5 ms·

Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi

133 points by donohoe 2y ago

NavinF 2y ago
>But records released so far show the probe, which wrapped in November, found that the entire chiefs mess knew about the secret system, and those who didn’t buy into it were nonetheless culpable for not reporting the misconduct. >Marrero and her cohorts paid $2,800 for a Starlink High Performance Kit with a personal credit card, and contacted Starlink to expedite shipping so the system would arrive in time for the deployment. >Those involved also used the Chief Petty Officer Association’s debit card to pay off the $1,000 monthly Starlink bill, and Marrero warned the chiefs to only use the network in their rooms. Sounds like the Navy needs to provide better wifi before people get desperate like this and screw up their electronic warfare
- stevetodd 2y ago
  Related: The US Navy Is Going All In on Starlink https://www.wired.com/story/us-navy-starlink-sea2/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-navy-starlink-sea2/
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Those very same electronic-warfare concerns might be what's preventing that, barring something really fancy like hyper-directed satellite communication using lasers etc. Considering that "streaming movies" figured prominently in the illicit data stream, I would strategically reframe the problem like so: "America's excessively-restrictive copyright laws are putting our troops in danger!!!1" Clearly, the only possible choice is for Congress to make explicit and broad copyright exemptions for public libraries, and then put one on the ship. :D
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    On the one hand I’d love to be a vendor to make deployments suck less and more entertaining for servicemen. On the other hand I don’t want to deal with procurement.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Video disks might not be superduper convenient; I don't know what kind of leisure devices navy peeps have, but you don't need a copyright exemption to lend them. If you don't mind tossing the cases, binder sheets for discs are pretty high density.
    - bluedino 2y ago
      Those portable DVD players were hot items on the ship
- pdpi 2y ago
  > Sounds like the Navy needs to provide better wifi before people get desperate like this and screw up their electronic warfare "Desperate" is a strong word. The point is that there should be no wifi at all during these deployments, and there are reasonable operational security reasons for that ban. This isn't a "fix" to a problem, it's directly disobeying an order.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Navy already can’t meet their enlisted recruiting [1] and civilian mariner [2] targets. Operational security is a consideration, but unmanned vessels don’t sail and project force. As stevetodd’s link mentions downthread, the Navy is procuring StarLink officially (likely as part of StarShield, their DoD product with milspec satellites and full DoD ownership and control [3]); peel off some bandwidth for the humans if you expect them to show up to the job. They’ll easily find a better job in the current labor macro otherwise [4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169676 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331066 [3] https://spacenews.com/pentagon-embracing-spacexs-starshield-for-future-military-satcom/ https://spacenews.com/pentagon-embracing-spacexs-starshield-... [4] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/3616786/dod-addresses-recruiting-shortfall-challenges/ https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/36...
    - markus_zhang 2y ago
      How about a huge collection of offline digital medias and an Intranet that connects the sailors on the ship? That might help a bit?
      - knowitnone 2y ago
        that solves 1 of the three content types. the other two are "check sports scores, text home" which an intranet would not solve.
        lostmsu 2y ago
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Meanwhile, second paragraph of the article: > For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  This is not a case of failing to serve a fucking market. Holy shit.
  - NavinF 2y ago
    It literally is, as others have elaborated on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441755
hindsightbias 2y ago
Does the Starlink router not allow a hidden SSID? I’d imagine the EW equipment might still notice but it reads like every seaman’s phone was finding it.
- jackvalentine 2y ago
  Hidden SSIDs are a hack on the wifi protocol and don’t really do anything. Windows 11 just shows ‘Hidden Network’ for example.
  - helpfulclippy 2y ago
    They're even worse than useless, because the devices paired to those hidden SSIDs have to probe for them explicitly. So instead of having the base station broadcast its SSID in one spot, you instead have clients broadcasting that SSID everywhere they go, disclosing not only the SSID itself but also their association to it. I wish OSes would go a step further and deanonymize hidden SSIDs, just to drive home to everyone that this feature sucks and doesn't work.
    - mPReDiToR 2y ago
