Whether or not you think that governments should spy, the amount of hype here seems staggering.
They don't just nmap the internet, they systematically compromise vulnerable targets as per the article and the slides. And unlike common criminals, there's no hope of them being stopped by any law enforcement agency.
If they're really going after every non 5-Eyes machine they can compromise, people living outside of the 5-Eyes need to protect themselves.
I wonder what would happen if they started using Monstermind-like software?
This is why you should resist government spying, because once you come to their attention, they could mistakenly or rightly decide that you need to be fucked with in some way, which could range from a brief arrest to murder. Merely coming to a government's attention puts you at risk, so we should minimize the chance that anyone can come to the government's attention.
"Oh, so you give all that information to Facebook, but you don't want the goverment to have it?"
Well yes, smartypants, that's because the government has the monopoly on violence. Full stop.
If you don't think that you government should spy, that's fine, a lot of very respectable people have had this opinion over the course of human history. I just don't buy the remediation story, at all.
You seem to conveniently ignore the fact they are doing this with the intent to exploit.
Its cute and all but honestly, anyone who is going to do that then seek to compromise a box is a problem. Its the intent of compromising the box that is the issue, not simply scanning.
Did you not RTFA?
"The covert infrastructure includes so-called Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs), which are used to hide the location of the attacker when the Five Eyes launch exploits against targets or steal data (Figure 18). Several times a year, the spy club tries to take control of as many machines as possible, as long as they are abroad. For example, in February 2010 twentyfour spies located over 3000 potential ORBs in a single work day (Figure 19). However, going over the port scan results provided by HACIENDA was considered too laborous (Figure 20), so they programmed their OLYMPIA system to automate the process (Figure 21). As a result, the spies brag that they can now locate vulnerable devices in a subnet in less than five minutes (Figure 22)."