2003 Digital Wrapup: Year Of The Darknet

[DudeAsInCool]

Computers and the Internet

Military Strategy and Tactics to Entertainment Utopia

Darknets

By GARY RIVLIN

December 14, 2003. When the U.S. military sought to create a secure network over which soldiers in Tikrit could share intelligence on medical supplies and road conditions with nongovernmental organizations in New York and Geneva, it turned to a software package called the Groove Workspace. Using Groove, Central Command set up a so-called Darknet. Darknets allow a group to create a digital utopia that is equal parts socialist and elitist: participants can get information freely as long as they share the same software and have been granted the access code.

A Darknet isn't as much a new technology as an old idea -- the corporate Intranet -- reconstructed for a paranoid age. A Darknet offers all the security of a private in-house network, but it allows users to send encrypted messages and documents around the world through that vast, bustling, danger-filled wasteland of sprawl called the Internet. Sri Lankan human rights activists now trade cloaked electronic communications with one another using a Darknet, as do researchers at GlaxoSmithKline who work in geographically dispersed teams.

Darknets are suddenly au courant among the cybercool as well. This past summer, when, in a frenzy against music downloading, the Recording Industry Association of America started slapping suits on children and grandmothers, hundreds of thousands of music devotees flocked to Web sites like Bad Blue and Waste. Like Napster and KaZaA, these sites let users sift through the public contents of one another's hard drives and swap files on the Internet. But like the soldiers in Tikrit, file-swappers need an invitation to enter. Inside the velvet-roped cyberclub of the Darknet that Bad Blue or Waste creates, members can trade purloined music or movies or whatever it is they want to exchange, having been waved inside by the bouncers at the door.

NYTimes.com • Technology