THC 101: Conrad Jaeger | The Deep Web, Cyber Security, & The Surveillance State

00:04 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times but we're far from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration We offer a fresh conversation! I'm Greg Carlwood These are the Higher Side Chats. I am in a great place. The listeners are phenomenal, we are growing more every day... I say the only reason THC doesn't have a million listeners is because a million people haven't heard of us yet! But we ARE getting there thanks to you guys and thanks to the amazing guests

01:01 Today is definitely one of those shows with knowledge that anyone and everyone should have and can benefit from. Because we all hear these stories of websites selling our information, software companies creating government backdoors into the products we use on a daily basis... And were seeing the beginnings of an era where a person like you or I is dragged to courts for an unsavory tweet, controversial status, or early copy of The Wolf Of Wall Street None of us are happy about this, but what can we do but shrug our shoulders and hope to just get by on being a small fish in a giant digital ocean? But how dependable is that the shadowy elite and their worker bees are building better nets all the time. So why just sit there vulnerable and waiting for the inevitable day when the chickens come home to roost when the tools exists to keep the government from knowing you have any business with chicken at all

01:48 Now there's a reason you've only heard whispers of the deep web, but there is an entire parallel internet out there. Beneath the polished public surface where we find Facebook and Twitter A darker place where even Google and Bing dare not tread. A place were Stain Anonymous reigns supreme in an infinite network of black markets underground websites And the information they don't want you to know about And today we've got a man who's an expert in the deep web, internet cyber security and counter surveillance and the covering of one's digital tracks. He goes by the name of Conrad Jaeger he is the author of a book called Deep Web Secrecy & Security which is really all I could find out about the guy and that's how you know he's good! Conrad my man welcome to THC Hey Greg thank you so much for having me Yeah it's a real pleasure I think a lot of people have concerns with their online safety from

02:37 some of those things I mentioned, but they also don't want to seem paranoid. But let's start with identifying the problem what are some of the areas where people on the surface web they're just not being careful enough? What are some of the ramifications of that? Well quite frankly i think we should all be paranoid We should be very scared indeed because on one level we've had a lot of publicity about The National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ monitoring all our emails getting inside our computers We actually should worry about cyber criminals because frankly everybody on the planet who uses the internet is a target and there's a lot of things we can do. They're going to come at us primarily through our email, within the last 10 minutes or so I have various security products on my computer

03:25 It just went bing. Somebody sent me purportedly from my bank an email about updating my status with them and that was a complete fake and phony if I'd fallen for that one they would have easily planted spyware inside my machine, they would have found all of my passwords and my bank details if I've been so foolish as to leave them sort in the clear inside the machine. So on that level we should really worry about cyber criminals and then it just moves on there's so many people have an interest in knowing what we're doing you know all the way from advertising agencies, people that collect data for I don't know presidential campaigns voting rights and all the rest of it We need to concern ourselves at every single level and frankly everybody needs to wake up and really just tighten up the things they do on the internet

04:12 Mm-hmm. Yeah, man I've read uh, I read your book and I got several interesting little factoids from it. I mean mainly, it's that 1600 people are added to the terrorist watch list daily which is concerning but even if you're not saying anything controversial online just by visiting Twitter there are 5,000 companies that have paid good money to be able to latch on and track you and Facebook has over 8,000 companies that have access to you and those are just the big ones! There's no signs that show this kind of activity will slow in the future. No frankly if anything we'll grow I mean,

04:48 advertising aside, people might wonder how websites like Twitter or whatever make money. Well they make money by sharing and selling your information to all sorts of people and we should really worry about that on one level it's really boring and inconvenient you know to be micro-targeted with advertising but equally once they start knowing things about you I know it just gets out and about who knows what people will do with that information plus we also know the government piggybacks on this kind of data, particularly the data that's collected by mobile phone apps. Smartphone apps. Yeah I know phones are going to be more and more concerning because they don't have a lot of security and yet they're being able to do more and more things so they're becoming these little mini computers without much of the security or at least it's just something that people aren't thinking about

05:42 It's the fastest growing area for cyber criminals and also for intelligence agencies and law enforcement. Almost everybody now has got some kind of smart cell phone and very few people actually bother to install the most basic security measures. I was at a conference last week doing a class in cyber-security, and asked people to put their hands up how many people had just basic anti spyware on their phones or even in their computers so few people put their hands up it's alarming when you think that this stuff is free, you don't have to pay for it and you're better off getting some of the free anti-spyware. There's no good reason not to be doing this

