{"id":722,"date":"2018-12-12T08:09:19","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T08:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/?p=722"},"modified":"2023-06-12T09:04:53","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T09:04:53","slug":"can-technology-enable-a-perfect-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/2018\/12\/12\/can-technology-enable-a-perfect-murder\/","title":{"rendered":"CAN TECHNOLOGY ENABLE A PERFECT MURDER?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is a perfect murder possible ? I am yet to come across an Agatha Christie novel to date, where the murderer is sipping wine in a countryside villa, laughing to himself over the murder he got away with. Though most of Christie\u2019s crimes seem unsolvable, but Poirot or Miss Marple always solves the murder in the end. That has been the case with all the mystery novels written so far, in most of them the murderer is invariably nabbed.
\nIn real life too, as a police officer for over two decades, I have found perfect murders to be an occasional phenomenon .It\u2019s been my experience that about 90 to 95 per cent of the reported murder cases invariably are detected, while the few residual cases which go unsolved are mostly because of investigative lapses.
\nA perfect murder is one, where a person can be murdered with a zero percent chance of being detected by the police. Today, this may seem possible if one knows how to look and where to look. If one took the trouble of browsing an unfamiliar part of the internet and accessed sites like \u2018Quick kill\u2019, \u2018Cthulhu\u2019 and the likes of which advertise variety of services including murder, bombing, crippling, and maiming, it appears that one would be able to hire an assassin to execute a perfect murder from the comfort of one\u2019s living room in a safe manner. A dozen sites similar to the \u2018Quick Kill\u2019 exist beyond the more familiar world of Google, Hotmail and Yahoo on the other side of the internet, known as the \u201cDark Net\u201d.
\nThe Dark Net, also called the Dark Web, is an extensive digital underworld where hackers, gangsters, terrorists and paedophiles come to bid their wares and trades. It\u2019s a world which is uncensored, unregulated, and outside of society\u2019s norms. The Dark Net like the back streets and black market bazaars of any metro, is a place where criminals link up to\u00a0 conduct their illegal activities. It is dark because we seldom see it: it has a penchant to be enshrouded, obscure or camouflaged.<\/p>\n

\"\"Incredibly, the Deep Web is a mammoth five hundred times bigger than the worldwide web we use every day. While the google contains a scanty nineteen terabytes of information the dark net contains a humongous seventy-five hundred terabytes. A study published in Nature reveals that, Google picks up no more than 16 percent of the surface Web and loses out on all of the Deep Web. As a consequence, when we search Google, we are only seeing 0.03 percent (one in three thousand pages) of the information that actually exists and would be available online if you knew how to get it. In other words, a Google search misses 99 percent of the Worldwide Web’s data. Searching the Web today is akin to only fishing across the top two feet of the world’s vast Oceans. Though you may catch something in your net, you are missing the enormous largesse.<\/p>\n

The dark net came about in the mid 1990s, when the US Naval Research Laboratory project, created a technology that allowed intelligence operatives to help overseas political dissidents and democracy activists safely organize and communicate with one another anonymously. They called it ‘Tor’, which stands for ‘The Onion Router’. As part of their strategy for secrecy, they released Tor into the public domain for anybody whatsoever to use. Their reasoning simply being that, bigger the number of people using the system, the harder it would be to separate the government’s own messages from the general cacophony.<\/p>\n

\"\"Tor affords total anonymity to its users by repeatedly encrypting and routing it via several ‘onion routers’, and up to 5000 computer servers to conceal the origin, destination and content of the activity. Users of Tor are untraceable, as are the websites, forums and blogs that exist as Tor Hidden Services, which use the same traffic encryption system to conceal their location. Tor is also increasingly being used by journalists to securely communicate with sources and whistle-blowers, such as those within the Wikileaks community.<\/p>\n

Although most people have never seen or used it, the Tor software is freely available for download via the Tor Web site www.torproject.org<\/a>. It can be set up in just a few minutes and running the program surreptitiously transports the users well off the well-trodden path of the mainstream internet we inhabit. Though Tor is the largest and most popular gateway to the Dark Net, it has competitors, including Freenet and 12P (the Invisible Internet Project).<\/p>\n

As of early 2014, the Tor software had been downloaded nearly 150 million times and used by two million people daily. If the orthodox figure of 50 percent illegal use is presumed, it means every day 300,000 criminals are waking up and reporting for work on the darknet using Tor’s hidden services. A 2013 study of forty thousand hidden Tor sites found that nearly 50 percent were involved in illicit activities such as selling stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, weapons, drugs, and child pornography.<\/p>\n

