And scanning every IP for a port is how you trigger automatic abuse reports to whoever owns the IP block, and failure to respond to said abuse reports (and, more importantly, ceasing said abusive behavior) leads to eventually the attacker (the aforementioned government office) having their Internet service ended due to ToS violations.

Not only that, I suspect some ISPs now run 11211 honeypots to capture networks that source such attacks, so eventually the FBI would end up in common RBLs due to their abusive behavior.

In short, I suspect this entire article is bullshit. It is on Wired, after all.