> but choose not to act on anything they find on VPNs and other "privacy focused" tech?
Oh, they probably do act on it. For most things, I assume they use the intelligence they gather for parallel construction - if you know a fact about an adversary, it can make it easier to find other, more obvious (to that adversary) ways to "find" that information.
I'd imagine taking direct, obvious action on information gleaned from front and honeypot VPN services is probably only done for extreme cases i.e. an active threat to the country/administration/agency/allies.
Oh, they probably do act on it. For most things, I assume they use the intelligence they gather for parallel construction - if you know a fact about an adversary, it can make it easier to find other, more obvious (to that adversary) ways to "find" that information.
I'd imagine taking direct, obvious action on information gleaned from front and honeypot VPN services is probably only done for extreme cases i.e. an active threat to the country/administration/agency/allies.