> Imagine internet beyond the grasp of control freak governments

Radio jammers.

There are very few technological solutions to political problems.

Deploying and maintaining radio jamming devices is _way_ more difficult and expensive than telling an ISP to shut down service.

Nobody needs to jam anything, a starlink cpe needs to transmit. Try to operate one in xinjiang province, for instance, men with portable spectrum analyzers and guns will come to take it away and arrest you.

With a horn antenna tuned to the right band and a portable spectrum analyzer, finding a starlink, kuiper or oneweb cpe will not be technically difficult.

Also worth remembering that this kind of equipment, beyond being available to militaries, is also routinely in use by governments everywhere to enforce local RF regulations. Even in times of perfect calm, if you start illegally transmitting and disrupting legit radio activity, you can expect the local equivalent of FCC to quickly track you down.

Ku and mid ka, high ka band spectrum analyzers are no longer a $40,000 item anymore. I'm pretty confident I could put together a (starlink, kuiper, oneweb) locating kit for under $10k USD. The knowledge to run a spectrum analyzer just to locate on class of equipment could be taught to any moderately educated local police in one day.

Not much is using these bands anyway, especially in places like Iraq. Wouldn't it be even simpler to skip the spectrum analyzer and sweep the area with high-gain antennas tuned for these bands, the fox-hunting way?

Ku and ka aimed at the sky doesn't propagate like vhf, uhf. You'd need fairly high gain horn antennas to detect off-axial-aim emissions.

True, but jamming is even easier (and cheaper) -- particularly if you aren't especially concerned about incidentally jamming nearby frequencies.

Depends on the frequencies and types of antennas used. Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service (people do this by accident, that's why RF regulations exist everywhere). It's not that much of an expense for a government to set up a few antennas and make them put out half a megawatt of noise each.

> Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service

Particularly satellite signals, because they're very weak to begin with.

Indeed. High-gain antennas and some math trickery can compensate a bit (see e.g. GPS and its below thermal noise floor signals), but I don't think a commercial transceiver could in any way win with a 50kW signal on a broadcast antenna turned jammer on a nearby hilltop.

But iraq is quite a big country. So do you think some jammers are enough for the country, or would you have to deploy them on every big hill/mountain?

You don't need to deploy them on each hill because you don't need to cover the whole country. Just concentrate on the densely populated areas and surroundings. People both away from the protests and not taking part in organising anything are likely irrelevant to gov in this case.

You can also use directional antennas to find and destroy RF jammers

Thats why they would be probably based on military bases etc.

Can you destroy them with the antenna? Or is that just for locating it?

sure, but they have to have the hardware for that ready to go, and they have to get people deploy each site and prevent it from being vandalized or disabled

Wideband noise generators are cheap and trivial to make. Giving them more power is a bit more tricky. If satellite internet becomes a norm, I'd be surprised if most armies didn't end up with one of them.

Such antennas however are an easy target for rockets, grenades, IEDs, car bombs... in a riot situation good luck defending the jammers.

What kind of protests are you imagining? With that kind of ordnance in use, it's no longer a protest but an all-out civil war.

Let's face it these things will be used mostly in situations which can at best be described that way. France's Yellow Vests, Hongkong, China and whatever is happening in India at the moment.

It's the first time I hear Yellow Vests or Hong Kong protests involving explosive ordnance deployed on either side.

That depends if you're counting tear gas grenades as explosives - I do. But even then, arson has been used as weapon in both conflicts, and a molotov cocktail is pretty easy to build, transport and throw.

The technology that "turns off" the internet is not, in any way, required to run the internet. A router that uses deep packet inspection can process fewer packets than one that simply routes.

When communication networks can be accessed wirelessly, the devices that can block those communications will simply become part of what we understand as standard communication equipment.

Way more difficult maybe than running a bash script but in real terms it's very doable.

An interesting social effect could be that currently by default there is no internet. Then you get a device that provides internet and the government takes it a way. If there was starlink lets say there is internet by default. Then the goverment gets a device to jam that internet and the protestors can take it away. It kind of switches the local on ground dynamic I would say and makes it way more interesting for the protestors. They can occupy jammers like they do airports and get internet back

LEO Ka band jamming is very hard

https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/10_2505.pdf

I realised there's more to this article, but with notes like this: "Note this strategy assumes that the link from the ground to the UAV is somehow protected from an electronic attack by the jammer either through waveform design or by narrow beam antennas." you know they're not focusing on consumer level hardware.

