If you are interested in secrets or it seems to you that the person involved in your investigation may meet there, go to DDOS.
Another useful resource for journalists is SecureDrop. He helps anonymously transmit information to the editorial offices of major media outlets, such as The New York Times. This service was used by Edward Snowden, for example.
But, of course, first of all, the darknet is not dedicated to state secretaries. 57% of sites are criminal. Drugs, illegal financial services, bitcoins, money cashing and so on.
And 80% of search queries are about child pornography.
This does not mean that only pedophiles enter the darknet. Government agencies or non-profit organizations can automatically search for such content. Europol, for example. Robots take a screenshot of illegal material and try to find criminals by geolocation.
Most likely, such figures were provided by a large forum for the sale of drugs, the Russian Anonymous MarketPlace. Its creators are in prison or wanted. By the way, this is one of the Grails of journalism — to find a person under the pseudonym Darkside, who launched the Russian Anonymous MarketPlace and was not punished. He just closed the website and said he was retiring.
A separate topic is banners in the darknet. What they just don’t offer to buy. A new life, bitcoin mining equipment, flights to Romania, suspiciously cheap iPhones. And the cornerstone is cash!
What’s it? Let’s say you have a company registered for a homeless person, and it gets a crazy public or private contract. You find a company that is ready to fulfill it. And you still have a large amount in the form of a kickback from this company. But it needs to be legalized. And, since Rosfinmonitoring sees all your transactions, everything should look like you are actually buying something. But in fact, the numbers from the bank account are simply transferred to cash.
In the West, by the way, more often the opposite is true. There is a cache from the sale of, for example, drugs, trying to transfer to the account. And this is called legalization.