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Comment by bdefore | Hacker News Reader

Presumably the NSA wouldn't let something like Starlink get off the ground unless they had a way of listening. How are they addressing this?

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It all depends on where the downlinks are. I would expect the US government will require all US customer traffic to be handed off to the public Internet in the USA. Then it's subject to standard legal intercept.

There was an equivalent project (satellite internet) in New Zealand which was killed off because the government required that the downlink happened in NZ for legal intercept (and censorship) reasons. The costs only worked if the downlink happened in Australia (the project could share costs with Australian telcos)

The downlink for NZ customers _had_ to happen in NZ, having it hit Australia and be routed back to NZ wasn't enough.

What happened to the 'Free Internet'? It only becomes free once you start encrypting it. Sad, but necessary.

No-one ever got major part of people to care about Internet, or even understand it... :/

I'm guessing Starlink is going to follow the law here.

[Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

AFAIK "end-to-end encryption encoded at firmware level" is the current official answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/8049u6/starlink_t...

Sort of irrelevant if you don’t own either end.

I find the second part of that statement more interesting:

> If it is (and we learn about it), a crypto fix will go out immediately via network-wide firmware update.

This implies that the SpaceX holds private keys for signing firmware updates, and a mechanism for pushing them.

I hope those keys are kept very far from anything Internet-connected.

I mean even if you own your own private modem, Comcast (and others) can and do push new firmware directly into your modem. I don't see how this would be any different.

I'm not sure how you think those ISPs supposedly push firmware to private 'modems' of all shapes and sizes, but I would like to know because I had a hell of a time reflashing my router with OpenWRT.

It's because cable modems are standardized with a set of upstream management protocols. They have a looong history of fleet management [1].

If you have cable internet, try going to 192.168.100.1. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2880475/talk-to-your-m....

You're referring to the CPE which is owned and managed by the ISP just as they own and manage other routers in their network.

The other person said that they can push firmware to private modems though, which is not possible without that modem being configured to accept such pushes.

Perhaps you're thinking of CWMP (TR-069) which is a protocol that ISPs often use to push configs to modems configured to receive them, but again, it cannot be used to arbitrarily flash the firmware of private modems.

Motorola's documentation says that firmware updates to _my_ modem are pushed by the ISP, with the rollout managed by the ISP. It may be CPE, but I purchased it retail and it is not linked to any particular ISP.

https://motorolamentor.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/2160917....

Just curious: What do you presume that NSA would do to prevent a multibillion dollar private company from pursuing a communications satellite constellation along all the correct legal and licensing channels?

Let's ask Joe Nacchio from Qwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwest#Refusal_of_NSA_surveilla...

I don't follow. If you're referring to his imprisonment, that was him and 6 other execs on insider trading/fraud charges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio#Insider_trading...

There's a theory that he was selectively prosecuted because he refused to help the NSA.

Imagine how much dirt on Elon Musk could mysteriously appear and cause trouble for SpaceX and Tesla.

Deny the licenses, presumably.

Which relevant licenses are the NSA in a position to deny?

They’ve already have all the big core internet links, call and sms histories, facial recognition logs, license plate camera logs, real time cell locations, and gps logs at (at least) google.

I’m not sure if they bother with the long tail of traffic within smaller ISPs, but the parade of Cisco backdoors suggests they do.

Same as any other ISP, probably.

Black box router in the ISP data centre that is to say.

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