Assessing police topological efficiency in a major sting operation on the dark web

TLDR

Criminal activity on the dark web is poorly understood due to limited data, and studies on the topological effectiveness of police interventions are even rarer. The authors aim to build a topic‑view network from 2014‑2016 Brazilian Federal Police raids on a child‑pornography ring and compare network‑disruption strategies with the actual police actions. They constructed a topic‑view network from the raid data and evaluated various network‑disruption strategies against the real police interventions. The analysis revealed that only 7.4 % of forum users shared relevant content, that 60 % of core users would need to be targeted to break connectivity, yet arrests—though resembling random failure—effectively disrupted the viewership network because a small group of users produced most posts and were largely apprehended, indicating that targeting high‑view users is more efficient than targeting overall connectivity.

Abstract

Abstract The networked nature of criminals using the dark web is poorly understood and infrequently studied, mostly due to a lack of data. Rarer still are studies on the topological effectiveness of police interventions. Between 2014 and 2016, the Brazilian Federal Police raided a child pornography ring acting inside the dark web. With these data, we build a topic-view network and compare network disruption strategies with the real police work. Only 7.4% of the forum users share relevant content, and the topological features of this core differ markedly from other clandestine networks. Approximately 60% of the core users need to be targeted to fully break the network connectivity, while the real effect of the arrests was similar to random failure. Despite this topological robustness, the overall “viewership network” was still well disrupted by the arrests, because only 10 users contributed to almost 1/3 of the total post views and 8 of these were apprehended. Moreover, the users who were arrested provided a total of 60% of the viewed content. These results indicate that for similar online systems, aiming at the users that concentrate the views may lead to more efficient police interventions than focusing on the overall connectivity.