"This book explores the Dark Web--sites that must be accessed through special routers designed to protect the anonymity of visitors and publishers. Avoiding sensationalist definitions that conflate the Dark Web with illicit activity or "deep layers" that search engines cannot crawl, Gehl focuses on anonymity and encryption as the key differences between the Dark Web and the everyday "Clear Web" on which both users and publishers are tracked and identified. Gehl focuses here on Dark Web systems -- Freenet, I2P, and Tor -- to reveal the wide range of activities, many of them perfectly legal and socially enlightened, that the Dark Web supports. Despite its various uses, the question of legitimacy is an essential one: who needs the Dark Web and why? To answer these questions, this book shares the perspectives of the Dark Web's creators, users, and publishers, and proposes an original theory of media legitimacy as it relates to state power, organizational propriety, and authenticity"-- Provided by publisher.

Violence, propriety, authenticity : a symbolic economy of the dark web -- The dark web network builders -- From agorism to OPSEC : dark web markets and a shifting relationship to the state -- Searching for the Google of the dark web -- Being legit on a dark web social network -- Facebook and the dark web : a collision.