After more than a decade tracking Internet bad guys, a semi-secret government contractor has revealed itself to recruit hackers at a notorious DefCon security conference in Las Vegas.
Chet Uber, chief of Project Vigilant, an alliance 600 volunteers, has described the group as a sort of cyber "A-Team" taking on terrorists, drug cartels, mobsters and other enemies on the Internet.
"We do things the government can't," Uber said Sunday, adding: "This was never supposed to have been a public thing."
The semi-secret organization scours Internet traffic for clues about online attacks, terrorists, cartels and other targets rated as priorities by members of group.
Uber said that Vigilant came overground after 14 years of operation in a drive to be at "full capacity" by adding 1,750 "vetted volunteers" by the year 2012.
"We are good people not out to hurt anybody," the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant said. "Our one oath is to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic."
The democratically run private organization claims to monitor the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers (ISPs), and under a provision in their end user license agreements (EULAs) they are able to share users' Internet activities with third parties.
The group 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.
Vigilant also claims its secret ranks reportedly include chiefs of technology at top firms and former high-ranking U.S. cyber spies besides having "collection officers" in 22 countries that gather intelligence or coordinate networks in person.
"We go into bars, look for lists of bad actors, get tips from people..." Uber said.
"But, a significant amount of our intelligence comes from our monitoring the Internet. We are looking at everything on websites, and websites are public," he added.
He said Vigilant stays within the ambit of U.S. law while being more technologically advanced than government agencies weighed down by bureaucracy and internal rivalries.
"We don't do anything illegal," says Uber. "If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don't, we can't."
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