Dr. Joseph M. Hatfield has spent his career thinking about threats to democracy. As a retired naval intelligence officer, he analyzed security risks at the highest levels, from aircraft carrier deployments to combat operations in the Middle East and North Africa. Now a visiting fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute, his work explores the threats and opportunities that come not from physical weapons but rather from digital tools. In a recent talk at Johns Hopkins, co-sponsored by SNF Agora and the JHU Information Security Institute, he challenged the audience to consider the nuances of one of the most misunderstood digital spaces: the dark web.
In popular media, people often portray the dark web as a lawless digital underworld where cybercriminals operate beyond the reach of law enforcement. It enables illegal markets, Hatfield acknowledged, but it also serves as a powerful tool for bypassing censorship, securing private communications, and thus protecting free speech and resistance to authoritarian control. To understand its impacts on democracy, both negative and positive, one must first know how it works.
Unlike the surface web, which search engines index and make easily accessible, the dark web relies on encrypted networks requiring access to specialized software. The Tor network is the most well-known, short for The Onion Router, which anonymizes internet traffic by routing it through multiple relays. The relays add layers of encryption, like the layers of an onion, making it nearly impossible for anyone to track the origin or destination of a user’s activity.
This anonymity makes the dark web indispensable for those living under authoritarian regimes. Hatfield pointed to major news organizations that have adapted to this reality. The New York Times and BBC operate dark web versions of their websites, ensuring that people in heavily censored countries can access independent journalism. In addition, there are numerous blogs and forums on the dark web where individuals freely express their opinions without fear of censorship or surveillance. In places like China, where the government aggressively filters internet content, citizens use bridge relays, a feature within the Tor network, to disguise their location and circumvent firewalls. In Iran, where authorities closely monitor dissent, activists rely on dark web forums to coordinate protests and share evidence of human rights abuses with the outside world.
The dark web also provides a critical channel for whistleblowers. SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblowing platform, allows individuals to submit sensitive information to journalists without revealing their identities. Unlike traditional online communication, which relies on traceable IP addresses, SecureDrop functions within the dark web, making it far more resistant to surveillance and government pressure. Hatfield highlighted how this system helps to expose corruption, human rights violations, and abuses of power in countries where conventional reporting is restricted or dangerous.
Intelligence agencies recognize the dark web’s importance for secure communication. The CIA operates a dark web portal that enables informants to contact them without fear of being monitored by hostile governments. This secure communication is crucial for national security. However, this same anonymity makes the dark web appealing to cybercriminals. Black markets on the dark web allow for the sale of weapons, drugs, and stolen data, often using cryptocurrencies like Monero, which further obscures financial transactions.
This tension between the privacy-securing and identity-obscuring features of the dark web is what makes it so controversial. Hatfield described how law enforcement agencies have developed techniques to monitor and infiltrate illegal networks that use the dark web. The FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road, an infamous dark web drug market, was not just a technical victory but also a case study in social engineering, the use of deception to manipulate individuals into revealing information. Investigators posed as users, gained access to the marketplace’s internal operations, and eventually arrested its founder, Ross Ulbricht.
But Hatfield also cautioned that the goal should not necessarily be to take down the dark web itself. While the United States and other democracies continue to debate how to regulate the dark web, authoritarian governments seek to eliminate it entirely. The Chinese government runs the Golden Shield Project, a vast surveillance system that aggressively filters and blocks access to encrypted networks like Tor. However, internet users in China and elsewhere continue to find new methods, such as obfuscated traffic protocols. These protocols disguise dark web activity as normal web browsing, making it harder for surveillance systems to detect and block it.
Hatfield urged the audience to rethink what it means to call something “dark.” The term suggests secrecy and danger, but its meaning depends on context. A news website that is freely available in one country might be labeled a dark site in another simply because a government seeks to suppress it. The dark web is not just a tool for criminals. It is also a battleground for democracy.
He left the audience with an open-ended question: If democracy depends on the free flow of information, how should societies balance the risks and rewards of a system that keeps that flow anonymous? The real challenge is not whether the dark web should exist but how democracies can best engage with it while staying true to their values.