      There is a way to combat this: https://f-droid.org/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/ https://f-droid.org/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/ No idea if it works, but it has been around a long time.
- JCM9 2y ago
  I would hope that our warships have sophisticated enough counter signals intelligence systems to detect the presence of rogue transmitters regardless of if they are broadcasting an SSID or not. Even a run of the mill corporate security setup will pick up rogue wifi networks on premises and pinpoint their location.
  - kfarr 2y ago
    Agreed. While other commenters say that this can't be stopped, humans need their wifi, etc., I sincerely hope naval intelligence caught this nearly immediately and determined it wasn't an operational hazard, or even better that their new relationship with starlink gave them "enterprise visibility" into this unauthorized civilian link that just happened to be following the path of one of their ships and allowed them to do packet sniffing, etc. and then left it to the normal system to sort it out.
rasz 2y ago
/insert picture of a tree full of smartphones nailed to it in russian deployment camp inside Ukraine
Mainsail 2y ago
This is insane yet not shocking. I can’t imagine throwing away my entire career, and possibly more, over this. When I was stationed aboard the USS Mount Whitney, we had internet access at essentially all times. Yes it was painstakingly slow but you learned how to navigate that by using mobile sites, bookmarking exact pages, etc. If I wanted to find sports scores, it’d take a moment but I’d get them - heck, we had fantasy football leagues going using ESPN while at sea. The mobile pages of Facebook and email was enough to communicate with friends and family while movies and shows were passed around on external hard drives. I genuinely don’t understand what they gained from this to contemplate it yet alone act on it. My best guess is it was simply a chiefs mess with a ton of issues and who felt they were untouchable. But who knows. There will be a lot of training..
- MarkMarine 2y ago
  I've been stationed in a lot of places with no or little internet access, and it does suck. I'm sure it's worse for people that weren't used to circa 2003 internet... but the hubris here. Getting caught then just lying and saying the system was only used in port and HAVING IT RE-INSTALLED. I can't even imagine that. The fact that the rest of them just got NJP too... this reads to me like a command failure.
- tzs 2y ago
  > This is insane yet not shocking. I can’t imagine throwing away my entire career, and possibly more, over this. Has she thrown away her career? She was demoted from Senior Chief Petty Office to Chief Petty Officer, a demotion of one rank, which at least on paper doesn't seem to be too bad. Or will this being on her record mean that she won't get any future promotions, nor any of the more desirable assignments that a Chief Petter Officer might get, making it unlikely that she will reenlist whenever her current enlistment ends? Here's her bio [1]. I'm surprised the punishment wasn't much more severe. I could see being lenient if this was some relatively inexperienced sailor who had not been in the Navy a long time. But she's been in the Navy for just over 22 years, and based on this > Marrero first served at Submarine Group Eight, followed by U.S. Second Fleet as the afloat Flag communicator. She was Sailor of the Year at Combat Direction Systems Activity Dam Neck, completed two combat deployments with Mobile Communications Team attached to SEAL Team Two, and held multiple positions in the joint intelligence and operations departments at U.S. Southern Command. it looks like she had experience in communication and intelligence, so really should have known that unauthorized communication channels can be very risky. [1] https://www.surfpac.navy.mil/Leaders/Biography/Article/3152697/cmdcs-swexwiwaw-grisel-marrero/ https://www.surfpac.navy.mil/Leaders/Biography/Article/31526...
yencabulator 2y ago
Here's an angle for HN to ponder: How could the navy have noticed this? Noticing an SSID is easy enough to work around. What's next? Can one easily scan for just radio activity on wifi bands? What if it was all wired, could the navy notice the unplanned RF signature (note that it's quite directional)? Do military installations scan their RF environment regularly to notice such unwanted things? I'd assume CIA/NSA/embassies do make similar scans, to notice surveillance gadgets.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  I would think that there is some radio officer on a ship That would in their normal day-to-day business find errant radio signals.
- vueko 2y ago
  Yes, it's pretty trivially easy to detect, even without fancy EW equipment. At one point I admin'd a college dorm's network, wifi/wired, and we didn't allow personal APs for interference reasons (you could run your own switch or router as long as it wasn't a WAP). Our run-of-the-mill networking hardware could find signals and triangulate them down to a couple of feet. A couple residents were flummoxed to learn that the "hidden network" thing doesn't actually do anything, which was hopefully at least a useful educational moment. Any decent SDR can notice such things, presumably not to mention actual EW equipment. It's only really with sub-noise-floor gold code type stuff where a signal doesn't jump out on a waterfall spectrum chart, and even then it's generally fairly obvious at close range. I can only speculate as to why that didn't actually happen here.
