How Chinese police infiltrated and monitored the dark web with the help of AI tools
Researchers linked to law enforcement collected data and devised tools to help classify sensitive and illegal material
Chinese police scientists have offered a rare insight into how they were able to break into the dark web using artificial intelligence to decode underground content.
In recent years, researchers both in China and abroad have made progress in analysing dark web content, but most of those efforts have concentrated on English-language material and little research has been published about content in Chinese.
But in May, a research team from the Criminal Investigation Police University of China published a paper in the Journal of Chinese Computer Systems about a model specifically trained to translate and assess dark web content in Chinese.
The first challenge was infiltrating dark websites to collect data. The researchers found that login requirements varied widely across platforms, and traditional web crawlers struggled with Captcha verification and the constantly shifting anti-scraping tactics adopted by these sites.
To overcome this, the researchers designed a system to handle different tasks such as logging in, making lists and downloading images.