Vessels of Russia’s shadow fleet are using Starlink to communicate and coordinate, a Kyiv Independent investigation has revealed.
If this was a just world, US government would have nationalized starlink the second they saw Musk’s company was aiding and abetting the Russian Military and hindering Ukraine’s, which we saw in the early stages of the war.
But we all know that original premise isn’t true.
Elongated muskrat hisses
Pretty sure that was the action musk took already…
IIRC Musk disabled Starlinks geographically. That is, regardless of where you bought it from the Starlink wouldn’t work in Russia.
The shadow fleet is all over the globe and the nationality of the freighters is obfuscated making it a far more complicated endeavour.
There is zero chance the terminals don’t have a unique serial number, meaning they absolutely have other ways to block connections. Frankly, it would be trivial to identify and block every ship in the shadow fleet; they are choosing not to.
The shadow fleet exists because it isn’t easy to know who is who. It would be trivial once demonstrated a particular ship is shadow fleet but until then it is just one of thousands using Starlink on the open sea.
The shadow fleet exists because it isn’t easy to know who is who.
I see an easy fix. Most of the time these Shadowfleet tankers are turning off their AIS beacons to hide their movements. Step one is for Starlink operators to collect lists of active Starlink connections that exist without a cosponsoring realtime AIS signature. You’ve now got a list which contains nearly all of the shadowfleet vessels with Starlink (and some bad data from a handful of legit ships that were having communication difficulties or maintenance occurring during Starlink use). This would be fantastic targeting data for Ukraine!
If Starlink wanted a denial effect, they could simply bake in a pseudo AIS signal (not the traditional VHF transmission) derived from Starlink posiioning data into the Starlink product so that as soon as Starlink is used, it itself is broadcasting your position into AIS through a proxy server.
And then if caught, they just buy another dish once they’re somewhere else and SpaceX no longer knows which ship is which again.
Thats going to be a lot harder than a whitelist in ukraine unless the tankers are stupid enough to also dock at a Russian port with it turned on, which maybe they are, but then they just buy a new one and be smarter about it.