The ‘Darknet’ is in the limelight. Over recent months, reports of drug conglomerates pedophile rings and terrorist organizations have set pulses racing as investigative journalists have started dipping their toes into the network. Clue narratives like: ‘Five things that are terrifying EVERYONE can purchase in the prohibited markets of the Darknet’. Now, a briefing has been released by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

The note, entitled ‘The Darknet and On-Line Anonymity’, centers on Tor. Tor is an easy-to-use web browser which makes tracking a user’s online activities a lot harder. It’s created to stop large corporations and government agencies learning your identity, your place along with your browsing habits. In addition to browsing the ‘open web’ anonymously, additionally, it enables users to access ‘Tor Hidden Services’, more often called the Darknet.

Tor is bringing more and more users, for a multitude of different motives. There are offenders, obviously, looking to purchase, sell or share services and prohibited goods. The most high profile of these was the Silk Road – an on-line drugs marketplace – taken down again by the CIA in February (it was initially taken down in October 2013). There are activists and journalists looking to communicate securely as authorities look to prosecute them, for example during the Arab Springtime in Egypt. There are those citizens looking to avoid censorship in countries where internet content is curbed: it avoids ‘The Great Firewall of China’, as an example. Eventually, there are average citizens who’d favor their viewing habits who’d favor their private information to stay, well, private and not to be ordered by algorithm.

The sounds coming from Westminster lately on the topic of online anonymity and tracking web communications information have been combined. Generally, the Home Office and other have seemed like they are on the strike. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Cameron made it clear that ‘modern sorts of communicating’ can’t be enabled to ‘be exempt from being listened to’. Boris Johnson is not ‘especially curious in this civil liberties things when it comes to cellular telephone conversations and people’s e-mails’. The ‘snooper’s charter’ seems to live a ghoulish, necromantic half life, never lurking way from the topsoil.

This note, released by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, is a step change, both when it comes to political orientation and practice. Recent public calls for greater surveillance by bodies including the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament have not tended to offer practical suggestions for how goals might be put into practice. Malcolm Rifkind criticized Facebook for not alerting MI5 to a message sent by one of Lee Rigby’s killers with no real appreciation of how hard the task of identifying one of the fifty billion messages sent across Facebook’s systems (which now contains WhatsApp) would actually be.

The note, for a change, acknowledges the challenge that is technical suppressing or observation Tor. In addition, it presents a sceptical evaluation of how much communication or prohibited content actually occurs on the network. It reasons that ‘prohibiting on-line anonymity systems completely isn’t viewed in the UK’ as an appropriate policy choice.

More significantly, but the piece implies that if such actions were not impossible, it may not be recommended. In so doing, it presents a side to the debate that’s seldom expressed in Westminster: a defence of internet anonymity.

The power to be anonymous online has all manner of advantages – for all people. As my co-worker Jamie Bartlett puts it, ‘Syrian democrats actually do create untraceable and secret chat rooms to coordinate action. Russian dissidents truly do should circumnavigate state censorship of the internet. Homosexual people within the Middle East actually do use browsers that are anonymous to evade the barbarous enforcers of state morality’.

They use the same technology – and there isn’t any way of getting around that. Forget for a minute the glamor and terror of freedom fighters and terrorists, as the capability to go online without being followed, tracked, monitored and observed at each turn brings a number of advantages to us dullards also.

It means we can talk our mind without anxiety about judgement: the Federalist Papers – essential files for the American Revolution – were authored. It permits US to address and lift sensitive information without giving away too much about ourselves. It means we can browse the web without fear of hackers. That is not to say there are not issues. As Bartlett has recently claimed in a fresh ebook ‘Orwell Versus the Terrorists’, terrorists and paedophiles are using on-line anonymity to evade detection. However, the response, he implies, isn’t to remove everyone’s skill to remain online that is concealed: it is to develop new methods that are targeted to get at the bad guys. Some great benefits of the type of liberty are huge – it is what propels along society. The price is the fact that it will be misused by some people. Otherwise called life in a liberal democracy.