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Re:SpaceX sends laser-linked Starlinks to the polar orbit by walrus01 on Monday January 25, 2021 @03:49PM (#25908654)
if your potential adversary is a five eyes nation state intelligence agency with the ability to sniff traffic from 10/100/200GbE submarine fiber DWDM links, the fact that spacex/starlink is also a US company and subject to national security letters and other monitoring won't help you.
Re:SpaceX sends laser-linked Starlinks to the polar orbit by bilbo0s on Monday January 25, 2021 @05:10PM (#25909632)
Likely wouldn't help even if it wasn't Five Eyes.

At some point, the communication has to enter the terrestrial network. That entry node is likely to be under the influence, if not outright control, of Five Eyes security infrastructure.

You would need to build out a lot of infrastructure to escape the sort of ubiquitous surveillance that is available to those organizations.

Re:SpaceX sends laser-linked Starlinks to the polar orbit by toast0 on Monday January 25, 2021 @09:13PM (#25911636)
> At some point, the communication has to enter the terrestrial network.

Not necessarily. If you're communicating between two SpaceX terminals, that could feasibly avoid SpaceX ground stations. I don't know how capable SpaceX's routing actually is to know if this is within their scope though.

Re:SpaceX sends laser-linked Starlinks to the polar orbit by walrus01 on Monday January 25, 2021 @10:08PM (#25911974)
and then we come back to one of the original missions of the NSA, which was to intercept international telephone call/data/telex traffic that had no terrestrial intermediary, between two different C or Ku band geostationary earth stations in two different locations of the world which were using a geostationary transponder as a relay point.

If it's flying through the air and somebody really wants to grab it they will, whether they can read it depends on how good your crypto is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Menwith_Hill