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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone propose the possibility that allowing Russia to use Starlimk is an espionage play.

I have no idea if that's actually what's going on, but if it would give Starlink information on troop locations and open a door for listening in on all Starlink-based communications, you would want the public and Russia to believe the CEO is on their side. It would also align with the fact that Russia's big military pushes to secure and advance the front have largely failed or ended in stalemate. Tie that to the number of Russian ships attacked and again, if Russia is using Starlink Maritime that would track as well.

By no means am I proposing this as the likely scenario, but it does seem possible and one that gets buried by people piling on to hate on Elon.

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Yeah, listening in wouldn't work because you can always stack more encryption on top of the one the carrier might listen in to. But Starlink can't operate without exact knowledge of antenna locations for aiming the phased arrays (some sibling said that it can operate without GPS, but I read that as it's able to locate the antenna on its own after a crude signal handshake is done).

But in a world where Musk/Starlink/someone inside Starlink/someone with sufficient leverage over Starlink was trying to hinder the Russian invasion, they would allow Starlink terminals to be sourced through plausibly shady channels and then operate in Russian hands for quite a while, before striking locations and only then shutting down.

Or even go all Ultra on them and start an elaborate programme to create alternative explamations for the data use.

One reason I don't consider this likely: imagine how hard Musk would enjoy going through his very own version of the Cryptinomicon Ultra plot line. The idea that he might be able to keep that a secret just doesn't fit in my skull.

Plus, that would give the ability to degrade communications whenever it's tactically useful.

Flight MH17 investigations revealed Russian military has a habit of switching to cellphones when their normal communications don't work, and those calls tend to be plain audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

Is it fair to assume Musk and any state actors he could be working with don't have any way to decrypt Russian encryption techniques?

My only point is they its interesting how quick many are to jump on this a narrative that Elon is evil, he works for or with the Russians, etc when there is actually a scenario that fits in which he is closer to playing a role akin to Allan Turing during WWII.

You're doing Turing a great disservice comparing him to Musk.

I was comparing a potential scenario in which Muak found himself in much the same situation as Turing, I'm not comparing the men or their character at all.

I'm definitely not trying to compare what both men were/are put through. A sea of internet trolls complaining about how terrible a person they believe Musk to be is nothing compared to chemical castration and being convicted of gross indecency for what one chooses to do behind closed doors.

They're emitters though. I assume the US and Ukraine are already able to locate every emitter within minutes of them powering up.

They're highly directional though, so this is much harder than with old school radios. You might need to fly overhead to catch the emissions.

Right but they aren't perfect and have sidelobes like anything else.

I presume Musk necessarily has a clearance already and keeps many things secret on pain of imprisonment.

Did you forget SpaceX does NRO launches all of the time?

Furthermore, you aren’t allowed to have access to orbit from the USA without playing by the MIC/IC’s rules, clearance or no clearance.

Not divulging boring details of stuff you have clearance to and keeping quiet about the biggest adventure of your life, while being a person so talkative that you once spent 44 billion on your favorite blogging tool? Those are very different challenges.

OTOH, "cryptonomicon ultra plot line" could be the ultimate Musk lure, so the gates are open to even the wildest speculation.

Do you think the American government can't already find Russian ships? America gets their ass beat consistently in unwinnable wars against guerilla armies, but in terms of identifying giant warships I think they're pretty capable.

I think it'd be more accurate to say the US consistently signs itself up for wars based on political or economic motivations with little intention of doing what would be needed to actually "win" the war.

Specifically, we either don't define metrics for success or we define completely unrealistic metrics. Worse, we go to war with no intention of destroying an enemy that has left us with no alternative other than to risk many, many human lives to stop them. We go for political wins at home, to claim ground in a geopolitical power struggle, or for natural resources.

Finding them is actually likely much less of a problem than listening in, though providing the Ukrainians with additional ways of finding and tracking their enemy without us directly providing intel does offer the US plausible deniability.

>US plausible deniability

*snort*

It never really has to be believable, it just needs to be enough that you can deny direct involvement in a specific attack. I have little patience for politics and which we didn't let pur world be run this way, but that's the way we do it.

So the usual 'it's okay when USA does that, totally not okay when someone else does that'.

Guerilla tactics just raise the cost of steamrolling an opponent to an unpalatable level, hiding among civilians, civilian infrastructure, etc. American loses these matchups not because they can't blockade a country, raze their farmlands and wait a few seasons while they all starve, but because fully eliminating and "winning" would be the worst possible choice.

I'd still argue that the problem is not defining "winning" beforehand. That could mean any number of thing, but without defining that first we can't weigh the likelihood of success or cost of tactics that will be required.

I agree I'm not sure when a goal of eliminating the enemy completely is one that I could support, though interestingly enough that is precisely what Israel's claimed goal currently is with regards to Hamas. I believe its also the stated goal of Russia, though I'm not familiar with what faction of neo-nazis they claim to be targeting or whether they even exist in any meaningful numbers in Ukraine.

Ass beat? More like outlasted. The Taliban went to Pakistan for 20 years until the US left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom

The US lost 2,380 and the coalition killed 72,000+.

The US has reconnaissance satellite data that it provides to the Ukrainians. Each side knows where each other's troops are. I don't know where this report is getting its facts, but the Ukranians haven't captured any significant territory in months, so it's unlikely their troops are seeing 'star link' unless Russians are hauling terminals to the front trenches, which seems quite unlikely.

On the flip side, we know from the article and elsewhere the Ukrainians are using the terminals for military coordination, and command posts have been struck which utilize star link.

There is of course the reality that they actively helped the Ukranians with internet connectivity when early in the war they lost most of their satellite connectivity due to Russian hackers disrupting that. Distinguishing Russian users from Ukranian ones in Ukraine is probably not that easy.

Can't they look up the subscriber information? Presumably the Ukrainian ones would be registered to the Ukrainian government, but the Russian ones would be registered to some random UAE company.

Many, many Starlink terminals and service subscriptions used in war zones by members of the UA army are donated and/or fully or partially paid for by private people - ukrainians and many more nationalities (including UAE). I personally helped stuff a van full of Starlink terminals and drones and my friend drove it to the UA border (though this was a much larger group effort than just us - especially the finance and sourcing).

The UA army command is doing everything it can, but it's not unlimited and everywhere. The war effort relies on help of private individuals and groups a lot. Many soldiers are using equipment sourced entirely from private sources - all they got officially was a uniform and gun. All the drone videos you see on the internet - these are almost 100% bought privately.

starlink meta data is surely being collected and used for sigint, thou i suspect russia has good enough mathematicians so that listening in on content is not on the table unless the endpoints are compromised.

I never know where the line is for assumptions on encryption and espionage. The Germans thought Enigma was unbreakable, you really just never know if you encryption was compromised unless the ones who cracked it tip their cards.

tbf enigma was marketed as unbreakable, but serious engineers know that such a "perfect" thing is very unlikely to be true.

also afaik it did hold up until a sizeable amount of corelated plain-chipher-text was available for analysis.

Musk, Elon Musk, Agent double oh four twenty.

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