Comment on Russia is using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite devices in Ukraine, sources say

• rdri@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You literally said it in your first comment here:

  At that point, you cant tell the difference.

  I also don’t exactly buy the possibility of Russian intelligence agencies being able to do stuff like this adequately. As anything else in Russia, they degraded seriously under Putin’s regime. They might not even be involved - I wouldn’t be surprised if those Starlink modules were just a nice opportunity found by whatever volunteers buying stuff like drones from Aliexpress and sending it to Russian army. Reports say they were purchased from UAE.

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  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This isn’t some super difficult covert operation. The objective is to purchase a Starlink dish without it being obvious it’s being used by the Russian military. Apart from the fact that Russians were already living in Ukraine before the war, who likely already had Starlink, it’s trivial to purchase these things. They aren’t some super secret item, or locked down to government use only, it’s a consumer item that can be bought for “relatively” cheap, and doesn’t really have a method to do a deep dive into the background of every purchaser (not to mention, people would get pissed if a deep background check was done for every purchase.)

    At that point, you cant tell the difference.

    This is referring to the data. Unless you’re suggesting the Russian military is incapable of using a VPN, something literal children have used on their own to bypass school restrictions.

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    • rdri@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Like I said, purchasing anything through Ukraine is unviable at the thought level from the perspective of Russian army. Hence why it’s much more likely to came from elsewhere.

      Using VPN for what purpose exactly? VPN won’t deliver you a device from Ukraine. VPN won’t change your physical location.

      Russian military was using Ukraine’s own mobile operators and its talks has been recorded many times thanks to that. Yes, they are stupid enough to not know about end to end encryption sometimes.

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      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        …

        You’re conflating so many things.

        A VPN would prevent anyone from being able to tell what the data was, where it was going, what it was for. The moment a VPN is introduced, there’s no way to tell what the device is being used for. And there are dozens of options out there for network level encryption.

        Russian operatives can still purchase things in Ukraine. I don’t see why you’d think they couldn’t? They don’t walk in in full military uniform and say “hey, I’m Russian military, I want to buy these things.”

        And yeah, the grunts on the field are idiots, we have that problem elsewhere as well. Remember that marine who accidentally leaked his bases location with a geotagged photo? Doesn’t mean higher ups are all idiots as well.

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