Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2016 19:10:45 -0400
From: Kymberlee McMaster <kymberlee.mcmaster@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Tor Research Safety Board

Please see below for our answers to the questions on the website.

   - What are you trying to learn, and why is that useful for the world?
   That is, what are the hoped-for benefits of your experiment?
   - Team DIRE plans to analyze major events relating to the Dark Internet
      and the substituent community response, the culture of the Dark Internet
      community, and bitcoin's use as a form of currency in Dark Internet
      marketplaces. The communication of a community during and after events can
      provide insight into the culture of the people immersed in that community.
      In order to understand the culture found on Dark Internet marketplaces,
      Team DIRE plans to study the communication among individuals within the
      Dark Internet community during events, such as the shutdown of a popular
      marketplace.
      - Our goal is to answer the following question: How does the
      communities response to major events reflect the underlying culture? We
      hypothesize that, although members of the Dark Internet are anonymous,
      these events will bring the community together and give a representation of
      the Dark Internet's culture that is different from the day to day. It is
      useful for the world to understand the culture of the Dark Internet as it
      expands its reach and is used by more and more people.
   - What exactly is your plan? That is, what are the steps of your
   experiment, what will you collect, how will you keep it safe, and so on.
      - Our plan is twofold. We plan to collect texts form sources such as
      blogs, Reddit, and news websites that all discuss the Dark Internet so we
      can analyze their view of the Dark Internet. We then plan to take this
      analysis and compare it to some events that have occurred involving the
      Dark net to see if their view or user reactions change during those times
      of crisis. All texts being used are public information available to anyone
      with access to the Internet. Each text is coded so that we only use the
      coded values in our analysis of those texts. We also plan to purchase items
      from both Dark net and traditional Internet marketplaces and compare the
      experiences involved with both and the quality of the products received in
      relation to the price of the product.
   - What attacks or risks might be introduced or assisted because of your
   actions or your data sets, and how well do you resolve each of them? Use
   the "safety guidelines" above to help in the brainstorming and analysis.
   - Our data sets will be limited to the coding of the articles that we
      read that have been published for public view on the Internet and Dark
      Internet as well as the products that we receive from the purchasing we are
      going through. Due to the nature of our project and the fact that we are
      only looking to compare the views and products of the marketplaces on the
      Dark and traditional Internet, there will be no attacks or risks to Tor due
      to our actions and data sets.
   - Walk us through why the benefits from item 1 outweigh the remaining
   risks from item 3: why is this plan worthwhile despite the remaining risks
   - Since we believe there are no risks associated with the conduction of
      this study, the benefits of learning about the differences in the way Dark
      and traditional Internet marketplaces behave and are viewed can only
      provide valuable insight into their cultures.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need further information on
the above information. We tried to keep it short but also descriptive
enough that you would understand what we were trying to do without bogging
you down with the exact things we are coding in our textual analysis.

Additionally, my team will need to present our thesis next semester to a
panel of experts, and we were wondering if you would be interested in
serving as a member of the panel.

Thank you for all of your help with our team!

-Kym