In June 1985, when widespread communication between computers was first being born, The Washigton Post was stamped with a T.R Reid headline that was, at least, symbolic for the new times that computer communication was about to enter. The title of the article was “Computers Becoming Nation’s Bulletin Board”, and the journalist announced America, by it, that a less regulated, cheaper and more accessible medium of communication was on the air: The Bulletin Board System (BBS).

As computer communications left Universities to reach the houses of anyone who had enough money to afford a modem, criminality grew. Four years later, back in 1989, the U.S Department of Justice was launched a Guide for Dedicated Computer Crime Unities, where the use of BBSs to spread information appeared, and, also, when we were talking about criminal information.

The first computer crime case was, as everything indicated, a BBS one, handled in the U.S.A for by (only) two investigators: A user that left a message about another Bulletin Board which was disseminating access codes to a local company that offered information network services. The message also had instructions on how to access the board, including the passwords to the system. Does it seem familiar to anyone? Things haven’t changed a lot since 1989.

But, for most of the ones reading this text, Bulletin Boards are a weird word. They are like Internet dinossaurs. But, exactly because they are dinnousaurs, studying them remains as a field of interest. They share us light in a time, out from the mainstream Dark Web problem, where things have started to emmerge and where investigations where being done, as they still are, in the Open Source way of everything… when things have gone dark.

What happened to the BBBs? Writing to IEEE (I triple E) – an Academic Journal that everyone interested in the newcomes of computer research knows – in its Spectrum section, Kevin Discroll (2016) points out that BBS haven’t simply disappeared, but thousands of them rather “quietly metamorphosed into Internet Service Providers, or ISPs.” Some of them, he claims, “attempted to move, wholesale, to Usenet or the World Wide Web, while others simply pulled the plug and turned off the lights.” David Cassel’s, commenting Discroll’s texts, sets the hypothesis is that “Maybe, like old soldiers, BBSs never really died; they just faded into something else”. For me, BBS are the backbone of the Dark Web.

But what was BBBs after all? Bulletin Boards Systems (BBS) were part of 1980 and 1990 landscape, when people were allowed to be part of, for the first time in history, an Internet Community with anyone of their local area that came to be connected to a modem. At that time, things worked through telephone lines.

Already from its beginning, BBSs mechanic point us out something that tends to be forgotten when we talk about the Darknet: Communities were born locally. An argument that convinces me little when we talk about Dark Web nowadays is that “Dark Web communities are born from spontaneous generations”. We tend to believe that criminals “found things on the Internet”, but we decline to analyse the hyphotesis that someone had pointed them that out, and out of the eyes of Trust & Safety Teams or either Community Moderators.

Have you ever thought about what is going on with posts that nobody answers? At least, not publicly.

As Kevin Discroll mentioned about the BBSs, “Online disagreements — flame wars — could be kept in check as well, because the cost of being a jerk escalated with the likelihood of later seeing your interlocutor face to face.”. Do we still really believe that Dark Web club members do not know anything about the others for the simple fact that they are identified through nicknames? I do not.

Like the Internet forums we know today, BBBs were places where you did not need to be there in real time: Posts stayed there, waiting for you to connect to your modem and read it. Replies were, in the first BBBs (even though private ones appeared latter on) done in the “Reply to all” mode of things. We start, already here, to think about a little bit deeper about the Forum’s rationality.

In a 2016 text, the computer and video-game history journalist Benj Edwards wrote The Atlantic in another symbolic headline -“The lost civilization of dial up Bulletin Boards-” what using a BBS looked like:

“Dialing into a BBS felt like whole-body teleportation. It was the intimacy of direct, computer-to-computer connection that did it. To call a BBS was to visit the private residence of a fellow computer fan electronically. BBS hosts had converted a PC—often their only PC—into a digital playground for strangers’ amusement. [….] Although every BBS displayed walls of text—menus, options, and prompts—those characters somehow translated, in my brain, into a casual walk through a cozy living room or a stroll in a grassy yard.”.

Does it gives us, at least, a more clear view on how forum socialization works? Yes, it does.

Having entered, years later, an old BBS he used to visit previously, he reveals how much does it looks like a ghost town – pretty much like a closed criminal forum, where panic messages are still to be seen when they realize a Police Operation have just started. “The message threads [in old BBSs] are incomplete, with discussions left hanging.”, Edwards (2016) says. As I plan to mention somewhere else, journalists and law-enforcement people work this criminal scenario together and, contrary to what some say, in the very same side.

Very like Dark Web criminals forums today, “BBS’s felt like a place where “system operators (sysops) that ran each BBS were always watching. […] It was a gentle, pleasant form of surveillance.”. The self-moderated chats were born with BBSs. This “sense of surveillance” that the author is refering to is but not meant as a sense of legal surveillance, but a sense of community surveillance.

