Reports that Russian forces were using the Starlink service within Ukraine first appeared in Ukrainian media, citing social-media posts. Prominent Russian volunteer groups supporting the Russian invasion have also shown off Starlink terminals purchased for army units.
In a Feb. 8 tweet, SpaceX officials said the company “does not do business of any kind with the Russian Government or its military. Starlink is not active in Russia, meaning service will not work in that country. SpaceX has never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.”
Multiple Russian companies advertise Starlinks for sale, including iMiele.ru and DJIRussia.
“If Russian stores are claiming to sell Starlink for service in that country, they are scamming their customers,” the tweet said.
But Russians can easily acquire Starlinks from abroad and then bring them back to distribute to their forces, the second Ukrainian source noted.
With the DoD taking over the starlink contract with Ukraine I’m pretty sure starlink works in occupied territories now.
That means there could be Ukrainian operatives behind enemy lines using starlink to communicate so you can’t just assume anything on one side of the border is Russians.
They gotta add some filtering at the account/serial number level and then have a way to disable satellites that fall into enemy hands.
One way could be accounts requiring another rolling authorization code that the military can hand out on an ongoing basis so if a satellite is unknowingly lost it can be disabled.
Another could be SpaceX/DoD giving all starlink locations in the region and asking the military which ones are them, and disabling the rest on an ongoing basis?
I mean, they could from a technical standpoint, but in a scenario where Ukrainians are hypothetically using it covertly, that’d kill their cover. Other receivers on the ground can see the emissions from the stations broadcasting, and will be able to use radio direction finding to locate them. Russia may not know the contents of the data being sent – it may be encrypted – but if the only transmitters that are allowed are Ukrainian operatives in occupied territory, I expect that it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re going to look into transmissions.
The Russians could just do that anyway couldn’t they? They know which ones they are using and can ignore those signals.
It takes time to track things though, you could probably do short bursts and go undetected?
Exactly. They all have to have hardware ids and starlink already geofences the consumer versions.
I doubt that the irregulars using it have informed Moscow that they’re doing so; if they were, they’d presumably be told not to use it as well.
And you’ll have any random civilians that can get it.
If Ukraine only whitelists people who are working for them, though, then those people are gonna be the only sources.
They could maybe try to blacklist just the irregulars, leave any civilians.
In World War II, maybe.
If a listener has an antenna array and are logging received data, all they need to do is receive a definite signal once. Record a log with precise timestamps on two antenna arrays, and that’ll be enough to identify a transmission’s location.
EDIT: Here’s a $500 software-defined radio with an antenna array that random people can go out and buy capable of doing this.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/df-aggregator-new-software-for-networked-radio-direction-finding-with-kerberossdr/
I assume you mean terminals that fall into enemy hands? Either that or Roscosmos has some surprising new capabilities I am unaware of.
Whoops. Yes.