By Dolores Haze

Numerous Wikipedia articles about the Dark Web, and various sites and entities operating within it, contain links to forums and websites supporting activities that would generally be described as criminal — selling drugs, hacking secure networks, stealing credit card numbers, and so forth. Sometimes, links to fake websites are added by the criminals themselves as part of their efforts to ensnare people (many of whom are also criminals) into parting with personal or financial details. Many have reported being scammed this way, with Wikipedia acting as an otherwise innocent-looking gateway into the scams and frauds of the Dark Web.

There are no background checks on editors in this (or any other) topic area, so any thief, drug dealer, or pedophile could be editing articles about the Dark Web with impunity. Recently we noticed that someone tried to draw attention to the problem on Jimmy Wales’ talk page, providing numerous examples. Unfortunately, the responses from Wikipedians were not very helpful. One claimed the person was “promoting censorship,” though all he was actually doing was expressing his disapproval of Wikipedia linking to criminal websites. Another even argued that linking to websites that sell and trade child pornography would be “fine,” as long as the sites don’t host any of the child-porn images themselves! The sheer repulsiveness of this stance should be obvious; even sites that specialize in hardcore pornography don’t intentionally carry such links. Hopefully — hopefully — the person in question isn’t typical of most Wikipedians, and we can safely shift our focus to… someone else.

Meet the editors: Deku-shrub

At least one convicted child-porn possessor that we know about has been editing in this topic area. User:Deku-shrub has created and helped develop many Wikipedia articles about Dark Web websites, forums, and key personalities. His user page (the name is a slightly-altered Legend of Zelda reference) links to his blog, “pirate.london”, which identifies him as Chris Monteiro, the subject of this informative WIRED article and this equally informative Harper’s article about his efforts to take down a fake-hitman scam on the Dark Web. According to his website, Mr. Monteiro is a cybercrime and Deep/Dark Web researcher, as well as a transhumanist. (For more information about transhumanism, you could have a look at the Wikipedia article about it, though it almost reads like an advertisement, and yes, User:Deku-shrub occasionally edits it.)

These days, Monteiro is most active on the Transhumanist wiki H+pedia, where he appears to be the main contributor. His blog indicates a strong concern about people using the term “Dark Web” when they really should be using “Deep Web,” and vice-versa. And to be fair, not every website that can only be accessed via Tor nodes is doing something illegal, or even unethical. To Monteiro, it’s important to ensure that people don’t get the wrong idea about the Deep Web; these so-called “Assassination markets” might theoretically exist somewhere, but they certainly don’t exist there.

The articles on WIRED and Harper’s missed an important detail: Chris Monteiro is a registered sex offender because police found 58 images of child pornography on one of his computers, presumably when they searched them in 2017. Monteiro later admitted to making the images, but that didn’t stop him from editing Wikipedia articles about child porn and the Deep/Dark Web: Before his conviction, he created articles about police operations on the Dark Web against child pornography, such as Operation Torpedo, and after his conviction he continued to edit related articles such as the one about Freedom Hosting — a company that specialized (and by some accounts, still specializes) in hosting Dark Web sites, and whose founder-owner was described by the FBI as “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” And while merely adding bracket characters to the name of Freedom Hosting’s successor site in order to make it a “redlink” might seem innocuous… is it? Redlinks encourage the addition of new articles; does Wikipedia really need a new and separate article about “Freedom Hosting II,” and if so, why?

As they say on Facebook, “it’s complicated”

It’s fair to conclude that as a Wikipedia user, Chris Monteiro presents the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia admins with a real conundrum. They could take the position that Monteiro’s child-porn conviction was bogus, because… who knows, maybe he needed the images as part of his anti-scammer activities, and besides, lots of otherwise-innocent people who frequent dark-web sites could conceivably have child porn on their computers without even knowing it. Certainly his efforts to expose fake-hitman scams seem commendable, and may have even saved lives. But even if his intentions there are completely pure, haven’t they also had the effect of helping real dark-web murder-for-hire operations, if in fact they exist, simply by reducing competition and making potential murder-customers feel more confident that they won’t get ripped off? Or should Wikipedians simply take Monteiro’s word for it that these sites don’t exist?

And even if we put that whole question aside, are Monteiro’s activities on Wikipedia really meant to simply inform readers about the Deep/Dark Web, or are they actually meant to promote it? We know he wants to promote transhumanism, which often involves unusual, extreme, or even illegal body modification procedures that aren’t sanctioned by official medical authorities. And it’s well-known that people who perform those procedures often use the Deep/Dark Web to promote their services.

Still, if Wikipedia admins are serious about child protection, there’s at least a chance that once they’ve seen this blog entry, they won’t treat these as mitigating factors (after all, they’re not really supposed to), and User:Deku-shrub will be blocked. It’s also possible that he’ll be banned by the Wikimedia Foundation soon afterwards. And while we don’t necessarily mind writing these blog entries, we can at least say that informing the WMF directly about such individuals has generally been a waste of time. In the past they’ve taken months to ban editors whose conduct raises serious concerns in this regard, and they’ve also completely ignored another editor profiled here.

Of course, if that’s how they want to run their website, it’s their website to run. We just think you should know about things like this before you donate your time and money to it.