Dark Web Demon Hunters

I've just watched an incredibly heavy BBC documentary, Don't Look Away, about an international group of dedicated undercover officers infiltrating child sex trafficking and abuse networks on the Dark Web.

Fun fact I didn't know: Dark Web was created by the US Department of Defense in the 1990s, in parallel to the Internet, so that their spies and operatives could communicate instantly in secrecy, without the fear of being traced. In 2004, it went public and immediately became a safe dwelling space for criminals, including drug cartels, illegal weapons traders, pedophiles and sex traffickers. Dark money lives there too, mostly in the form of crypto. So, like so many other things, Dark Web is another invention of the military industrial complex that at some point went commercial and acquired a new meaning and new modes of use (satellite technology and high-definition resolution in photography are two other well-known examples).

Because IP addresses don't work on the Dark Web, officers who try to catch criminals there go undercover, pretend to be a part of the networks and get into their conversations and their heads. They also have to see thousands of photographs and videos of sexually abused and trafficked kids that are floating out there. That is an incredibly heavy burden.

The main protagonist of the documentary, US DHS officer Squire, at some point spent so much time with his "friends" on the Dark Web, up to 12-16 hours a day, that he developed an alcohol addiction (to numb himself, to forget what he saw, as he admitted) and divorced his wife because his work was negatively affecting his personal life. But his dedication and determination to exposing and stopping pedophiles' networks all over the world is admirable.

The entire documentary is fascinating and disturbing. It gives you a glimpse into the operatives' work and how they find the criminals in real world by analyzing the clues on the Dark Web. I've learned a lot from it and was struck by the fact that the Dark Web kiddie porn criminals are now getting younger and are mostly specialists in IT and digital security. Not all of them are necessarily pedophiles themselves, but they trade pictures and videos to pedophile networks, helping them grow and flourish that way.

It gave me some peace of mind to know that this group of people fighting them on the Dark Web exists, even though there's only about 30 dedicated units for this all over the world, for millions of Dark Pedophilia Web users.

Their work reminded me of the work FBI is doing in investigating "764" - an exploitation and abuse network of teenagers who recruited vulnerable teens on Discord and gaming platforms for the rituals of self-harm, public humiliation and other forms of exploitation for social media views. I attended a panel at the 2025 Eradicate Hate conference in Pittsburgh where these officers told us about their work and investigation practices and couldn't stop thinking about how screwed up our world is, where teenagers can cause so much harm to other teenagers and kids.

Anyway, going back to Don't Look Away: one of the unexpected developments of these officers' work was mentioned at the very end. The documentary was released on Feb.16, 2026, i.e. almost a month ago. In February 2025, a year ago, one of the investigators featured in the documentary, Russian criminal intelligence officer Ivan Semenikhin who helped catch a child kidnapper in 2020, was arrested in Russia on the state treason charges. No one knows what happened to him since then, his trace is completely lost. After the war with Ukraine started, there are no human rights organizations in Russia left that can even inquire into his fate.

I guess it's the new price some citizens of Russia have to pay now for cooperation with "foreign agents," even for noble causes like stopping pedophiles and disabling their global networks.

Here's the full documentary: