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Navy officer lost job for secretly installing internet on warship to check social media (fortune.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A U.S. Navy chief who wanted the internet so she and other enlisted officers could scroll social media, check sports scores and watch movies while deployed had an unauthorized Starlink satellite dish installed on a warship and lied to her commanding officer to keep it secret, according to investigators.

Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats.

The Navy quietly relieved Grisel Marrero, a command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, in August or September 2023, and released information on parts of the investigation this week.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (26 children)

There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (7 children)

it took the Navy months to find it.

I'm surprised they didn't hide the SSID... It's likely nobody would have even found the network then.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Effectively they did through obfuscation. The Command Chief renamed it to look like their wireless printers. She did that because so many more junior people (relative to the Chief's Mess) complained that the officers tried to check (with their phones) for some wifi Internet. They couldn't find it because they thought it was a printer. The Command Chief is obviously trusted since she's the most senior enlisted but she's also the one that lead the entire scheme. When asked directly by the Commander, she denied it existed, so after not finding it, they just assumed it was a rumor. So, they had a ship-wide call and told everyone that there was no rogue Internet access point on the ship.

It took months because when a tech from a port they were at was installing a Starshield transceiver they physically saw the Starlink transceiver.

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