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The title is underselling the nuance—there's the entire Myanmar civil war hiding behind the word "allegedly". The group in power claims a group trying to overth
by perihelions 1y ago
The title is underselling the nuance—there's the entire Myanmar civil war hiding behind the word "allegedly". The group in power claims a group trying to overthrow them is operating scam centers (they deny it); this SpaceX intervention cuts off communications on a large scale, presumably aiding one side or the other in some unclear way.
> "“Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park,” the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is “part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar’s civil war” and “deny any involvement in the scams.”"
- iknowstuff 1y agoA scam is a scam right
- boringg 1y agoRight - shutdown the scam centers. Why is this so hard? If one group is using the scam center to power their resistance ... that resistance is built on a really bad foundation. I get that if you are shutting down comms for an an org thats different - but if its a known scam center not a tough decision here.
- ralfd 1y agoThe nominal group in power should be able to deny/allow communication from the space above their country though.
- perihelions 1y agoBut the US (who has jurisdiction over Starlink) isn't bound by Mynamar laws, and (IMHO) shouldn't give the time of day to the requests of a junta commiting crimes against humanity, systemic extermination[0] of ethnic minorities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
- buran77 1y ago> But the US (who has jurisdiction over Starlink) isn't bound by Mynamar laws, and (IMHO) shouldn't... Should everyone else be allowed to do anything they want in a country as long as it's from a distance because "your laws don't apply to me"? Is it fine when Russian, Chinese, or NK hackers are operating against the US? If a country is good enough to sell to and provide a service there, it's good enough to obey its laws.
- IshKebab 1y agoStarlink isn't sold to Myanmar.
- simiones 1y agoSold in, not sold to. The GP meant: if you consider it legitimate to sell your product in Myanmar, you should obey the laws of Myanmar. If you consider the government is illegitimate, don't do business there.
- perihelions 1y agoWhat if a "legitimate" government is committing genocide, as Mynamar's is? Should international companies respect its sovereign laws? This thread baffles me, that people are somehow capable of ignoring the elephant in the room of the massacring of civilians, to tunnel-vision instead on some trivial and insignificant technicalities about satellite law.
- logicchains 1y agoBecause a good chunk of people on this site have so little moral development that to them "whatever the law says is moral".
- buran77 1y ago> What if a "legitimate" government is committing genocide That's an interesting question, I'll say. I can't say yes or no but I can say that the answer should be consistent. You either support genocidal regimes, or you don't. So you have Starlink operating in Israel and in Myanmar. > that people are somehow capable of ignoring the elephant in the room of the massacring of civilians, to tunnel-vision instead on some trivial and insignificant technicalities about satellite law. Imagine the bafflement when some people stick to their tunnel vision while writing about other people's tunnel vision on the same exact topic.
- elif 1y agoReally? Even Darth vader? Who defines "should"?
- alt227 1y ago> Who defines "should"? The group in power of the country
- maxerickson 1y agoNo, it's the group in power in outer space.
- alt227 1y agoI agree with the parent comment, each country should control the communications in its own airspace. Surely this is how it works? Starlink cant just start selling internet in countries it has no jurisdiction or communications license in?
- IAmBroom 1y agoWhy not? Isn't the entire point of the internet to make access to communication of information equal? We're playing around with the word "should" here, but from a moral standpoint, I disagree with any opinion that a sovereign power should(morally) be able to control communication at all - short of immediate threats to public safety (yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater).
- alt227 1y agoTheres a difference between people in different countries talking freely, and people selling internet connections to residents in another country where they have no company registration.
- maxerickson 1y agoControl vs want. If you don't have power in outer space, you simply don't control what happens. You can hope that whoever has power respects your desires.
- elzbardico 1y agoThey can. They can have laws and try to enforce them. International Law and Companies should not be in the business of doing jackbooted thugs work for them. The same apply for other stuff like chat cryptography. No, we shouldn't fuck everyone's right to privacy because your fat policemen are unable to conduct an investigation on meatspace and prefer to just have a digital panopticon. obs: I upvoted you because while I consider your position absolutely abhorrent, I believe you're entitled to it and we should not downvote comments just because we don't agree with them.
- croes 1y agoWould SpaceX comply if it was an order from a Brazilian court?
- ferbivore 1y agoYou think resistance movements should never have telecommunications access?
- sbarre 1y agoYou think the issue is that black and white?
- swarnie 1y agoThat's not what OP is saying. An entity truly in control should be able to deny access to insurrectionists because of you know, being in control.