Darknets first search engine patterned after Google and called \u2018Grams\u2019 was developed by a creative hacker in mid-2014. It\u2019s now possible to comb for contrabands by entering keywords and search concurrently across eight different dark markets for goods and services. The search engine returns a vendor\u2019s name and allows for comparison shopping. Like Google, it also has an \u201cI’m Feeling Lucky\u201d button. Although, Grams can only be got in via the Tor anonymizing browser using an .onion address.<\/p>\n

Perfect murders and assassinations are just a click away on, the Darknet. Service providers such as, the Assassination Market, Quick Kill, Killer for Hire, Contract Killer, and Cthulhu all advertise “permanent solutions to common problems.” One of the strangest features of the entire ecosystem of Deep Web murder-for-hire sites is in the way that many of them employ marketing techniques just like the sites selling legal products. For example, Cthulhu advertises itself with a caption: \u201cThe best place to put your problems is in a grave!\u201d
\nSome of the hitman offering these services also proudly boast of their sniper capabilities honed in Iraq or Afghanistan or their training with militaries such as the French Foreign Legion. Each service has different rules and regulations. One has a strict “no minors policy and refuses to murder children under eighteen, while another wavers when it comes to political assassinations.
\nHitman Network, which claims to be a trio of contract killers working in the United States, Canada, and the European Union, offers people a commission for referring their friends. \u201cTell others about this shop, and earn 1% from every purchase they will make,\u201d reads a message on the site.<\/p>\n

There are some sites dedicated to killing government officials, such as the crowdsourced Assassination Market. Prices range from a low of $20,000 to more than $100,000 to kill a police officer. The murder for hire sites, to execute the task would request you for a recent photo of the target, as well as the address, daily routines, and frequent hangouts. Payments would be acceptable only in bitcoins and after the job is executed photographic proof of murder would be provided by the service providers.<\/p>\n

James Dalton Bell, an American crypto-anarchist created the idea of arranging for anonymously sponsored assassination payments via the Internet, which he called \u201cassassination politics\u201d. He argued an ever-present threat of assassination could encourage accountability among politicians, bureaucrats and police officers.
\nIn the early days of Tor, a person with the nom de plume Kuwabatake Sanjuro created a site called, \u2018Assassination Market’ where users can pay Bitcoins to a wallet address supporting an individual they would like killed. A prospective assassin can place a ‘prediction’ into the wallet, along with their own address should they attempt to claim the reward.
\nRecently, on the Augur marketplace, open bets were found on the deaths of a number of public figures, including Betty White, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett. The one predicting Donald Trump\u2019s death this year, had dozens of trades.<\/p>\n

A crowd-sourced and untraceable perfect murder would unfold as follows. First, the assassin would send his forecast in an encoded message that can be opened only by a digital code known to the person who sent it. After the assassin executes the assassination he will send the organisation that code, which would unlatch his prediction.
\nOnce the assassination is confirmed from the news media , the prize money in the form of a digital currency donated would be publicly posted online as an encrypted file, which can be unlocked only by a ‘key’ generated by the assassin who made the prediction. Without anyone knowing the identity of anyone else, the organisation would be able to verify the prediction and award the prize to the person who delivered the hit.
\nEven if the police discovered who’d been contributing to the cash prizes of people on the list, the donors could truthfully respond that they had never directly asked for anyone to be killed. The organisation that ran the market wouldn\u2019t be able to help either, because they wouldn’t know who had donated, who had made predictions or who had unlocked the cash file. It would therefore become a perfect assassination or a perfect murder in the end.<\/p>\n

In reality, there may be a few actual hit men who advertise on various dark web markets. Most of the assassination services on the dark web seem to be scams. A good example of this being the now-defunct site called Besa Mafia, which claimed to offer assassination, torture, and beatings for bit coins. This site has been exposed by several people to be an elaborate scam.
\nAs a final touch, the human mind is like a personal computer, we can plug in our computer to the internet either to access the surface web or the darknet. The movie \u201cDark Net\u201d made in 2015 narrates the story of a young man’s descent into self-destructive madness through the power he harnesses on the deep web. We similarly have the choice to log into the internet either to learn, improve ourselves and enhance our spirituality by harnessing it to connect to the higher mind\/cosmic intelligence or spiral downwards like the young man in the film into negativity and self-destruction.<\/p>\n

Source from:<\/strong> epaper\/deccanchronicle\/chennai\/dt:10.12.2018<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, DVAC.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is a perfect murder possible ? I am yet to come across an Agatha Christie novel to date, where the murderer is sipping wine in a countryside villa, laughing to himself over the murder he got away with. Though most of Christie\u2019s crimes seem unsolvable, but Poirot or Miss Marple always solves the murder in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3273,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/3273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jayanthmurali.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}