required to control traffic and transfer data to the competent authorities, and this, in fact, is already happening, Vyacheslav Golenev, managing partner of Lawyers: Golenev and Partners, told Vedomosti. “According to the “Yarovaya law” (it requires operators to install SORM on their networks and not store records of telephone conversations, text messages and Internet traffic of subscribers – Vedomosti), any information can be accessed, for example, by the FSB. Therefore, it is still difficult to say what the purpose of this legislative proposal is,” the lawyer noted.

At the same time, Golenev doubts that Gorelkin’s initiative is consistent with the provisions of the law on operational-search activities and the rules on the protection of private life. In particular, there are issues of law enforcement. “What if a person mistakenly logged into a site on the dark web and logged out? In this case, will there be a crime in his actions or not? According to the law on operational-search activities for non-serious crimes, the provider does not carry out a special data collection from electronic communication channels, or will it now have to? – the expert is perplexed.

The dark web is still illegal, and technically blocking it is practically impossible, says Natalya Kasperskaya, president of the InfoWatch group of companies. “This is an area that “mutates” all the time, it does not have its own clear ip-addresses that can be blocked and solve the problem. Otherwise, they would have been blocked long ago, if it were possible,” she told Vedomosti. At the same time, users of the darknet use it deliberately to obtain prohibited goods or content, so with a high degree of probability they understand that they are breaking the law, Kaspersky said.

“As for blocking on the user side, from the technical side, I don’t really understand how to check if a person uses the darknet or only legal Internet services. To control this, you need to get access to each specific technical device of the user,” she stressed.

How the initiative will be implemented in practice can only be assessed after the legislative settlement of the concept of “darknet”, says Alexei Raevsky, CEO of the Zecurion consulting company. “Darknet can, for example, be recognized as any sites blocked in Russia,” he told Vedomosti.

Now, as Raevsky explained, it is considered a network of sites that users visit through the Tor Browser. The degree of anonymity is quite high on the dark web, and there are no reliable technical means to combat it, he believes. Raevsky suggested that law enforcement officers can use trap sites to identify offenders or determine the presence of the Tor Browser on a computer.

The risks of prosecution will depend entirely on what exactly the legislator proposes as a definition of “darknet”, and in addition, what will form the corpus delicti, Dmitry Gorbunov, a partner at Rustam Kurmaev and Partners, believes. If persons who use the capabilities of the darknet to commit some illegal actions are held accountable, then changes to the legislation are not required, since such actions can already be qualified as criminal, he told Vedomosti.

At the same time, according to him, if the very fact of entering the darknet is recognized as illegal, then this may entail extremely high risks of bringing to justice an unlimited circle of persons, including those who do not assume that they are committing illegal actions.

For those who use the dark web for criminal purposes, the risks are likely to increase slightly, Gorbunov believes. “I will assume that they have a sufficient level of technological training in order to hide the very fact of access to the darknet from the territory of Russia,” he said.

Gorbunov stressed that the main problem in the field of cybercrime is that it is extremely difficult to identify a criminal, and the darknet implies precisely the anonymity of file sharing using non-standard protocols and encryption, even without additional software and hardware.