Isn't starlink and most other LEO constellations ku, though?

Yes, C and Ku are dominant now, but not on LEO.

LEO is dominated by 400-500Mhz for milcom, L and C. Resurgence of Ku in LEO is mostly due to regulatory regime already being cleared for satellite internet due to previous entrants, and cheaper hardware for consumer market.

And prosecuting people with the relevant transceivers.

Then Iraq would have to make it illegal to own this sort of internet connection. A country like North Korea could do that, but not a country like Iraq or Cameroon that has some degree of normal freedom but intermittently shuts off the internet.

A country willing and easily able to shut down the Internet is also perfectly able to temporarily limit or ban civilian use of a frequency range.

There are ways of dealing with jamming [0] though I doubt they are in most (or any) easy consumer available units.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_counter-countermeas...

Yeah, but what about the radio jammer jammers?

Aren't some of them planning to use lasers? They'd have a hard time blocking that.

Lasers between them in orbit is what I've heard, nothing about ground stations, AFAIK.

Yeah, probably not much point in making an internet connection that only works without cloud cover.

I'd imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths would be just as susceptible to cloud-cover-induced interference as a non-laser at typical radio wavelengths, no? Not that even lasers would be necessary to mitigate jamming; ordinary beam-forming / directional antennas should be enough (barring some really sophisticated jamming technology of which I'm not aware, or the Iraqi government putting up and maintaining permanent chaff clouds or something similarly outlandish).

Jammers (to my knowledge) operate by actively producing an inverted copy of the signals it actually sees. That is: it'd be reliant on non-directional signals. Any directionality / beam-forming would make jamming a lot harder, since it makes it a lot harder for the jammers to actually see the signal in the first place (let alone produce an inverted-waveform copy of it).

Jamming also tends to get in the way of other radio communications, so even if it was actually effective against satellite communications, it'd be a last resort and would likely cause all sorts of other issues.

> Jammers (to my knowledge) operate by actively producing an inverted copy of the signals it actually sees.

No. Usually, all you need is to do is to send a signal - any signal - on a frequency you want to jam with enough power to overwhelm the target signal. A directional antenna won't get a milliwatt satellite signal if it starts picking up half a kilowatt of random noise, even if that noise is coming from the side. It's essentially a matter of how much power your jammer radiates and how high you can put it. Whether or not jamming interferes with other radio communication depends on how much of the spectrum your jamming signal covers.

Seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to block signals coming from the side (e.g. by putting some metal or something else similarly RF-blocking between the antenna and the jammer), no? Kinda like how wearing a hat helps keep the sun out of your eyes. Actively jamming the jammer (i.e. inverting the signal received from the jammer side and rebroadcasting on the the antenna side) would help, too, though this probably makes it easier to detect. And yeah, the higher the jammer, the harder it is to block it without blocking the signal you're trying to actually see (but it's still possible; if it wasn't, then modern astronomers would have a much harder time picking out interesting things amidst the menagerie of cosmic background radiation bouncing about).

There are plenty of other strategies, too (like not sticking to a single frequency, or picking frequencies that are likely to be too valuable to block with such a blunt-force method).

> Seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to block signals coming from the side (e.g. by putting some metal or something else similarly RF-blocking between the antenna and the jammer), no?

Depends on the wavelength and your surroundings. Imagine yourself wearing a cap that's little too small and half-transparent on the edges, walking on fresh snow, surrounded by snow mounds, trying to spot something on one of the hilltops nearby. So the cap mostly protects you from direct jamming signal, but reflections and bleed are still painful.

Now we're talking here about satellites, in particular LEO satellites, so you need a mass market (or at least commercial-grade) tracking antenna, which will have to look all across the sky and not just point straight up. In urban environments, there's a great chance there will be scores of decent reflectors (buildings) all around you for the jamming signal to bounce off, and as for bands, the ones used by Starlink are ones that are unlikely to be used much for anything else in places like Iraq - so they may as well just jam the whole band. And since Starlink is a commercial service, you won't be able to switch to something the government depends on (not to mention procure new antennas and adjust software on the transceivers).

