[Ken Regis]

I have some IT experience but not even enough to barely understand MOST of this article.

I’d like to.

It seems important- especially the “scooping up traffic” line.

I wish I understood it but I have a gnawing sense that it would be too frightening.

[familyop]

The author was being a little overly dramatic by using the word, scooped. Defense was probably only doing what any well educated sysadmin could do: analyzing traffic that came to routers. Look up Wireshark (analyzes packets). Nothing frightening. Boring, maybe. I saw some pretty silly little messages in packets at times in the past (admins joking).

[pierrem15]

The DOD had reserved a gazillion IP4 addresses it didn't use for decades. Scammers and bad actors are probably using those addresses to mask the origins of packets or misroute data. Now those addresses are 'lit,' so a device somewhere will actually receive those packets, including info packets about bad routing, address unknown, resends, etc. If something actually examines the data received that uses these addresses, a lot of interesting information about scammers or intel agencies using these addresses might be garnered.

Or, you'd just collect gigabytes of garbage.