These people are much less hardened than I am, so you will here me refer to things with a much more nonchalant manner.
I've spent a good bit of time on the "deep web" and it's really not a big deal. A lot of the information is available for free on the regular web. The information given in the OP may be true, it may not be, but I sincerely doubt it.
There are places where there are assassins for sale, websites like the pedoforum which are solely dedicated to child pornography, sites where they do drug deals, where people pay for people to smuggle them slave children, etc.
The child pornography (CP) forums are a little disturbing. The pedoforum I remember had a thread about a man who had a daughter who was about 3 months old, and he had been doing things like spanking her, spreading open her vaginal lips, and having her suck on the head of his penis. He took pictures of all of these things and posted them, and spoke of how he hoped to raise her as his own personal cum slut, and how he would humiliate her until she would serve him willingly. Him and another member named Predator talked for pages about the abuse that they both wanted to subject this little girl to.
I found and subsequently downloaded and watched a movie called "The Grifter" which is a disgusting snuff film. It's literally watching people get murdered. There was a scene in particular where the main character, the Grifter, came into a room where he had 3 people chained up to the ceiling. He killed the 1st man by taking a knife, and stabbing him directly in the spine 3 times. The man would shake uncontrollably, and release his bowels. The blade was covered in flesh and bone and blood, so the Grifter forced the man to lick the blade clean, before he shoved the blade through the mans skull. That was the most pleasant of the 3 murders.
As I continued through the "deep web" I found out it's mainly just bullshit. People hosting websites with stuff they copied out of the anarchists cook book. The sites are usually one or two pages, and contain little to no information. There's no real insider trading, or actually useful information being traded. It's all just bullshit, for the most part.
Also, despite what people will say, there is no need for a proxy. The only way to access it is to use Tor, which is a proxy in itself. A proxied firefox is just as safe as a firefox using tor. Using both doesn't improve the safety. It's not illegal to access the deep web either, so even if the government did track you down, there would be no point because it's freely available information and none of it is going to get you put away. Unless you download things like child porn.