> Imagine yourself wearing a cap that's little too small and half-transparent on the edges, walking on fresh snow, surrounded by snow mounds, trying to spot something on one of the hilltops nearby. So the cap mostly protects you from direct jamming signal, but reflections and bleed are still painful.

The usual answer, then, would be a polarized filter and a more narrow aperture (e.g. goggles). The narrower the FOV, the less risk of glare.

That does mean an antenna will have to actively keep itself pointed at a moving point in the sky, but with GPS, a compass, a clock, and each satellite's orbital parameters, that should be a solvable problem.

The harder problem would be for the satellite to pick out the signal coming back from the ground without having to limit itself to a single ground station.

> imagine a laser at typical radio wavelengths

Huh?

Radios are Kilo/Mega/Gigahertz.

Light is Terahertz.

Okay, sorry, "electromagnetic radiation amplified and collimated in the same manner as a laser does to visible light". Better?

Like beamforming, or something more extreme like a maser?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser

As an aside, the Maser wikipedia article is a bit incorrect.

> The laser works by the same principle as the maser, but produces higher frequency coherent radiation at visible wavelengths.

There are plenty of lasers in the non-visible spectrum, I use IR lasers all the time.

A maser's what I had in mind, but either would likely work reasonably well.

I could've sworn somebody was planning to use lasers to communicate from the satellite to a ground station, claiming it would improve latency. Maybe I misread.

Lasers alone won’t improve latency, but they would certainly impact reliability. Radio waves already travel at essentially the speed of light.

It's been done in the past. I think the main benefits are preserving EM spectrum and some theoretical improvement in bits per watt

The lasers are for inter-satellite comms, where there’s no atmosphere to interfere.

wat how are lasers working in this scenario

Each end (satellite and ground station) point a laser at each other, which they modulate according to the data they wish to send. The other end has a sensor (much like in a camera) that captures the light, and processes it to recover the data (demodulate). It's much like fiber optics, except over air instead of a cable.

How much power would such a laser emitter require? That is a huge distance to cover. Wouldn't it get attenuated over the distance?

Lasers are subject to the same inverse squared law as regular radio waves. However with lasers you're starting with a smaller beam so the attentuation is actually less

Do you realise that most of satellite jamming is done on uplink, not downlink?

This is how Cubans jammed US milcom and few civilian satellites since nineties

Not to be too cute but by relying on corporations you're trading one dictatorship for another. Im not saying an oppressive government is the same as Comcast. Im just making the point that neither entity is accountabile to the people they 'serve.'

No one is wholly trustworthy. That's why every additional option is a good option.

> That's why every additional option is a good option.

Without the "but verify" part of trust, every additional option is just another name for the same thing

It will still be owned by a private company you have no control over, which isn't necessarily better

Especially since Iraq is leaning on private companies (ISPs) to get them to shut down the internet.

The one advantage that Starlink might have is, it might be a company beyond the reach of the Iraqi government, and therefore less likely to give in to their pressure to close off access. But what we really need is several such companies, not just one.

Given how satellites don't respect national borders by default, I wonder whether there will be - or maybe already are - international agreements that would make it easier for a nation's government to coerce a foreign operator to deny service over that nation.

Aren't there multiple Starlink competitors in development now?

Yes, they’re just the furthest along and perhaps most likely to succeed since they own the launching mechanism the others would likely use.

At least it's a another competing choice.

That seems much better to me. Comcast only shuts off my internet occasionally, through incompetence. They could censor customers who criticize Comcast, but that isn't maximizing their profits, so they don't.

>It will still be owned by a private company you have no control over

I don't have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control a person. Why should I have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control, if a group of people get together (a company) to do something?

> >It will still be owned by a private company you have no control over

> I don't have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control a person. Why should I have any ethical justification to enslave or coerce or control, if a group of people get together (a company) to do something?

Who said anything about justification? Profit or power is the motive. Those need no justification to their pursuers.

Things like Starlink won't remove a government's ability to cut off internet access. The radio signals aren't hard to jam.

We need one that uses lasers

Not to be too cynical, but it’d be pretty straightforward to at least tell where the ground-based terminals are if they’re shooting lasers into the sky. Not sure if laser-based systems use IR or UV or what (presumably whatever has the least amount of atmospheric attenuation), but airborne cameras could likely pick it up pretty quick.