06:23 Yeah, there's not. But in terms of cybersecurity what are some of the most important practices that the layman should be introducing into their online repertoire? Okay well one of the big things is called a drive-by download you know there you are maybe on your phone and someone tweets you and says oh look this really interesting story on this website here and you follow that link and maybe it's a spoof website, and it contains lot of... I don't know. You know in the way that you visit almost any website they will plant a cookie inside your computer? Yeah! Well its the same techniques that people use to plant spyware on your computer so you'll be sent off to a phony website and before you know it your computers infected

07:15 Equally, they've got smarter than that and they can now put this spyware technology inside legitimate websites. So you might visit somewhere that's completely okay website but for advertising and other means they can then insert malware into your computer This is called a watering hole attack Now how do we know about this? How do we know if it is even happening to us when visiting the website But there are various programs simple little free apps that you can install in your browser and I highly recommend use Firefox. You install these and it will alert you the instant somebody tries to plant anything in your computer, again it costs nothing. Interesting! So man how important is something like making a strong password? I hear all the time that passwords are weak from people who dabble in hacking but what techniques should people be putting into their passwords

08:10 OK, so what not to do? What not to do is use any word you can find in a dictionary. Don't use any dates memorable dates don't use your mother's maiden name because if someone is that interested in you and you've got a Facebook page they probably see your mother on there figure out her maiden name and incorporate that into their cracking techniques for your password what do you do ok this is really simple I love to teach this to people If you can remember, say the opening line of a poem or of a favourite book or a pop song if you can remember that then you can remember a password. I'll give an example okay? A very simple one it's lovely introduction to a book Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice okay And it begins with It is truth universally acknowledged

09:01 that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of wife. Now, anybody with half the brain could remember that you might wonder why but what you do is take the initial word from every letter from every word on opening paragraph and that is your password. If you can remember that, you've now got a string of meaningless letters when they try to crack your password using a thing called brute force that will not trigger anything because it's meaningless jumble of letters. Now if I can remember that which I easily can, that is the basis my password. I put some upper and lower case in it maybe put a number on it or two and maybe stick in a couple smiley faces or something then becomes unbreakable password. Yeah man! That actually is pretty smart tip. I like that. I'm probably going to start using them

09:58 I highly recommend it. And so important for locking your phone or your laptop, particularly if you're using something like Gmail Hotmail any of these services and I wouldn't really recommend you do but lots people will do and they won't stop necessarily don't give a simple password something like that you can easily remember it and in the sense I find it kind of fun but I know how to do this, well I can easily tap that into a keyboard and it amuses me. And I know it will block most people including the NSA Yeah, I mean man it is a weird world out there now. When i think about the way governments and privileged corporations are using what you call the surface web, the internet we all know It's kind of exactly what they do in the real world Our leaders give us entertainment and shiny new electronic toys And finely tuned air conditioning In exchange for looking the other way when they invade a country

10:55 or lock some people up in Guantanamo Bay. I mean, sure it's bad but we got a good thing going here so we let them do kind of whatever they want and the internet is kinda the same way. We allow the abuses to go on because we love Netflix and we love Facebook and if... we don't want that to get interrupted. And also too, i dont think people take it seriously you know? The often repeated line is, I have nothing to hide therefore I have nothing to fear. It doesn't even matter whether you've got to hide anything or not we're looking at if you take law enforcement intelligence agencies you're dealing with people who are hyper suspicious They can misconstrue anything from very simple activities. Let's say you watch a film about terrorism, I don't know something like that and you think wow that is really interesting, I'd like to look deeper into the subject. You start looking into terrorism online and hey presto suddenly you've come to the attention of the authorities

11:48 And before you know it, you might find yourself on an airline no-fly list and suddenly all your contacts are being followed too. Or conversely one of your friends may research something they might want to take up shooting or buy a rifle or some ammunition instead of spending time looking at different weapons online And then suddenly they become of interest and then because they're of interest, They find their contacts book. They look in that and then you are on their contacts book You may have done nothing but you're caught up in a web suddenly and then bang! You know? Your potentially in trouble with this suspicious minds. You don't know what they gonna misconstrued from your life. Mm-hmm...and I've also had guests that have talked about The fact that the FBI, you know, and there counterterrorism

12:33 investigations, they're only really concerned with prosecutions or with charges. They're not really concerned with clearing your name and a lot of people are actually getting caught up in these nets that really have no place being there I mean didn't we just see There was a guy kid a few years ago who is trying to make a creative way of saying he was gonna party hard when He came to America and he said he was gonna destroy America. He ended up having his vacation ruined No, absolutely. There's a British guy you know he's using typical London slang You know instead of saying I'm gonna have a jolly good time He said the slang is I'm gonna destroy it and destroy America Yeah Well here you know the FBI no the Department of Homeland Security Ready and waiting for him when he hit Los Angeles Airport, you know And the thing is they knew everything about him except what he was actually talking about

