ban the publication of software which is specifically designed to enable access to the darknet.

Since he also joined a day ago, I suppose a welcome is in order. So welcome friend! Hope you enjoy your stay. But let's get right into it. An Explanation of The DarkNet:In case anyone was wondering, the answer is no: you are not currently using the darknet. Before any discussion of Darknet begins in earnest, we must first identify and clarify on what the darknet actually is. And in order to explain what the darknet is, it's necessary to understand what programs like TOR are. Before I explain what Tor is, though, I want to give an example. Take Facebook, for example. Popular social media site, used by millions, if not billions, of people every day. It also automatically records your IP address the second you enter the web address into your search bar. Didn't know that? There are ways around it, though, and one of those ways is Tor. Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is a free program you can download onto your comuter in minutes that acts as a proxy server on steroids, essentially. It takes your IP address and bounces it around the globe to different places and locations to mask where you're originally typing from. With Tor installed, for all facebook knows you can be typing from Palm Springs, California and they get an IP address located in Siberia. That's why it's called the "Onion" router; each little jump in location is a peel of an onion. What's good about Tor is that it provides vast amounts of privacy and anonymity, far more than your typical icognito search bar. To compare the two, Tor is an invisibility cloak that makes you nearly impossible to sense and perceive. Incognito is hiding behind a plant at your grandmother's 85th birthday party. There's another perk to Tor, though, and one that isn't discussed very widely. There are actually certain websites and marketplaces for goods and product that you can't actually view without something like Tor installed. This is what's known as the "darknet"[1], as opposed to what's refered to as the "clearnet", which is site's like this one. So what's wrong with the darknet? Pretty simple, actually. As Al Jazeera writer Claire Gordon summarized it up nicely, "Honestly, it's not a particularly nice place. "[1]Crime is rampant on the darknet. Drugs, weapons, forgeries, child pornography -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Credit card fraud conducted on a international scale. Weapons rings organized online. Thieves and assassins openly posting their resumes and contact information through the anonymity of the darknet. In order to stop this crime, we have a few options: track and prosecute the individuals who are perpretrating the crimes, shut down the individual sites in the darknet in which the crime originates, or shut down the darknet entirely. I'll explain why the first two are flawed, and how the third one is the only possible option. Hunting down the individual members of the site's that are doing the criminal activity seems like a decent idea, but the inherent problem with it is that with Tor, they're virtually untraceable. Normally to find someone over the internet you just trace their IP back to a physical location, and then you're right at their doorstep. Tor physically prevents that by bouncing the IP address all over the globe, making it virtually untraceable. Shutting down the sites on which the crime occurs is another decent thought, but that's simply naive at best. This has actually already been tried before. The Silk Road was the name of a very popular darknet hub for drugs and other illegal wares before it was shut down. The members fled to other sites, leading to a 70% growth in membership for BMR (a similar site), and a nearly 400% increase to the Sheep Marketplace (another similar site). Simply put, there's always going to be another site for the criminals to flee to, making shutting down individual sites a flawed method of solving the problem. [2]The final method, shutting down the darknet entirely, is a rather simple process to do and one that is guaranteed to not fail in theory. The darknet is a part of the internet that is only visible with certain software and programs installed onto the computer. Banning this software removes the ability to access the darknet entirely, forcing the criminals out into the open, where they can be prosecuted and the crime can be prevented. Sources:[1] . http://america.aljazeera.com...[2] . https://media.gractions.com...