LAHORE: Following anchorperson Dr Shahid Masood’s claim that the accused, Imran Ali, in Zainab rape and murder case, is an active member of some international racket involved in producing and sharing violent child pornography over dark web, has triggered unprecedented curiosity among the masses to know about the dark web, a parallel network of illegal websites over internet primarily used for immoral trade and activities.
An official of the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) Cyber Crime Cell told a leading daily that recent incidents of child abuse in different parts of the country, especially in district Kasur, and discussions about the existence of dark web was attracting huge public attention. He pointed out that over 1.3 million Pakistanis have searched about the dark web over the internet during past week alone.
Google Trend, a public web service that indicates how often a particular search term is entered in relative to the total search volume across different regions in the world, highlights that the terms like “dark web”, “what is dark web”, “dark websites” and “deep web” were the top search terms in Pakistan during the past week.
Google Trend’s historic data of past five years shows that hardly any Pakistani searched about these terms since 2013 but after Kasur incident and anchorperson’s revelation suddenly curiosity was developed among the masses to know more about dark web.
The search engine’s data shows that the highest number of people searched for similar terms from Balochistan followed by Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Islamabad, Sindh and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT) Principal Dr Mansoor Sarwar said that the dark web is a hidden network of internet websites which exists from early days of the internet.
“It is not a new thing but everywhere in the world people hardly know about this dark side of the internet because it is not available over search engines,” he said. He pointed out that the dark web was all about illegal activities which were punishable under the law everywhere in the world. “Dark web is primarily used for illegal arms and drug trade, child pornography, extremism, terrorism, hacking and other illicit activities. All these illegal activities are generally funded or traded through crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, owing to their anonymous nature.”
This is shocking that so many Pakistanis immediately ran to internet to search for child porn. It tells us about the health of Pak society. And the value system prevalent in the country. I only pray that more Zainabs do not become victim by these dark web trained perverts. Those little girls do need our prayers.
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