13:25 Yeah, isn't that ironic? But man it's bad out there. No question! So let's kind of dive into this thing called the deep web I mean that's really what is sexy and mysterious about this thing and i think that's what people want to know about how would you describe the deep web to the uninitiated OK, well on the face of it the deep web itself is actually rather dull because what it is all the areas of the internet that are not indexed by search engines like Google. If you think Google, Yahoo or AltaVista their job is to throw up the most popular results for people. If you look at the top questions asked of Google in any given week it's celebrities and sporting events and all that rest of it People don't want deep technical details so Google only skimmed the surface hence the term Surface Web I guess things beneath the surface

14:20 I don't know, it might be really technical stuff. It could be all sorts of things they don't get caught up within the searches so in a nutshell if Google aren't looking at it its deep web an example would be Google would tell you of the existence of a database or archive somewhere but he doesn't look inside that database or archive so what's inside that is Deep Web however The thing about the deep web, it's huge. People really don't know how big it is maybe its 5,000 times larger than the regular surface web but within this deep web are an unknown number of hidden networks and this is the area that is strange you know? It's dangerous in some areas

15:08 You can easily run into arms dealers, drug dealers, slave traders, paedophiles all manner of unpleasant people down there. There are people like journalists that will use deep web tools on hidden networks to communicate with whistleblowers and dissidents. Aid agencies in repressive regimes who want to communicate amongst themselves, their base back in Washington or where have you would use these tools that cannot be intercepted. Now, so the really cool part of the deep web which frankly is just a massive information that most people are not interested in the interesting part are the hidden networks and one way you can look at this if we've probably all seen the movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark well in the final scene of Raiders Lost Ark they hide the ark of the covenant inside a crate

16:05 And then they hide the crate inside an enormous warehouse full of identical crates. You see, it's a matter of scale but if you expand that think of the deep web as a warehouse for the crates but on magnitude I don't know what billion times larger than that down in the uncharted depths of the internet this is where people hide and they can hide extremely effectively and do so Yeah man, it's so interesting. It's kind of like Google keeps you on Main Street but if you want to go down the alleys then you need to get on the deep web Yeah, but I mean all sorts of things. Things that you might not be popular things to discuss. Anything! There are bulletin boards there are chat rooms there are all sorts of things down on these hidden networks one which is the talk network perhaps we'll talk about that in a moment and you can discuss anything and do it with complete anonymity in a way that you cannot describe or discuss things with anonymity on the surface web

17:07 Yeah, I mean another thing that i learned out of your book that was pretty fascinating was that there are considered to be two billion people using the surface web but less than half a million are on the deep web which sounds so crazy like five thousand times more data but fewer people then live in Denver Colorado. Absolutely very few people using it but I think more and more people waking up to the possibilities of using Using a hidden network like the Tor is called tor the onion router That's what it stands for onion because as a multi-layered Encryption process, so I don't want to get too tech tip too technical and boring here But you know The onion router was actually set up with funds by the US Navy at the start of millennium As they secure means of communication amongst themselves now

17:56 The US government also have been putting money into this because they realize it helps human rights activists, free speech advocates around the world. There's a kind of irony here I'm sure is going to register with most people listening now but you can use these facilities and they're happy for people to use them and they will fund it now partly funded As a result, as I say journalists aid workers free speech people are using this all over the place. However because it's so sharp It's so clever So hard to be tracked on our on the tour network that you will find money laundries and in their arms dealers and drugs dealers And all the rest of it. I think most self-respecting serious criminals don't communicate Using Facebook or Twitter or their email they use deep web tools

18:47 Right. And like for people who are trying to think of things they might have heard of, that's where the WikiLeaks full archive is I think? That's also where of course I'm sure people have heard of Silk Road both of these websites or archives are located deep within the dark web right? Yeah, I mean the Silk Road which has been brought down and it's now come back again under a slightly different form. That is still running A lot of the WikiLeaks material you will find on the so-called surface web However, you will find things on the deep web and it won't take you very long to find these places. You'll find sensitive documents before Wicked Leaks even gets their hands on them." In the book I give various sort of like starting points entry points into the Onion network

19:38 and one thing is called the hidden wiki, and it just lists all sorts of places where people will dump tons of information. Just because you know whistleblowers they can't don't trust giving it to the press they certainly don't trust going to whistleblower organizations And they will upload amazing amount of documents certainly from a journalist or anyone who's slightly interested in life generally You can plough through some this stuff and have your mind blown Right, yeah. That's kind of what is most interesting to me but let's tell people how this works. Traditional internet you know you log on and have an IP address it's kinda tied to your computer so your fairly traceable You leave a big footprint on the surface web So you mentioned Tor the onion router Tell people what that is It's like a client right? You download that And then... What happens

