The portion of the Internet you reach on your browser barely scratches the surface of the cyber world; and well below it is a network of users who use the net to deal in selling drugs, child pornography, weapons and other illicit activities.

Marion County Attorney Ed Bull says Google has indexed less than one percent of the available websites and IP addresses on the web; around another ten percent are password-protected sites known as the deep web. But many illegal activities he and his attorneys try to track down take place much further out, on what’s known as the dark web.

Bull tells KNIA/KRLS News the nature of the dark web makes it difficult to trace criminals and serve warrants; these users don’t operate off a central server, but instead use peer-to-peer networks which break up information into fragments.

“Individuals who are trading imagery of child exploitation, they realize that one person to one person exposes both of them to potential legal exposure,” Bull says. “The way that the Tor network and other dark web websites are interacting, it is in fact you’re downloading pieces or different bytes of a program from many different people which makes it difficult to know who in fact was the supplier of that information.”

Further complicating things for law enforcement is the use of composite images in child exploitation cases; Bull says by law an image must be traced to an identifiable person, but combined or computer-generated images can hinder prosecution of a case.