A secretive Pentagon program that started on Trump’s last day in office just ended. The mystery has not

WaPo via Seattle Times ^ | Sep 10, 2021 | Craig Timberg

[BusterDog]

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the internet to a Florida company in January — just minutes before President Donald Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.

The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6% of a section of the internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.

Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April.

[BusterDog]

"The unusual nature of the program has been tracked by several people in the networking world, including Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company."

"In April, Madory, a former Air Force officer, had come to believe the program was intended to collect intelligence. By announcing control of such a large section of the internet — especially one the Pentagon had left mothballed for years — it likely was possible to reroute information flowing across the internet to military networks for examination and analysis."

[frogjerk]

What was the IP subnet range were talking about here?

[MercyFlush]

Global Resource Systems is a front for a US government agency. This practice is nothing new. The FBI and other agencies routinely register surveillance aircraft to ‘private’ firms who are often headquartered in northeastern Virginia.

[IndispensableDestiny]

What was the IP subnet range were talking about here?

Too many to list. For instance, DoD has 14 /8 blocks. Many more /16 blocks.

[al baby]

dedicated to kiddie porn?

[NWFree]

Sounds like the government was using them to spy on people again as usual.

[SunkenCiv]

A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the internet to a Florida company in January — just minutes before President Donald Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.

[FreedomPoster]

175 million addresses is basically 10 Class A spaces. That’s a whole damn lot!

[Army Air Corps]

PING!

[Don Corleone]

Once again I caution,”Follow the money” Someone has their hand in this till.

[DoughtyOne]

Seems like a nice clean way to set up a group of IP Addresses
and monitor them for espionage type activity.

[BarbM]

Maybe WDC is afraid of a Revolution, so they sent all their data to Fla.

A girl can hope...

[bitt]

p

[V K Lee]

Could these have been used in tracking/holding the data from other networks/countries to our voting machines while on line? Just asking due to curiosity and such info is beyond this deplorable’s pay grade.

[DoughtyOne]

If these came online right as the electors were casting their
votes it would make me wonder a bit. Why right then?

Could be totally unrelated, and I don’t know of a reason to
suspect something. It’s just curious timing.

Was the protest on January 6th planned with ANTIFA to draw
people’s focus away from something else?

Propaganda is sometimes advanced with questions like these,
but I have no ulterior motive.

Your question caused me to do a little pondering on the
record.