  - rendall 2y ago
    > we didn't allow personal APs for interference reasons For "interference reasons"? Would you mind expanding on that?
    - __d 2y ago
      I imagine the issue was that in earlier WiFi versions, there weren't a lot of channels available. You basically got 2 or 3 (depending on which country you were in) non-interfering channels. The protocols also dealt with congestion less well, I think. On a university campus, let's assume that at least one of those channels is taken by the campus WiFi, possibly more if they have separate networks for staff or whatever. At that point, you start getting a few dozen private networks running in the dorms, and the campus network(s) grind to a halt.
aorloff 2y ago
So does the NSA or NRO run the daily Starlink standup meetings ?
joe_hills 2y ago
If this was a bunch of junior enlisted, I’d be impressed at their ingenuity, and they’d probably get a slap on the wrist for doing the dumb things that nineteen year olds are expected to get caught for. I can’t imagine the entire senior enlisted crew of a shop risking their careers over better internet access, though. I doubt many captains would have either, though, so I wonder if this presages an imminent crisis of confidence in senior enlisted by senior officers.
- josh_carterPDX 2y ago
  Given how easy it is to deploy Starlink, I am actually surprised this is the first time this has been tried. Or perhaps this is the first time it came out publicly.
  - joe_hills 2y ago
    Yeah, if it was actual spies or junior enlisted, I doubt we’d hear about it, so this may not be the first time. For a captain not to be able to trust his senior chiefs is what’s most scary here.
- strickman 2y ago
  [flagged]
WatchDog 2y ago
With the proliferation of cheap consumer grade satellite communications devices, I imagine this sort of thing is going to become a bigger issue for the military. Apple recently enabled sending non-emergency messages via satellite[0], it's reasonably easy to detect a big starlink terminal, but it's harder to police people using their iPhones to communicate over unauthorized channels while deployed. [0]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/06/11/apple-expands-satellite-messaging-capabilities-with-ios-18/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/06/11/apple...
- MBCook 2y ago
  While iPhones (will be able to) do that, you have to point them at the satellite. So if anyone is around to watch it might look kind of suspicious. This all reminds me of when users of when users of Strava were accidentally mapping out military bases for anyone who wanted to see. https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-fitness-trackers-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...
signatoremo 2y ago
The Navy have invested heavily in Starlink by now. They could just have waited a little longer. https://www.twz.com/sea/starlink-now-being-deployed-on-u-s-navy-warships https://www.twz.com/sea/starlink-now-being-deployed-on-u-s-n...
softgrow 2y ago
Given a navy ship is a collection of conductive metal boxes bolted together , would there be an issue with radiation hazards from (introduced consumer grade) RF bouncing around each container? Equally, probably also not nice to have fuel or munitions ignite just when you start watching the big game.
- NavinF 2y ago
  You realize Starlink Tx power is 0.5W right? It's less than a wifi AP: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/ndh92t/dishy_rf_output_power/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/ndh92t/dishy_rf_o...
- choilive 2y ago
  Given a naval ships radar systems power output can be 200,000x (or much higher) than your WiFi access point.. no. Also there is absolutely no chance WiFi could ignite munitions.
exabrial 2y ago
I would think a ship would have sensors for this sort of thing
bell-cot 2y ago
> Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero—the enlisted shipboard leader—led a scheme to buy a Starlink for $2,800 and to install it inconspicuously on the ship's deck. The system was only for use by chiefs—not by officers or by most enlisted personnel—and a Navy investigation later revealed that at least 15 chiefs were in on the plan. So a "screw it, security reg's are for the little people" conspiracy by at least 15 of the ship's most-senior NCO's. Wow. Talk about leading by example, eh? If China started a real fight with the USN, I wonder how many seconds it'd take the PLA Navy to win. :( (Back in the Day, one of the Ars Technica editors was a former USN surface warfare officer - https://arstechnica.com/author/sean-gallagher/ https://arstechnica.com/author/sean-gallagher/ It would be extremely interesting to hear his take on this story.)
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  [flagged]

