The censor triangulates your signal and fires artilery shells at you: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/satphones-syria-and-su...

Now obviously satphones use very different protocols from these modern internet constellations but I wouldn’t bet my life on them being impossible to triangulate.

> I wouldn’t bet my life on them being impossible to triangulate.

Don't bet anything at all. A drone with a phased array antenna pointing down will draw you a map directly to every transmitting base station that exists.

Make a double hop.

Give your antenna a cellular connection, route over a few hops, cover your tracks.

If all you need is a receiver, you're right that an antenna is reasonably difficult -- not impossible -- to locate. But if you want to request a resource from a satellite, you need to broadcast a signal. And that's very easy to locate. Even tightbeams are scattered and reflected, so can be triangulated by ground receivers.

For covert operations contexts one could use a backscatter/passive modulation such as “Passive Wi-Fi” setups or corner cubes with vibrators attached

Not impossible.

mesh network/TOR for uplink can solve that. not to mention it can work as a backup connection when the high bandwidth downlink satellite is nuked/lasered(?) from orbit.

Every node in that mesh network will get a missile, problem solved.

It's amazing how complex solutions get before someone remembers the $5 wrench approach

mesh network and tor/etc over clearnet is already a solution in many, unfortunate, parts of the world.

It's just slow for the most part.

Isn't tor blocked in many high-risk censor areas?

I know cellular was blocking it during the peak of the war in Syria.

just like many other traffic. But it's mostly done via routes. that's why people use actual real world personal networks to share hidden TOR guards. ...until everyone start with DPI

Impossible using radio waves. Perhaps you could use a laser, but if you're transmitting via radio waves to a satellite, it's trivial to locate you.

Laser is actually what was on my mind when I mentioned tightbeam. When you shine a 5W laser into the night sky, it's visible to people quite a long ways away. Particles, clouds, and even variation in humidity or pressure create impedance mismatches, which result in partial reflection of your signal -- which end up spraying everywhere.

to block mesh network you are assuming the state will also ban every bluetooth speaker.

In most cases, I think the censor nation would lodge a complaint against the country of origin of the offending communications satellites, and the owners of the satellites would then be prohibited from operating in those countries. If using international treaties doesn't work or is deemed too slow, the censor nation might pursue other means.

Wont nation states be able to use basic triangulation to find out where people are and prosecute them heavily?

Also wont nation states be able to tell Starlink to not transmit in china if they dont want Tesla factory nationalized or other similar threats?

Nation states will jam Starlink ; GPS jamming is easy , there's no reason to thing Starlnk jamming will be much more difficult.

GPS and LEO satellite internet are very different. GPS is meant to be received by near-omnidirectional antennas anywhere on the planet. Starlink satellites will place multiple spot-beams acting as cells and customer receivers are high directional as well.

Jamming Starlink would require satellite tracking and high gain antennas. And you would have to have separate jammers for each spotbeam that the starlink satellite casts on the ground.

I think active antennas are harder to hide than you might think.

Also if they only receive data, don't send / upload anything?

A old times radio receiver, it cannot be detected? Or can it

Or TV antenna? That receives only

If the receiver uses mixing (like a superhet) it is trivial to detect radiation from the receiver. This was widespread 70 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER) and has almost definitely been expanded to modern radio by today's spy agencies.

There are commercial receivers that can be placed near the side of the road to measure the popularity of broadcast FM stations by measuring LO leakage. Definitely not limited to TLAs.

> A old times radio receiver, it cannot be detected? Or can it

Old times radio receivers are low power transmitters. Their local oscillators leak out of the antenna enthusiastically.

The physics hasn't changed. There is far less leakage in modern receivers, but our detectors are way more sensitive as well. And if you're a nation-state and free to fly drones over rooftops looking.... yeah, don't believe anyone that claims they can operate anything involving electromagnetic energy without risk of detection.

Yes, you can locate even passive antennas by broadcasting a wide-band signal and looking at the reflected spectrum. It's way easier if you know the frequency that the antenna is tuned to.