And for the most brutal dictators: laser-guided bombs are already a thing...

Why would an airborne camera be able to pick ground-based lasers up easily? Wouldn't you need to fly directly between the satellite and the ground terminal?

Same goes for laser-guided bombs - those home in on where the laser pointer is pointing, not the pointer itself.

Deflection. It's pretty easy to spot a laser pointed straight up, because it's deflections create a visible trail of the beam. Have you ever shined a laser pointer in a foggy room, or seen the lightshows that do so? That.

Right, but presumably you'd be using a wavelength that's scattered a bit less than that.

Remember that you don't jam transmitters, you jam receivers. Blinding an on-orbit receiver is easy regardless of whether you use lasers or radio because you know exactly where it has to be at any given time.

Why? Are lasers hard to "jam" (I'm using quotes because it seems weird to use "jam" with optical media, but maybe that's just me)?

All you need is a cloud.

For certain wavelengths, yes. But others go straight through.

Others have stated their objections to your comment, but... my belief is that once StarLink becomes operational, the American Gov. will have oversight & control of it, just like our current ISPs.

I believe that the only way the US could legally do that is by exerting control over up/downlink stations that are in US jurisdiction. I'm assuming that things like Starlink will have up and downlink stations in places outside of the US as well as inside.

Extralegally, though? All bets are off.

SpaceX is a US corporation, therefore US jurisdiction.

You're making an assumption that Starlink will fight a nudge by the US government instead of quietly complying.

I'm not, really. That's why I added my "all bets are off" comment.

I can't see every other nation being too happy about US-controlled global Internet service. They will demand some degree of control over their territories. I can see the space law getting some updates sometime soon.

You'd think a headline like the one we're posting under would stop techno-optimism dead in its tracks.

When all you have is a startup, everything begins to look like a nail.

We got the news within 12 hours. Right now massive amounts of data is being collected, and eventually it will get out.

This seems like it'd all be a lot easier to control without technology.

A Starlink dish is a transmitter, which is a beacon that says "come arrest me!" or "drop bomb here."

Seriously though: as bad as Trump is, I still think Bush II was by far the worst president of the past 100 years. Trump would have to do something much worse than he's already done to match Bush's accomplishments.

Iraq, Syria, yes. Agreed. Though it feels like Trump is one false move from something just as bad or worse.

The freedom to access information is one of the greatest and most sacred gifts the internet gave us. The longer we can protect that, the further the human race will progress. Bring on starlink!

And instead controlled by one corporation headquartered in a nation that also partially controls Iraq.

To anyone else interested, here's a link to a draft paper about starlink: https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkJHandley/status/1044621609120.... Apologies for not posting the direct link, for some reason my copy url gets hijacked on twitter mobile.

FTFY: http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf

You're forgetting that governments, especially of the control freak type, tend to be the only entities that are entitled to the use of violence and coercion.

Good luck using Starlink or any other forbidden technology when your skull is being pushed to the ground by their boot

Imagine how difficult it must be to drive through a neighborhood, and mark off anyone with a satellite dish on their roof as a political criminal.

Hint: Not very.

Also, how exactly do you plan to pay your bills to your ISP, when their service is illegal in your country?

I bet half of houses in my neighborhood has a TV dish. If it will be possible to make Starlink dishes visually indistinguishable from those, the police will have a slightly harder time. Slightly, because detecting radio transmission doesn't seem hard either.

Transmissions from ground to orbit tend to be highly directional (it's why satellite TV/internet typically uses dishes instead of ordinary antennae). Detection from the ground would be pretty difficult, given that most (ideally all, but there's probably at least some leakage) of the signal will never reach anything else on the ground (for the same reason you typically can't see the beam of light from a flashlight or laser pointer unless it reflects off dust or fog or some other particulate in the air).

The most reliable way to detect ground-to-space transmitters would be with aircraft, since those will have a much easier time crossing paths with the signal (and thus actually being able to see it).

Also, imagine it being much harder to verify that your systems are air-gapped.

Suggesting that revolted populace protesting about basic life amenities will have the ability to purchase and operate a starlink antenna is uneducated at best

satellite internet already exists

the internet, with most content and platforms by freak capitalists

Yet people pine for Net Neutrality.