133 points by donohoe 2y ago

>But records released so far show the probe, which wrapped in November, found that the entire chiefs mess knew about the secret system, and those who didn’t buy into it were nonetheless culpable for not reporting the misconduct. >Marrero and her cohorts paid $2,800 for a Starlink High Performance Kit with a personal credit card, and contacted Starlink to expedite shipping so the system would arrive in time for the deployment. >Those involved also used the Chief Petty Officer Association’s debit card to pay off the $1,000 monthly Starlink bill, and Marrero warned the chiefs to only use the network in their rooms. Sounds like the Navy needs to provide better wifi before people get desperate like this and screw up their electronic warfare

stevetodd 2y ago
Related: The US Navy Is Going All In on Starlink https://www.wired.com/story/us-navy-starlink-sea2/ https://www.wired.com/story/us-navy-starlink-sea2/
Terr_ 2y ago
Those very same electronic-warfare concerns might be what's preventing that, barring something really fancy like hyper-directed satellite communication using lasers etc. Considering that "streaming movies" figured prominently in the illicit data stream, I would strategically reframe the problem like so: "America's excessively-restrictive copyright laws are putting our troops in danger!!!1" Clearly, the only possible choice is for Congress to make explicit and broad copyright exemptions for public libraries, and then put one on the ship. :D
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  On the one hand I’d love to be a vendor to make deployments suck less and more entertaining for servicemen. On the other hand I don’t want to deal with procurement.
- toast0 2y ago
  Video disks might not be superduper convenient; I don't know what kind of leisure devices navy peeps have, but you don't need a copyright exemption to lend them. If you don't mind tossing the cases, binder sheets for discs are pretty high density.
  - bluedino 2y ago
    Those portable DVD players were hot items on the ship
pdpi 2y ago
> Sounds like the Navy needs to provide better wifi before people get desperate like this and screw up their electronic warfare "Desperate" is a strong word. The point is that there should be no wifi at all during these deployments, and there are reasonable operational security reasons for that ban. This isn't a "fix" to a problem, it's directly disobeying an order.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Navy already can’t meet their enlisted recruiting [1] and civilian mariner [2] targets. Operational security is a consideration, but unmanned vessels don’t sail and project force. As stevetodd’s link mentions downthread, the Navy is procuring StarLink officially (likely as part of StarShield, their DoD product with milspec satellites and full DoD ownership and control [3]); peel off some bandwidth for the humans if you expect them to show up to the job. They’ll easily find a better job in the current labor macro otherwise [4]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169676 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41331066 [3] https://spacenews.com/pentagon-embracing-spacexs-starshield-for-future-military-satcom/ https://spacenews.com/pentagon-embracing-spacexs-starshield-... [4] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/3616786/dod-addresses-recruiting-shortfall-challenges/ https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/article/36...
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    How about a huge collection of offline digital medias and an Intranet that connects the sailors on the ship? That might help a bit?
    - knowitnone 2y ago
      that solves 1 of the three content types. the other two are "check sports scores, text home" which an intranet would not solve.
      - lostmsu 2y ago
yencabulator 2y ago
Meanwhile, second paragraph of the article: > For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
This is not a case of failing to serve a fucking market. Holy shit.
- NavinF 2y ago
  It literally is, as others have elaborated on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441755

hindsightbias 2y ago

Does the Starlink router not allow a hidden SSID? I’d imagine the EW equipment might still notice but it reads like every seaman’s phone was finding it.

jackvalentine 2y ago
Hidden SSIDs are a hack on the wifi protocol and don’t really do anything. Windows 11 just shows ‘Hidden Network’ for example.
- helpfulclippy 2y ago
  They're even worse than useless, because the devices paired to those hidden SSIDs have to probe for them explicitly. So instead of having the base station broadcast its SSID in one spot, you instead have clients broadcasting that SSID everywhere they go, disclosing not only the SSID itself but also their association to it. I wish OSes would go a step further and deanonymize hidden SSIDs, just to drive home to everyone that this feature sucks and doesn't work.
  - mPReDiToR 2y ago
    There is a way to combat this: https://f-droid.org/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/ https://f-droid.org/packages/be.uhasselt.privacypolice/ No idea if it works, but it has been around a long time.
JCM9 2y ago
I would hope that our warships have sophisticated enough counter signals intelligence systems to detect the presence of rogue transmitters regardless of if they are broadcasting an SSID or not. Even a run of the mill corporate security setup will pick up rogue wifi networks on premises and pinpoint their location.
- kfarr 2y ago
  Agreed. While other commenters say that this can't be stopped, humans need their wifi, etc., I sincerely hope naval intelligence caught this nearly immediately and determined it wasn't an operational hazard, or even better that their new relationship with starlink gave them "enterprise visibility" into this unauthorized civilian link that just happened to be following the path of one of their ships and allowed them to do packet sniffing, etc. and then left it to the normal system to sort it out.