- jacquesm 1y agoClearly, they are not in control of SpaceX.
- miroljub 1y agoYes they are, if they are able to force SpaceX to do as they want.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThey are in control of the military, and presumably the capital city area and a majority of the country's resources. That says nothing about their power to control the satellites overhead.
- bilbo0s 1y agoI think the commenter only meant that there is such a thing as RF engineering. But that to be effective, RF engineering would require the local authorities to have some level of control over the region they want to shut down. Thus, the authorities must not have that control. I agree with the commenter from a technical perspective. It's extremely easy to cut off SpaceX terminals in some area if you control that area. I just don't think that's relevant. It's not the local authorities the rest of the world is lining up behind, it's the regional players around Myanmar. The regional players can countenance the local authorities only slightly more than the warlords and gang leaders. What the local authorities want is almost completely irrelevant to the regional players.
- vintermann 1y agoWhy?
- itchyjunk 1y agoLaw of the land. Must follow it to operate in that jurisdiction
- Ray20 1y agoOr what? We're not talking about Russia or China. They don't have the capability to destroy satellite constellations.
- ta1243 1y agoMight makes right? That kind of arrogance is what leads to 9/11, the most successful destruction of a western country since ww2.
- Ray20 1y agoDidn't this happen because of the abandonment of this principle? 9/11 would not have happened if there were no radical Muslims in the world, and US had the Might to make such world.
- gpm 1y agoThe US had the might to make such a world as demonstrated by... their loss to the Taliban in Afghanistan? Killing an individual is easy. Killing an ideology next to impossible, and trying tends to make the proponents more violently against you.
- hollerith 1y ago>US had the Might to make such world. It is clear to me that the US never had the capacity to do that.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
- vessenes 1y agoHard no. Communications is a human right. I’d say routing communications as a private company is a privilege that can be extended or denied, but this perspective is poison IMO.
- jayd16 1y agoIt's wild to me how many of these comments are appealing to local law without any thought to what is just. If the local law was to deny all women or some ethnic group access to communication, the world should do it without question?
- Workaccount2 1y ago>If the local law was to deny all women Palestine gets widespread support
- jonah 1y agoIn that case, they're probably the lesser of two evils. Women can't campaign for more rights if they're dead...
- evilkorn 1y agoThat is sort of the way I see it. It's a leap to ask for gay or women's rights before the county has the right to not be bombed.
- foxglacier 1y agoIt's a leap even without being bombed. Asking for gay or women's rights is asking for reform or elimination of Islam. Leftists never seem to want that, I think because they see Muslims as an oppressed group that should be supported, not have their identity taken away from them.
- arczyx 1y agoDo you have an objective source about what law in Palestine denying access to all women?
- Rover222 1y agoQueers for Palestine is so hard to wrap my head around.
- infthi 1y agoThe precedent seems to be that anyone can broadcast anything without caring what territories can receive your broadcast (see Voice of America broadcasts during the Cold War or GPS jamming in the Baltic nowadays). This seems to be extendable to broadcasting from space. The nominal group in power may ban/jam _receiving_ equipment on their territory though.
- fnfs2000 1y agoUS law prohibits Starlink from transmitting into countries that don't permit it, with exceptions as directed by the US Government. If this was not the case, Starlink would have made its product available globally instead of having to seek permission from every country they want to service (called "landing rights")
- nradov 1y agoThere is no single group which has power over all of Myanmar. It is a failed state.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoDepends if your country claims to be free or not, or what your own morals and values are - if you believe in "might makes right", then sure, the ones in power get to suppress freedom of information to the rest of the country. If you believe in a free democracy, then information and communication should be free (think freedom of speech, press, information, etc).
- yieldcrv 1y agoThe cool thing about multi national corporations is that you're more powerful than nation states in your respective domain, a demigod
- sidibe 1y agoThe nominal group in power in Myanmar depends on where you are standing and changes with time. The official government has no authority in most of the country.
- jacknews 1y agoThey may well deny it, but there's plenty of international documentation showing it is indeed a thing, and presumably starlink have even more evidence.
- altacc 1y agoThe truth is more likely that both the junta and local militias have ties to different scam centres. The Myanmar government never does anything for its people, it's motivated by power and money and they were profiting heavily from scam centres until China's patience broke, due to large numbers of Chinese being trafficked and imprisoned at these scam compounds. The junta needs China's support in order to survive. As the junta lost control of the border regions the local militias stepped in to either profit from scams or close them to please China, depending upon what they thought would benefit them most.
