There's a shadowy corner of the Internet where real names give way to aliases, and ".com" is conspicuously scarce. In this space, privacy and anonymity are dogma, and government-imposed laws draw scoffs more than reverence.
The "deep web," as it's known, is where users ranging from do-gooders to cybercriminals employ cutting-edge technology to mask their identities and interact with others around the globe. As you might expect, not many camera crews are allowed meaningful inside access to this world. Despite these challenges, director and producer Alex Winter said he is shooting interviews for a feature-length documentary he plans to call Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and Silk Road.
See also: Exclusive: Inside the World of a Silk Road Drug Dealer
"The film is about linking all of these people who exist unseen on the web, who are connected technologically and philosophically ," Winter told Mashable. "The movie is about, essentially, the cultural implications of having a massive global community online that's doing good things, bad things and things in between, that's out of reach of the law and is not public."
Winter is perhaps best known for his leading role alongside Keanu Reeves in the 1989 cult classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and 1991 sequel Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. More recently, Winter directed Downloaded, a documentary on Napster and the advent of digital file sharing, which debuted in March at South by Southwest.
For the deep web film, Winter is teaming up with co-producer Glen Zipper, whose 2011 feature Undefeated won an Academy Award for best documentary.
The film, as with most any documentary, will likely hinge on the quality of the sources. Winter said it was too early in the process to tip his hand on who it will feature, but he called them the "core players."
"We're talking to everyone," Winter said. "I have pretty deep access in the technology world, the hacking world, the encryption/cryptography world, the black market world and in the political front end."
Winter became interested in this topic in 2009 with the release of Bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency many on the deep web use in financial transactions. Bitcoin has become increasingly valuable since its release, and it's currently trading at all-time highs. As advocates for the currency try to push it into the mainstream, Congress is trying to figure out how to handle the challenges Bitcoin presents from a legal perspective. Though it's not foolproof, Bitcoin allows for relative anonymity.
The film will likely feature another trademark dark web software called Tor, which stands for "the onion router." It allows for anonymous web browsing by bouncing your computer's identifier information through layers of volunteer nodes around the world before ultimately connecting to a website. Instead of ".com" or ".org," deep websites accessed through Tor use ".onion" in their web addresses.
At their best, deep web users have created a safe space to facilitate free expression and political dissent for those under oppressive governments. On the other end of the spectrum, the deep web harbors child pornography, a crowdsourcing site for assassinations and other criminal enterprises.
"The film is in depth across the board in those areas, so I am getting into all those areas," Winter said.
Silk Road is perhaps the most famous deep web black market to date. After a two-and-a-half year run during which Silk Road facilitated more than $1 billion in sales, the FBI seized what it called "the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet" and arrested its alleged owner on Oct. 1.
About a month later, a new Silk Road launched, made to look exactly like the original. Though Silk Road is in the title of Winter's documentary, he stressed that the film is not solely about Silk Road.
Indeed, there are many other online black markets on the deep web, but Silk Road has become emblematic because of its size and the significant attention it has received since the FBI takedown and subsequent re-launch.
"I don't think that anyone knows anything at all about the Silk Road of any significance at this stage of the game," Winter said. "The story is evolving rapidly, and I don't think anyone has a firm grip on where it's going because it's too early."
Winter and his team launched a crowdfunding effort on Kickstarter for the film Wednesday, though not out of financial necessity. He said the goal of the campaign is to build a strong community of people to be invested and involved throughout the filmmaking process. This is meant to mirror what will be one of the deep web film's main themes: when a community of individually invested people work together on something, particularly on the Internet, it can quickly become an unwieldy force.
"The whole notion of Internet is about community first and foremost ," Winter said.
The film's Kickstarter goal is set for $75,000 in 30 days, but Winter said he will make the documentary whether or not the crowdfunding campaign is successful. Though don't expect the product anytime soon; Winter has yet to set a targeted release date.
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Image: Mashable composite. iStock, evryka23, pialhovik, Flickr/TechCrunch