Is the deep web real?

[adaviel]

The Silk Road was a Tor onion site that got taken down by the FBI.

There are certainly carder sites where you can buy credit card numbers. I believe you have to hang around on IRC long enough to demonstrate you are a criminal before someone gives you a password.

Per the wikipedia article on the deep web, it would include private sites like the boating association I host - there's a password on the site so it doesn't get crawled by search engines, because the members don't want to get spammed and there's intellectual property that basically the association has created or paid for and don't want to give away for free. Same with academic journals, newspaper archives etc.