- whimsicalism 1y agoi haven’t seen any good evidence tying the Tatmadaw to these large-scale scam operations, while I have seen a fair bit of evidence tying a few of the regional militias.
- yorwba 1y agoMany of those regional militias are or were integrated into the Tatmadaw as Border Guard Forces to hold territory against other militias. E.g. the scam centers in Laukkai were run by the local BGF until 2023 when the Tatmadaw lost control to the MNDAA, who then shut them down, presumably as part of a deal with China. The Tatmadaw doesn't control many towns on the eastern border anymore, but they do control Muse near the border with China, where scam centers were operating unimpeded until after that offensive, when the Tatmadaw began to target them with arrests and deportations https://shwepheemyay.org/english-edition/junta-raids-muse-scam-centers-arrests-over-130-including-41-chinese/ https://shwepheemyay.org/english-edition/junta-raids-muse-sc... probably to get back on China's good side.
- wraptile 1y agoIt's a very well proven fact that the scam centers are operated by Chinese given that before covid they were all Chinese casinos that transitioned to online scams because no Chinese could leave China to spend their money there.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoIf it's a very well proven fact, can you link to some objective sources to your strongly worded claims? Given that clearly this is a very politically sensitive subject, I'm not going to trust a commenter on the internet on their own.
- wraptile 1y agoWikipedia is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KK_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KK_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shwe_Kokko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shwe_Kokko Statement by US Treasury: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0237 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0237 If you ever been to Myanmar you'd know that Burmese simply have no capability of operating something like this, especially now.
- moralestapia 1y ago>presumably aiding one side or the other in some unclear way "I'm strongly opposed to one side or the other gaining a possible advantage or disadvantage in some unclear way" LOL
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoIt's important to know that anything Elon or Tesla or SpaceX says about freedom of speech or libertarianism, is subject to either the US government or President Trump or Elon's personal beliefs about freedom of speech. Which so far have been "I support complete freedom of speech. (for myself, and censorship for others)" They aren't going to sell a product that could be used against them. Our allies are reasonably asking if the high-tech F-35 fighters have kill switches too
- whimsicalism 1y agoAny topic related to Elon Musk seems to get flooded with low-entropy uninteresting comments.
- miroljub 1y agoIt won't be the first time that Starlink takes a side in a military conflict somewhere in the world. Somewhere they do it openly and boast proudly about it, somewhere they just keep it quiet.
- safety1st 1y agoI don't think the nuance you believe exists actually exists. The scam centers at KK Park and Shwe Kokko employ forced laborers numbering in the thousands - they literally kidnap people from neighboring countries, imprison them, confiscate their passports, and force them to conduct scam operations for 17 hours a day, torturing them if they fail to comply. The KNU is undoubtedly in on this, allowing it to happen within their area of control and almost certainly profiting financially from it. The stuff going on there is evil of the highest degree. It's evil on a level that many Hacker News users probably did not even realize exists in the world. Starlink doesn't even offer service in Myanmar! The operators of the scam centers acquired the terminals through their criminal connections. Yes the Tatmadaw is also evil. It doesn't really matter though. This is a pretty black and white scenario. What's going on is dark beyond belief and any action which curtails it is positive.
- dylan604 1y ago> Starlink doesn't even offer service in Myanmar! If this is the case, what is the justification for allowing them at all? If the receiver's location is not in an authorized service area, why allow it to connect? In fact, I'm surprised that's not automated. I can't access websites due to geofencing, yet Starlink can't figure out the location of the dish accessing their network? I'm not buying that at all.
- mschuster91 1y ago> If the receiver's location is not in an authorized service area, why allow it to connect? Money and other KPIs. Money is an obvious KPI - 2500 terminals at 100 $ a month each, 250k a month in income, nothing to sneeze at. The more important KPI however is satellite utilization. And it's not like either the legitimate Myanmari government nor the various oppositional factions have any interest, much less ability, in trying to curtail Starlink.
- dylan604 1y agothey have interest in curtailing for the opposition while keeping it for themselves
- more_corn 1y agoThe scam centers are real and there has been extensive reporting on them. Look up “Operation Shamrock” and particularly the work by Erin West for some of the work busting them (she even toured a scam center Thea had been recruiting busted and took video and photographic evidence). Workers from many countries have been lured through Thailand, kidnapped and trafficked across the border forced to work behind bars and under threat of torture.