rasz 2y ago

/insert picture of a tree full of smartphones nailed to it in russian deployment camp inside Ukraine

Mainsail 2y ago

This is insane yet not shocking. I can’t imagine throwing away my entire career, and possibly more, over this. When I was stationed aboard the USS Mount Whitney, we had internet access at essentially all times. Yes it was painstakingly slow but you learned how to navigate that by using mobile sites, bookmarking exact pages, etc. If I wanted to find sports scores, it’d take a moment but I’d get them - heck, we had fantasy football leagues going using ESPN while at sea. The mobile pages of Facebook and email was enough to communicate with friends and family while movies and shows were passed around on external hard drives. I genuinely don’t understand what they gained from this to contemplate it yet alone act on it. My best guess is it was simply a chiefs mess with a ton of issues and who felt they were untouchable. But who knows. There will be a lot of training..

MarkMarine 2y ago
I've been stationed in a lot of places with no or little internet access, and it does suck. I'm sure it's worse for people that weren't used to circa 2003 internet... but the hubris here. Getting caught then just lying and saying the system was only used in port and HAVING IT RE-INSTALLED. I can't even imagine that. The fact that the rest of them just got NJP too... this reads to me like a command failure.
tzs 2y ago
> This is insane yet not shocking. I can’t imagine throwing away my entire career, and possibly more, over this. Has she thrown away her career? She was demoted from Senior Chief Petty Office to Chief Petty Officer, a demotion of one rank, which at least on paper doesn't seem to be too bad. Or will this being on her record mean that she won't get any future promotions, nor any of the more desirable assignments that a Chief Petter Officer might get, making it unlikely that she will reenlist whenever her current enlistment ends? Here's her bio [1]. I'm surprised the punishment wasn't much more severe. I could see being lenient if this was some relatively inexperienced sailor who had not been in the Navy a long time. But she's been in the Navy for just over 22 years, and based on this > Marrero first served at Submarine Group Eight, followed by U.S. Second Fleet as the afloat Flag communicator. She was Sailor of the Year at Combat Direction Systems Activity Dam Neck, completed two combat deployments with Mobile Communications Team attached to SEAL Team Two, and held multiple positions in the joint intelligence and operations departments at U.S. Southern Command. it looks like she had experience in communication and intelligence, so really should have known that unauthorized communication channels can be very risky. [1] https://www.surfpac.navy.mil/Leaders/Biography/Article/3152697/cmdcs-swexwiwaw-grisel-marrero/ https://www.surfpac.navy.mil/Leaders/Biography/Article/31526...

yencabulator 2y ago

Here's an angle for HN to ponder: How could the navy have noticed this? Noticing an SSID is easy enough to work around. What's next? Can one easily scan for just radio activity on wifi bands? What if it was all wired, could the navy notice the unplanned RF signature (note that it's quite directional)? Do military installations scan their RF environment regularly to notice such unwanted things? I'd assume CIA/NSA/embassies do make similar scans, to notice surveillance gadgets.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
I would think that there is some radio officer on a ship That would in their normal day-to-day business find errant radio signals.
vueko 2y ago
Yes, it's pretty trivially easy to detect, even without fancy EW equipment. At one point I admin'd a college dorm's network, wifi/wired, and we didn't allow personal APs for interference reasons (you could run your own switch or router as long as it wasn't a WAP). Our run-of-the-mill networking hardware could find signals and triangulate them down to a couple of feet. A couple residents were flummoxed to learn that the "hidden network" thing doesn't actually do anything, which was hopefully at least a useful educational moment. Any decent SDR can notice such things, presumably not to mention actual EW equipment. It's only really with sub-noise-floor gold code type stuff where a signal doesn't jump out on a waterfall spectrum chart, and even then it's generally fairly obvious at close range. I can only speculate as to why that didn't actually happen here.
- rendall 2y ago
  > we didn't allow personal APs for interference reasons For "interference reasons"? Would you mind expanding on that?
  - __d 2y ago
    I imagine the issue was that in earlier WiFi versions, there weren't a lot of channels available. You basically got 2 or 3 (depending on which country you were in) non-interfering channels. The protocols also dealt with congestion less well, I think. On a university campus, let's assume that at least one of those channels is taken by the campus WiFi, possibly more if they have separate networks for staff or whatever. At that point, you start getting a few dozen private networks running in the dorms, and the campus network(s) grind to a halt.

