This must have been what President Bush was talking about in the debates with Kerry: the internets....
Wired 13.01: The Shadow Internet:
It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works.In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it.
The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It's a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine.
This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside. An interview subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door."
The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement.
Quite a lot more here
and if I was "Bruce Forest", I would be unhappy with the amount of detail offered up in the article. For instance, isn't this enough to figure out who he is?
Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes. "Though I don't fink anyone out. I'm not a cop."As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite. Thanks to his unparalleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view of the scene. And because he's ostensibly on the right side of the law, he's uncommonly open with information. This makes him an anomaly within the paranoid byways of the media darknet.
Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home. He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista line one wall. A baroque array of computer equipment fills the next, including 13 CPUs and 16 external hard drives (for a total of 3 terabytes of storage). His desk runs the length of the room and supports five full-size LCD displays. I hear a soft ping. "That tells me a movie just made its first appearance on a topsite." He points to a window on the monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FTP site. The uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date.
