DoD has “massive ranges” of IPv4 space
The Defense Department "was allocated numerous massive ranges of IPv4 address space" decades ago, but "only a portion of that address space was ever utilized (i.e. announced by the DoD on the Internet)," Madory wrote. Expanding on his point that the Defense Department may want to "scare off any would-be squatters," he wrote that "*there is a vast world of fraudulent BGP routing *out there. As I've documented over the years, various types of bad actors use unrouted address space to bypass blocklists in order to send spam and other types of malicious traffic."
On the Defense Department's goal of collecting "background Internet traffic for threat intelligence," Madory noted that "there is a lot of background noise that can be scooped up when announcing large ranges of IPv4 address space."
FYI it doesn't matter where the company was / is incorporated, only where the physical router that was configured to advertise those networks. If the plan is to harvest BGP packets from other routers, you need to be close to them on the network, which is usually the same as geographically (frequently the same building)