cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13231676
A U.S. Navy chief who wanted the internet so she and other enlisted officers could scroll social media, check sports scores and watch movies while deployed had an unauthorized Starlink satellite dish installed on a warship and lied to her commanding officer to keep it secret, according to investigators.
Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats.
The Navy quietly relieved Grisel Marrero, a command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, in August or September 2023, and released information on parts of the investigation this week.
Regarding tracking – and I don’t know if that’s the main concern here – it won’t just be the Starlink transport itself. My guess is that they’re more worried about having devices connected to the Internet.
Let’s say that I have a smartphone. I download an app because it’s got a fun game attached. It comes up with some dialog about permissions when I installed it, which I promptly accept and forget about. This includes location permission. A month later, I get deployed, and I put my phone on the Wifi network that the nice ship IT person has set up that we all chipped in for. Yay!
So now, every now and then, maybe that app is phoning home and reporting my location using the GPS sensors in the phone. Now, maybe that game company is on the up-and-up. Maybe they’re selling data to some data broker. Maybe they’re in a country subject to legal requirements to turn over data to the government on demand. Maybe they’re securing their own systems to a level sufficient to keep out nation-state level intelligence agencies, and maybe they aren’t.
But my guess is that the Navy doesn’t want to deal with those possibilities.
And that’s even before potential for things like microphone permissions for a device that’s on a warship.