Sadly enough, one of the many beasts that has made manifest and abundant within the deepest layers of the onion that is the Dark Web is that of child pornography. Amanda Haasz notes that, although child molestation websites only comprise about 2% of Tor websites, it has been found that over 80% of Tor browsers come for pedophilia -- making it the "most viewed topic on the Dark Web."
The Dark Web, by nature, encrypts files through their distribution amongst many nodes -- making illegal production and viewing of such videos almost impossible to detect. Mark O'Brien discusses this issue in regards to its effects on law-making and policing online activities. He argues that, in order to for legal systems to stay relevant to today's progress (especially in technology), lawmakers need to drastically alter policies and regulations to fit modern, more advanced levels of crime. Surely, the essence of the Dark Web is for it to be unregulated. That is why, O'Brien suggests, such policing should refocus its efforts to realistically attempt to manage the presumably unmanagable -- such as through partnering with user groups as a form of community surveillance of the domain.
Although the Dark Web is difficult to police, the FBI has been working on developing suveillance methods to compete with anonymous illegal activity. Earlier this year, the FBI implemented a hacking tool NIT (network investigative technique) to seize the bulletin board site "Playpen", one of the largest child pornography (at 215,000 members) sharing and discussion sites on the Dark Web. Journalist Mary-Ann Russon documented for the International Business Times that, with one warrant, the FBI was able to retrieve 1,300 IP addresses to track down individual members of the site. This was a monumental achievement for the FBI, as it stood as the first time that a NIT was successfully able to navigate through the defenses of Tor.