In fact, criminals forums and BBS are places where messages there are or were public to everyone. Isn’t it but the same feature that survives, also today, as the moderation backbone of criminal forums? Criminality, as we will see later on, emerged in BBS despite this sense of “surveillance”.

We will arive to that point, but something that I already wanted to make you think about is, supposing you are an criminal forum investigator, who you go after: Who is asking the question or who is answering it? How do you solve that… if ever nobody comes to (publicly) answer it.

BBS rules are pretty similar to the Dark Web’s forums one. Capslock Warnings like “USERS WITH FAKE NAMES WILL BE BANNED FOREVER” survive 4 decades after they appeared on BBS. The “Attempts to tamper, damage, or defraud this system are against Oregon and Federal laws and will be reported immediately to authorities.” warnings, as mentioned in the The Atlantic article, have changed only in name: They are called now Terms of Use.

Even though the prohibition of fake nicknames have died to turn nicknames into criminal forum’s rule, the “Follow-the-rules-or” still exist in forums dashboards of all kinds. The only difference is that criminals are moving problematic members out through their administrators, and not reporting it to the police anymore. Whisteblowers there are, as such, a issue still for law enforcement people to solve.

As in BBS, where things where so thematic as Orkut’s or Facebook communities, Dark Web is also highly segmented. The difference is that is it not a matter of clubism anymore, but a matter of security for criminals. Researchers must be careful to not poison their conclusions here saying that traditional “upload per view” mechanics have simply turned into “commercial ones”.

The anonymous author from the TwoBitHistory (2020) tells us how, from a post in Reedit, a place that remains still crowded of computer hobbits like the ones that used to access BBSs first versions, he could find the route to the Dark Web ancestral days. Is it not the same route that criminals take to the DarkWeb? And in fact, with archaic pages with poor graphical features, BBSs remember very much some pages that Dark Web hosts today. Some minutes after posting about his interest in seeing a BBS, the author of TwoBitHistory got a response: “If you want to see it, I’ll take you there, But I’ll warn you just once—it’s not pretty to see.”

Maybe, through Open Forums, just like our anonymous author did, is exactly how more underground communities emerge, invitation only models, in Dark Web nowadays. Is it not familiar that, when asked about the BBSs, the Reedit user does not show the hows on the public forum, but rather gives our author and all the readers a sign that he has the information he was looking for? Watch out, because this matter a lot when the question is “what should we look for here”.

True, when TOR (Dark Web entrance point) was born, it had not, except from the communication feature, nothing to do with the BBSs. TOR was born with the militaries, and BBSs were trying to connect computer nerds together. But still, BBSs were using from a Telnet protocol that was, at the end of the day, also a military protocol. To access BBBs, you need, as Dark Web, to install a special software. Similiarities start to appear.

In BBBs, there were no search engines, so, if you want to reach a specific BBS, you need to know where it is located. Dark Web first days looked but, exactly like that (even though onion sites have today, at their disposal, some “search engines”, if we could name it so, that helps navigation there).

BBBs varied from innocent discussion topics to criminals one, just like Dark Web today does. Communities grew in BBs for a huge variety of purposes: For playing games, discussing about something, reading news or even transferring files: everything using just telephone lines. Like today’s Internet forums, BBSs were often accessible for free.

The purpose with similiarities is seeing where Insights, Mechanics and Intelligence remains as applicable: How where BBSs investigated?

Question for you… to think about it.

 Bibliography:

Ackermann, Kevin. 2020. The Old Puppet Masters: Content Moderation on Computer Bulletin Board Systems. Master Thesis for the degree of Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture and Technology at the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University

Cassel, David. (2016). Bulletin Board Systems: Social Media Before the Internet. The News stack. Accessed in: 30 May 2021. Available at: https://thenewstack.io/bulletin-board-systems-social-media-internet/.

Dedicated Computer Crime Units. National Institute of Justice. August 3rd, 1989.

Discroll, Kevin (2016). Social Media’s Dial-Up Ancestor: The Bulletin Board System. IEEE Spectrum. Accessed in: 30 May 2021. Available at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system

Edwards, Benj. (2016). The Lost Civilization of Dial Up Bulletin Board Systems. The Atlantic. Accessed in: 30th May 2021. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-lost-civilization-of-dial-up-bulletin-board-systems/506465/

Reids, T. R (1985). Computers Becoming nations Bulletin Boards. The Washington Post. Accessed in: 30th May 2021. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/07/19/computers-becoming-nations-bulletin-board/0958cdce-9e09-4e65-be25-be6465cf4af1/

TwoBitHistory (2020). Bulletin Boards Systems: The Vice Exposé. Acessed at: 30th May 2021. Available at:https://twobithistory.org/2020/02/02/bbs.html