20:33 Okay, so what you simply do is you download the Tor Firefox browser free of charge. I do recommend in the book that you play around with settings just a little bit nothing complicated take about a minute and then suddenly you launch this browser and you can be 100% anonymous on the internet your internet service provider will perhaps know that you've entered the Tor network but what you've done subsequently or you do subsequently they can't see because Effectively a hidden tunnel, a secret tunnel. And then you may be sitting there in Seattle or somewhere accessing the internet but to anyone watching you when you pop up somewhere else to ask say Google a question it may look like your in Helsinki Finland they've got no concept of who you are or where you are You're quite anonymous

21:21 and also using this browser allows you to branch off deeper down into the Tor network itself, this particular hidden network where you can visit all manner of weird bulletin boards. You can visit the latest incarnation of The Silk Road and so on and so forth Right, and so what's off-putting for a lot of people is that there is no general search engine because nothing is indexed or monitored down there. So you've got to kind of know an exact website and you can't just put in like tickets dot com well it's dot onion everything's dot onion but you can't just put in like tickets dot onion or cool art dot onion and hope to get lucky because all the web addresses are just kind of random letters and numbers right?

22:00 Indeed they are, no you can't do that. What you need to do and again keep mentioning the book but in the book I do give various entry points there's the hidden wiki which lists all sorts of things as various directories that people have put together these are user edited directories so if somebody finds something interesting or let's say this starter in a chat group on on a particular subject they would then list that in one of these directories so thing to do is Launch a Firefox browser, cut and paste in say from the book or some other source the address for the hidden wiki and hey presto you've got an entry point. And it will give you so many different places to go off and explore. The first day any of us listening here found the internet

22:47 You imagine, it was an amazing thing of discovery. Yeah! You start looking at something and before you know it your looking at something entirely different and your going on this amazing journey It's like that but stranger much much stranger That sounds so crazy Can you give us some examples of the stuff you found down there that might kind of surprise people? That they'd even have access to from their home computer Well Yeah, I mean just simple things. You can buy any kinds of identity. You could buy US passports or Canadian passports. You can have people send you documents

23:29 Let's say you want to take out a new credit card. This is all the bad stuff, by the way. They will send you documents that say you're paying for various utilities at a particular address which you are not and this stuff looks so genuine it will convince pretty much most banks to allow them to give your credit card. Oh wow! Equally... equally you can buy You can buy people's credit card details that people have stolen and go off and buy things if you're of that bent. And, you can buy firearms a lot cheaper than you can actually buy in the stores which I found pretty shocking There's drugs there's weird sex stuff and then there is activism all manner of activism just fantastic discussions going on about all manner of things

24:17 Man, you know when I was getting ready for this show. I watched a few video walkthroughs on YouTube and they showed some pretty gnarly websites man There was one called quick kill where you can hire from a network of anonymous assassins They charge 20 grand for any normal civilian that which you need half up front half when the job is complete And if you want to kill a cop or a journalist well That'll cost you 100 grand and that was one of the crazier things I saw it's kind of funny because all There's a lot of mystique and conspiracy around deaths like Michael Hastings or some of these high-level bankers, and people like me always want to get to an answer. But there it is! You know? Monsanto wants to kill a few journalists that are a PR problem... Well half a million bucks which is like nothing to them

25:01 I assume companies like Monsanto might even have a quick kill punch card. It's so crazy! And there are so many people advertising it, there must be something in there? You can't take out an advertisement or have a listing on the yellow pages But my god, these people do list their services and you communicate with them using an encrypted thing. Generally the people use a thing called PGP which is pretty good privacy and it's a means of completely encrypting your communications backwards and forwards Anybody who was able to intercept just couldn't read what you were writing or receiving. So that works very, very well they would use the untraceable deep web currency, the Bitcoin

25:45 and pay for things that way. And there's no comeback, there is no way of tracing I'm not sitting here recommending anybody pop off a judge or journalist or whoever but in terms of boy is this interesting to look at my god it's fascinating! You can destroy all sorts of people lives and for example let's suppose you thought your partner was cheating you go contact the Russian underground and for a modest amount of money they will hoodwink your partner into accepting an update for his or her phone, get inside the phone then you can turn on the webcam to watch them see what they're up too. You can follow them around wherever they go using GPS facility on their phones They do it on the cheap because they also want access to that person's bank account details no doubt will go in and suck all the information out themselves

26:38 If you want to bring down a website, let's say you have a beef against the particular company for example You can pay for a dedicated denial of service attack using the Russian underground and it's only $100 a day which is amazing value. Yeah Man that is value So, what if the president were to flip this almighty internet kill switch we hear about? Would that affect the deep web too? I mean you have to have an internet service provider right. You need some means of accessing the Internet but you know i recommend people who are journalists and secret bloggers and people like this who need real anonymity keep themselves safe. I recommend you get a USB thumb drive

