To catch a spider: Could police use AI to trawl the dark web?

The dark web is a difficult place to police. Comprising millions of websites shrouded in anonymity, it is an online playground for dangerous criminals and political plotters - anyone trying to evade authority or do the wrong thing. But one Australian Federal Police officer hopes to develop an artificially intelligent (AI) "crawler" that could scan the dark web for illegal activity and alert authorities to anything suspicious. If successful, the AI crawler would - for example - make it easier and faster to track down paedophiles, a task that at present is time-consuming and requires investigators to look at thousands of confronting images and material. The officer, Janis Dalins, has been developing the crawler as part of his PhD.