aorloff 2y ago

So does the NSA or NRO run the daily Starlink standup meetings ?

joe_hills 2y ago

If this was a bunch of junior enlisted, I’d be impressed at their ingenuity, and they’d probably get a slap on the wrist for doing the dumb things that nineteen year olds are expected to get caught for. I can’t imagine the entire senior enlisted crew of a shop risking their careers over better internet access, though. I doubt many captains would have either, though, so I wonder if this presages an imminent crisis of confidence in senior enlisted by senior officers.

josh_carterPDX 2y ago
Given how easy it is to deploy Starlink, I am actually surprised this is the first time this has been tried. Or perhaps this is the first time it came out publicly.
- joe_hills 2y ago
  Yeah, if it was actual spies or junior enlisted, I doubt we’d hear about it, so this may not be the first time. For a captain not to be able to trust his senior chiefs is what’s most scary here.
strickman 2y ago
[flagged]

WatchDog 2y ago

With the proliferation of cheap consumer grade satellite communications devices, I imagine this sort of thing is going to become a bigger issue for the military. Apple recently enabled sending non-emergency messages via satellite[0], it's reasonably easy to detect a big starlink terminal, but it's harder to police people using their iPhones to communicate over unauthorized channels while deployed. [0]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/06/11/apple-expands-satellite-messaging-capabilities-with-ios-18/ https://www.satellitetoday.com/connectivity/2024/06/11/apple...

MBCook 2y ago
While iPhones (will be able to) do that, you have to point them at the satellite. So if anyone is around to watch it might look kind of suspicious. This all reminds me of when users of when users of Strava were accidentally mapping out military bases for anyone who wanted to see. https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-fitness-trackers-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...

signatoremo 2y ago

The Navy have invested heavily in Starlink by now. They could just have waited a little longer. https://www.twz.com/sea/starlink-now-being-deployed-on-u-s-navy-warships https://www.twz.com/sea/starlink-now-being-deployed-on-u-s-n...

softgrow 2y ago

Given a navy ship is a collection of conductive metal boxes bolted together , would there be an issue with radiation hazards from (introduced consumer grade) RF bouncing around each container? Equally, probably also not nice to have fuel or munitions ignite just when you start watching the big game.

NavinF 2y ago
You realize Starlink Tx power is 0.5W right? It's less than a wifi AP: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/ndh92t/dishy_rf_output_power/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/ndh92t/dishy_rf_o...
choilive 2y ago
Given a naval ships radar systems power output can be 200,000x (or much higher) than your WiFi access point.. no. Also there is absolutely no chance WiFi could ignite munitions.

exabrial 2y ago

I would think a ship would have sensors for this sort of thing

bell-cot 2y ago

> Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero—the enlisted shipboard leader—led a scheme to buy a Starlink for $2,800 and to install it inconspicuously on the ship's deck. The system was only for use by chiefs—not by officers or by most enlisted personnel—and a Navy investigation later revealed that at least 15 chiefs were in on the plan. So a "screw it, security reg's are for the little people" conspiracy by at least 15 of the ship's most-senior NCO's. Wow. Talk about leading by example, eh? If China started a real fight with the USN, I wonder how many seconds it'd take the PLA Navy to win. :( (Back in the Day, one of the Ars Technica editors was a former USN surface warfare officer - https://arstechnica.com/author/sean-gallagher/ https://arstechnica.com/author/sean-gallagher/ It would be extremely interesting to hear his take on this story.)

snakeyjake 2y ago
[flagged]