Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers

Just when you thought that Wikileaks story couldn’t get any weirder, this story pops up. A shadow group of "volunteers" that monitors internet traffic and hands over the information it finds to the authorities?

A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its "volunteers," researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.

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