27:25 and you install the Tor Firefox browser on that, and a few other simple programs all free. And then you can just go anywhere slot that into any machine PC or Mac and your going to leave no trace at all You don't even need your own internet service provider. You can get it from Cyber Cafe or public library Or you're gonna slip into someone's computer when they are not even looking if your that devious! And then you can do anything like this there is no comeback There virtually nowhere where they could find you Right. I mean that was kind of one of my questions, like for somebody who just was curious and wanted to download Tor and just hop on there maybe they adjust the settings to your suggested preferences are they automatically safe? Are they still kind of in danger like couldn't get in trouble just for accessing the deep web? Yeah in this in the States I think they keep an eye out for people who are accessing Tor because they assume their up to no good

28:18 There's a very simple way around that. You can use a virtual private network, some are free and some you might want to pay for and as soon as you connect to the internet you're using their servers now your internet service provider can tell that you're using this service but once you're inside their service they can't see what you're doing so from that point onwards then you access the Tor Network and they haven't got a clue that you're on tour. Never say never, I wouldn't say anything is 100% secure or safe and never trust any one thing 100%. I always recommend people use two or three different things at the time mix-and-match different tools and techniques and technologies by doing that you are making it exceptionally difficult for anyone who's interested in knowing what you're doing make it exceptionally difficult for them to find out. Yeah yeah I've heard of VPN networks

29:12 for people who use like BitTorrent or the Pirate Bay to download music and movies which you know I have no problem with my show is free why shouldn't every show be free but i mean it's fairly risky people worry about getting a letter from their internet service provider the Motion Picture Association of America. Are there safer ways of pirating on the deep web? Oh yeah, for sure! Again we come back to what is the Deep Web It's basically things that are not being indexed by Google let's say use net news groups I'll say that again use net news groups now this predates the World Wide Web by about 10 years

29:51 If you imagine a ginormous bulletin board on every conceivable subject if you want to have porcupines as pets or You're looking for jobs in aviation, or you're a fan of Jackie Chan or any damn thing. There is a posting there's a board down there devoted to that one subject now if you wanted to download the latest blockbuster movies in blu-ray and Not be monitored had no one know you're doing it. You just go to the relevant The relevant bulletin board down there and people are uploading films and you can just download them And it goes to everything books music world music anything. You can think of Someone who's kindly uploaded that to share I mean, that's pretty awesome It's and you know for people who might not have seen it. I mean they're they're not big on aesthetics down there It's not very graphics heavy is it?

30:45 No, it's not at all. It is very sort of primitive as it were but there are some wonderful news group readers now so you put your cursor over I don't know let's say you're interested in particular types of dogs or something and you put your cursor over a post about a particular type of dog that you don't know what it a little thumbnail image of that dog will come up so you know it's there, you can see things. You just learn to operate slightly differently and also too if you think your not going to be interested in something you just download the first part watch the first 10 minutes, see that it's fine and then download the rest of it. And you join them all together with a particular program like game I list in the book and easy to find out anyone who looks into this will learn this stuff within ten fifteen minutes is really really basic but also it doesn't slow things down yeah? You can download a movie in like ten minutes or something if you've got a reasonable connection Wow! It takes two hours to watch it but you downloaded it in ten minutes

31:44 And you know, just discovering things. I have an interest in world music, music from Mali or wherever and where have you? Just generally I don't find this stuff on the regular internet But I could visit a world music element of the news groups and there's people who say, oh look you're interested in this. I recommend that! And before you know it you've made lots of friends they've introduced you to music You are introducing them to music. Famous like the regular internet just works slightly differently and it is just marvelous way sharing files. Nice yeah I mean sounds great Of course there are a lot really dark and evil things down there but

32:25 I mean, what do you think if someone needed an organ but was having a hard time getting on a donors list? Do you think they could find help on the deep web? Yeah for sure they could on tour. Oh my god! And then i hate to even guess at this but they'd probably get one toward them yeah oh man... That actually brings up another interesting dark corner of the deep web that was on one of these walkthrough videos other than the various forums where people are asking scary things like how to make chloroform and looking for kidnapping techniques which is a little uncouth. They also pulled up a site for an organization that has four warehouses at an undisclosed location available for unregulated human study you can pay, you can pay to have like dark experiments done on real people which you don't know where they get them but they'll run tests and publicly post the lab results?

