Encounter-a-Day

On April 30th, 2011, Tibetan protesters trying to break free of Chinese internet censorship inadvertently exposed a worrying secret to the world. They had uncovered what is now referred to as the “Darknet.”

The Darknet is so-called because almost every attempt to determine anything about it has been thwarted. Its a network of indeterminate size, but even the lowest estimates number in the thousands of nodes, and some have suggested it may even be in the millions or billions.

The truly strange thing is that no one is sure where the Darknet computers are located. They are connected to the internet, but traces on the origin of their traffic have proved futile as the traces wrap around the globe multiple times before the trail fades.

Those who’ve tried to investigate the Darknet have suffered a series of increasingly-dangerous setbacks. At first, they found their computers hijacked or wiped by viruses unlike anything yet-documented, viruses which have also resisted all attempts at capture and study. They seem to know what systems are honeypots and how to avoid them.

However, the more persistent have been targeted by stranger and stranger attacks. They’ve had their houses foreclosed on despite never missing a mortgage payment; been declared legally dead; had falsified warrants and arrest records placed in their name, and more.

Recently, some of them have even had attacks made on them in meatspace. One researcher was killed when the balcony of his hotel room collapsed, and was later found to have been sabotaged. Another was assassinated by a known mafia hitman; when the police tracked the hitman down they found him lying dead in a pool of vomit in a motel in Arizona.

At this point, the Darknet has been known for only five weeks and the more it resists inspection, the more it makes everyone paranoid. Many believe it is a Chinese cyberweapon, though the only real evidence for that is that it was first discovered in Tibet. The Russians believe it to be American; the Americans believe it is European, and the EU has been strained almost to the breaking point over infighting. Several African and Middle-Eastern countries and groups have claimed responsibility for it, but have been unable to prove their claims.

One popular theory states that the Darknet is based in satellites in orbit around the Earth or even the moon, which have somehow managed to go undetected as yet. Some even claim that the Darknet is extraterrestrial in origin, and that aliens are using it to study us, whether for good or ill.