It's one thing to be a capitalistic shitbag, it's another to be a traitor. Governments like capitalistic shitbags

they could also have stolen it though. gotta wait what an investigation of the serial numbers finds

It's almost like the Oligarchs of the world are all on the same team.

I had this idea that the US was very hard on treason especially after Snowden but apparently it's selective treason

This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.

IIRC Musk didn't switch it off, it wasn't turned on in the first place and Musk refused to turn it on when the Ukrainian military reqeusted it.

Musk is a shithead but not for this reason.

Yeah, but it's not a government satellite system, it's an independent Internet provider. It is always possible that the US government/military has access on the back end, but that's not guaranteed. And since Ukraine is using Starlink, they can't exactly just disable all access in the region.

Kind of makes sense for Russia to try and use Starlink at least a bit to test the waters and see what sort of Intel the US has access to directly through it.

Yeah, sure, if it was an adversary like the U.S. government and not a Russian ally like Elon Musk...

Remember they fired their corporate communications and even municipalities mid-project can’t get anyone on the phone. It’s burning down.

That said, I would not be shocked at all to find Elmo with his fascist oligarch mitts on this. That fucker needs a serious regulatory beatdown. (Not an actual, like, punching him in the head beatdown.)

They could probably prevent 99.999% of this with a list of starlink devices in ukraine, a list devices geolocated to the vicinity, and a single part time employee.

Look at this article from March 2024: https://robertgarcia.house.gov/media/in-the-news/cnbc-house-democrats-probe-spacex-over-alleged-illegal-export-and-use-starlink

In a statement on Thursday, the congressmen wrote, “Russia’s use of Starlink satellite terminals would be in contravention of U.S. export controls that prohibit Russia from acquiring and utilizing U.S.-produced technology.”

So the equipment has to fall into the wrong hands, through a somehow compromised supply chain. Maybe that could happen without starlink knowing, but they really should have figured that out in march. They should have very easily identified the units that were potentially compromised by auditing shipping logs.

Not only did the supply chain have to be compromised, but also the subscription and payments system... How did they not catch it on the subscription payment side? Now in addition to a compromised supply chain, a financial institution was compromised? At the least, they didn't do their due dilligance in customer verification.

How could russia have set up the equipment without some level of development and testing? Geolocation should have given that development away.

Now, could spaceX do something more about this ? Most likely. But that is resources you need to put on this, which is not profitable.

Yeah good point, that's called "negligence". Not doing due dilligance or taking the necessary steps to avoid breaking the law, because it isn't profitable, isn't a valid legal defense.

It really would have been as simple as geofencing against devices that weren't preauthorized or whitelisted.

They could have, but that doesn't mean that Starlink couldn't do a lot more to catch them at it. You're making excuses for a fascist.