33:21 Yeah, I mean...I'm of a highly dubious suspicious nature so I wonder if sometimes people are having you know putting my leg or having a bit of a joke there. I'm not entirely sure that these things happen but I guess if you can think of it someone somewhere is doing it and if there's money to be made they're certainly doing it yeah I mean it's wild but obviously Pandora's box is open to any extreme! I guess to get into some of the more positives like I try to find ways for the little guy to get ahead in this backwards world and of course everyone knows now that people who are early adopters and entrepreneurs on the surface web were able to make millions and billions of dollars by getting there first but is there any opportunity in that same sense with getting into the deep web or is it just like a different kind of animal?

34:06 I don't know. Again, we're down to human nature here. Someone will always find a way and means of making money out of the strange and unusual. And for sure there are. The blatantly obvious ones are the illegal ones but they must be all manner of services that people can provide you know slightly gray areas or what have you. There was Bitcoin! Who knows how valuable it will become? But that was a golden ticket for a lot of people who were using it two years ago Oh it still is. I mean when it first came out a few years back, you know, a Bitcoin was... It cost you 20 cents! Umm..I think you look more recent than me how much is it now? You know for one from Bitcoin Right now its hovering around $600 usually. That's shocking if you had just bought 100 dollars back then you would be so wealthy now

34:57 Yeah. And who knows where Bitcoin is going to go? I think that as an enormous futures, you shouldn't just be seen as some kind of investment. You know, I didn't get in on the ground floor and maybe got in on the mezzanine, as it were. My minor investment is now worth quite a bit but I'm not seeing it in terms as there's a financial investment I'm looking at ways in the thinking of ways that it's going to be used in the future. You know, we all get bombarded with junk email for example now someone is coming up with a notion whereby to receive, you know... somebody sends me an email right they have to pay me a microscopic portion of the Bitcoin. Bitcoins are infinitely divisible which means you can have 0.0000001 of a bitcoin now it's gonna cost nobody anyone who wants to send me an email it's going to cost them nothing however if your sending out a million spam emails a day is gonna add up so you could in theory

35:57 entirely defeat spam email by using the Bitcoin. Right, yeah it's very versatile and it's so efficient but people should realize we know that central banking and control over a people's currency is really the trump card of the elite you know thats how they keep us under their thumb they control the mechanism in which we do all business but bitcoin operates outside of that and that alone is tremendous value Well it is indeed, it doesn't cost us anything. If you use your Visa card or PayPal or whatever its going to cost you to do that Using a Bitcoin won't cost you a single cent and also it's immediate as fast an email can be sent and received It's that fast! Its an excellent way of paying for things and sooner or later people are going to come up with the right apps To use on your smart cell phone

36:47 that will allow you to make immediate purchases. You'll be walking past a billboard for something, you like the look of this concert coming up? You point your phone at it and you've made your payment with Bitcoins. Bang! Hey presto no one's had to take a percentage off for you. If you're trying to buy things online how many times does it go wrong? It goes wrong a lot if we were using Bitcoin and people devise, and they will do, device good payment systems I just see it as a marvelous way ahead. Instantaneous, no middleman and also there's an awful lot of people for example government agencies monitor all financial transactions maybe you just don't want them to know what you're spending your money on You doesn't have to be something dodgy or illegal you just wanna keep the things yourself

37:41 Yeah man, it's interesting stuff. Of course a lot of people have fears because when you do keep that power yourself you do have a lot of responsibility not to lose it we consider banks to be generally secure cause they'll hold our funds and we don't really have to do much about it but you know we've all seen runs on the bank and times when they just don't have the money so it's good 99% of the time but for my money I'd rather just control it myself. You know, I trust myself more than I trust anyone else No, absolutely. I don't trust anyone least of all bankers though i think it's a great way of doing that you know and you have a secure wallet online but you will print out your code your unique identifier for the amount of bitcoins you've got in your BitWallet You can store that in a physical safe somewhere so if your computer went down or anything like that then you've always got access to it and if you're going to put these things on your computer

38:39 Don't put it in a folder called Bitcoin. Give it a really fundamental boring name that no one's ever going to look at, give the name of an appalling sounding recipe anything and people won't necessarily look inside that. And then you can encrypt anything anyway within your computer very very simple there are lots of free programs just simple encryption so you can keep these things very very safe. Yeah definitely better safe than sorry So in terms of the deep web and the access to it, is Tor like the main thing? Are there other equivalents to Tor? There's Freenet for example. I haven't spent a lot of time exploring that but it works on a very similar principle. There are just basic person-to-person file sharing facilities. That technically is Deep Web

39:31 The whole nature, I guess of hidden networks is that they are hidden. And maybe you need an invitation to use them certainly in countries like... Digital secret societies? Well yeah or you're an activist in Iran and you just don't want the state to know what you're up to. People are using hidden networks purely for input into Persian language I've heard there's social networks too that are like clones of typical websites, like an anonymous version of Facebook and things like that. Oh absolutely! There is complete Twitter clones, there are Facebook clones... And in the same way you might use Facebook to share files with people or images it doesn't always have to explain who you are. Many people think they're foolish because they put far too much information up on Facebook

40:24 But you can use the facilities for sharing, for group chatting and doing all sorts of things. And this is where the Deep Web comes into its own and the Tor network particularly. We can have totally secure chats using just basic chat programs that would be used ordinarily on your regular internet There's deep web versions, you can send SMS text messages that simply cannot be intercepted or read. There are email systems down there that you can use to connect with the regular internet and they just can't intercept them. Let's say you're using Gmail and the government is interested in how many times does Google get asked by various government departments for handover information?

