Help with responding to classmates discussion post

The dark web is often thought of as this deep and mysterious place on the internet where criminal activity flourishes and hacker groups are at large. This conceptual idea is not too far off from what this "place" is. While not a single place in the world, the dark web serves many purposes, ranging from a mode of communication between oppressed organizations all the way to large criminal organizations communicating business endeavors (Taking on the Dark Web: Law Enforcement Experts ID Investigative Needs | National Institute of Justice, 2020). The dark web is not accessed on a whim by anyone, it requires additional drivers and understanding into how encrypted communication works, often routing connection through several different IP's to maintain anonymity, essentially a virtual private network (VPN) (Everything You Should Know About the Dark Web, n.d.). This changes the way that crimes committed because often times it requires intensive cyber programs to trace these methods of communication and combat it. These programs may be disguised as something far from what its real purpose is. One particular crime that is frequent all across the world and one that daunts many is human trafficking. I have travelled to many countries in Asia where this is an existential problem and many efforts are being taken by the United Nations to combat this (THEMIS, 2024).

When crimes do occur on the dark web, they can leave behind very little pieces of evidence for law enforcement to follow up on and do not occur in a manner that is easy to organize. Think of Google Chrome, the search engine is organized and the interface is user friendly for just about anyone to be able to use somewhat effectively. The dark web is the opposite and does not present helpful hints on how to navigate to the suspicious sites. 2 resources available to law enforcement are things such as network mapping and Videris Search (Clarke, 2024). Network mapping is an automated program which gathers data and presents it in a matter which is presentable and allows for trends to be identified, creating more approachable cases. Videris Search is on its own, a search engine which pulls data from sources all across the dark web and cuts out any data that may be irrelevant or not correspond to their particular searches.