41:07 You can use companies that are based in Switzerland and Iceland, but they're operating down on the Tor network. They're not going to take into consideration court orders from the United States or Canada or Britain So that keeps you particularly safe and also if it's in employing a form of encryption, end-to-end encryption they're not being intercepted in cyberspace because organizations like the NSA for example are scouring the internet looking for keywords. These key words will not come up because they're scrambled

41:43 Yeah, I mean that's kind of what i was thinking about. Like that's what really interests me the most is the idea of combing through leaked documents and sensitive material that the government probably has web bots searching for and taking down anytime they appear on the surface web but they might just be laying down there waiting to be exposed yeah And if you wanted to actually put up a your own website uh...that can't be taken down um...there's no better place to do it than Tor And there's very, very simple ways of doing it. There are file stores down there so you can store any amount of data anything you want you can store down there You could lock it in a box and have it where anybody could read it If you use something like Photoshop you can actually design a page and load up as a JPEG image and then your website is done in 10 minutes It's not interactive but maybe don't need to be if you want that There are file hosting services down there too

42:39 Yeah, and a lot of people are talking now in terms of the surface web that they're really concerned about is this net neutrality stuff. And I assume that would have no effect on the deep web? Absolutely not at all! You know here's the thing you know with net neutrality what we're going to be seeing is people...the internet service providers are going to be giving immediate access to services that they have a financial interest in and those that they don't have a financial interest in, they're going to throttle back or actually block totally themselves. Now which means we're gonna be looking at the kind of corralled internet you know very limited Internet but by using just using a virtual private network right your bypassing all of that because you are using somebody else's servers in another country so that stuff does not get blocked it does not get throttled back and the same with using Tor

43:30 You cannot limit it and I think more and more people are waking up to this. More often than not commercial organizations looking to make us pay for services that until now have been free, and i think this is the joy of the internet, the ability to share things all the rest of that... And if those things are being closed off you're going to be forcing people underground, your gonna make people use Tor and virtual private networks and in the end we're gonna find its much better for them Yeah, man. I find it fascinating and even just... It doesn't take that much to learn about it. I mean, I thought it was kind of a daunting task just like I thought Bitcoin was a daunting task two years ago and now I'm kicking myself but I've already found all these little cool tips and tricks in your book. Even with our communication you sent me a few messages that have self-destructed man! That's cool

44:22 Absolutely, and I find these things really funny. And you know they're supposing...I don't know let's say you having a protest about something anything could be anything maybe You know someone's driving at a toll road through your village or something and every time you complain The police or private security guards are there to break up any kind of protests or demonstration What you can use is marvelous little tools Right to send information to people one of my favorites is a thing called spam mimic now You know everyone gets all this junk email and it's oh hello, sir. You know we offer you financial incentive programs Shoulder you recommend to us and so kind of broken rubbish English Well that stuff is not being picked up by the NSA because it does you know? It's just there's so much of it well you can actually compose a message in

45:09 that actually looks like this junk email. When you receive this junk email, you put it back through a little device online and it will decode it and say meet at 4 o'clock on the village green or whatever but to any outsider its complete junk and they won't even be looking at it These tools are remarkable we could all use these for different things I think they're great! And they're free And we already know, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that on websites like Facebook and Twitter and even Reddit which is considered to be fairly open people are censoring posts. Moderators are pulling content any you know on all host the subjects but when people talk about fracking or GMOs or just general rebellion in corruption exposing a lot of those things get pulled

45:58 It's going that direction so the more time you spend on those networks, you're going to have to realize that the things you see have passed through the middleman and if I want to get rid of that middlemen then you got to do something different. Absolutely! And more and more we're gonna see examples where these services like Reddit or whatever will be seen as publishers And people will be able to say in the same way that a newspaper publishes something that's libelous, that the newspaper are the people who can be taken to court and sued. So I think people are going to use that route to start blocking debates about fracking or what have you and that will happen more and more. Because of that, people will bypass those services and they'll use bulletin boards down on the deep web, down on the tool network where no one is doing any monitoring

46:47 It's cool man. I mean being well versed in this stuff are there any tips you have for the typical internet users on the surface web or any little things you'd like to see people doing that would offer them potential safety that we haven't mentioned? Well yeah, i mean there is some very basic things. First and foremost I would change the way we browse. I would dump Microsoft's Explorer for example, which i don't think is safe. I would use the Firefox browser. It's free it's great and really fast There's a whole bunch of free add-ons that boost your security. So when you visit a site that is trying to plot a cookie in your computer, it will tell you if someone has got a bead on them and they are trying to follow you around if you're visiting a website that perhaps has malicious content, it will warn you before you get there

47:41 So, for starters I would use Mozilla Firefox. In the book I give you a list of all the free things you can download and add on to Mozilla Firefox that will make your browsing really really safe in terms of your email i think we need to wake up a little bit and when somebody sends you an email...I don't know..I'll give you an example A little while ago I had an email from my friend Phil, seemingly. From his Gmail account and it said Hey comrade found this amazing picture of you Now first off Phil's not the kind of guy who would have lots of amazing pictures of me

48:19 Secondly, he's a news cameraman as far as I know. He's in Syria So I'm sure we had better things to do than look at anybody's photos now what had happened was a hacker Had just got into his gmail account and got into his Gmail Contacts list and they were pretending to be Phil And there were sending out all this the these is what looked like photographs? And you open them and suddenly you have activated the most amazing spyware that has got inside your system them. So we have to think very long and hard about what we're receiving, you know? Um, if you are in any way suspicious, you should already have free anti-spyware and there's no reason why you shouldn't give you a list of really good ones. And then all you do is use those to examine the attachment

49:06 And it will tell you if there's anything malicious in there. So we should just need to be more suspicious, you know earlier today I was saying I got something purportedly from my bank and it wasn't for my bank It was complete rubbish and again If I'd accepted that or had accepted an update on my smartphone All these ways people get into your system so for example don't automatically accept an update You should update manually yourself in your own good time and do it regularly but don't automatically assume that things are what they purport to be because cybercrime for example is the biggest area of crime on the planet and we really got to wake up to that if nothing else. And then beyond that you've got law enforcement and national security agency with their miserably suspicious minds

49:57 Yeah, great points. Wow man this has been a great show I really love this talk that pretty much does it for us thanks for doing it! I know a whole lot of people aren't talking about this yet so its real pleasure if anybody wants to dive deeper Conrad's Deep Web Kindle book has clickable links to a lot of great programs and anonymous communication tools and a ton more info would you like to give them any other information before we go? Well, I just want to say you know. I am not a technically minded person You know if it's just this basic things like trying to make the VCR work Not gonna have one anymore. I couldn't make those things work. I have kept this book so super simple We've tested we've tested various products on various people free products You know techniques tools whatever on Various friends and other people and anything that people found too confusing To set up we have just dumped from the book

50:49 So everything is super straightforward 99% of it is free you can choose to pay for some of the stuff because we recommend it because we know it to be really good. But generally speaking, it is very simple. Anybody if you can send an email if you can access Facebook You can take on board any of these tools and tips and technologies And make them work for you and operate in such a way that you've basically given yourself back the freedom that the internet promised us in the first place Great point man! Is there anyway people could keep up with your writing maybe future writings?

51:27 Well, one thing I do recommend if you do buy the book we update regularly because techniques change. This is a constantly changing game of cat and mouse If you buy the book register and we will send you free updates whenever we bring them out Do have a blog but were not keeping it up to sort of as regularly as I used to because there's so many other activities going on at the moment now. But no, I just register for the book and we keep you updated with all sorts of information as we learn it and quite frankly a vast amount of my time is spent exploring new products and reading endless security blogs from various people who we know to be good So basically I choose distillation of everything that's going on put into this one book Deep Web Secrecy & Security

52:16 Right on man. Well that does it then very empowering, very interesting information Thanks again take care of yourself Conrad Greg thank you so much for having me and stay safe I'll try Alright people Conrad Jaeger tons of information a very important THC I would say and maybe even moreso in the coming 10-20 years So thanks everyone. Please donate to the Money Bomb to keep the good THC times rolling, please share this show and help it grow! Find me on Facebook or Twitter and now I have a little app that allows listeners to leave a voice message right on the website It would be great to hear some weird stories or theories from the people so think about that Until next time...I'll be on that deep web Your move Zuckerberg

53:12 When I only knew my friends. Oh, things say me but they'll miss the day when they're only without me again. You're the thing that wants to see me. You said I'd miss this when I was my second wife

54:32 Where are things in your mind? I wish time would heal us now. I wish time, I wish time would heal us. Free my cancer out of me. Can't take it no more

56:01 Aware of this dark