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.
I’d be curious to see the dish install. It’s hard to imagine how someone would think it’d go unnoticed, on a warship, no less.
Yeah, same. It’s not like there were windows they could point it out of, so it would have to be exposed and somehow disguised.
Lol, in college, some guy on my floor wasn’t happy with the dorm’s cable TV because it didn’t have NFL Sunday Ticket and brought his DirecTV dish/receiver from home. His room was facing the right way, so he was able to set the dish up in the room next to the window. This sortof reminds me of that but without the national security implications.
Ship officers heard the scuttlebutt about STINKY, of course, and they began asking questions and doing inspections, but they never found the concealed device. On August 18, though, a civilian worker from the Naval Information Warfare Center was installing an authorized SpaceX “Starshield” device and came across the unauthorized SpaceX device hidden on the weatherdeck.
Heh.
Why the F were they broadcasting the SSID on a “secret” wifi network? That’s just asking to get caught. If they had hidden the SSID most people would never have known about it.
Ugh, Elon continues to have the absolute most inane sense of humor on the planet. I’m not sure if it’s him or Zuck who are more clearly aliens wearing human skin
It’s Zuck. Elon is just a perpetual 13yo. TBH, he’s not entirely unlike Peter Pan (from the book).
Good that’s a severe risk she* put everyone and the ship in. It was 17 officers in total and they attempted cover up
Chiefs are enlisted, not officers. C’mon, AP, this is like day one stuff. Despite the name “petty officer” and term “non-commissioned officer”, there’s no such thing as an “enlisted officer”.
Also, “stinky” was the default SSID on Starlink, not a secret code word they came up with.
Was gonna call you out for messing that up; warrant officers are officers, they just started out as enlisted men.
Then I realized we are talking navy ranks, and my best knowledge of that is from halo.
Yes, warrant officers are commissioned though. (Technically the most junior rank of Warrant Officer is a warrant from the branch secretary, not a commission, but it’s effectively the same. All other warrant officer ranks, Chief Warrant Officer 2 and up, are commissioned by the president.)
Hence the officer in the title, yes.
Warrent officers are also generally insanely talented motherfuckers that had too much disdain for the bureaucracy of the military to start over as an 0-1, and instead sit in a weird middle ground of “so much talent they were elevated up to officers from the enlisted ranks by direct request.”
That means that they are right, and you are wrong, and I mean that with complete respect.
Enlisted dont even have ranks, they have rates. They also have a rating, which refers to your role, I.e the job you do.
Yes rates are used most of the time in forms of address. However you do have a rank, for example E-5 or Petty Officer Second Class. However when addressing enlisted you’d usually say something like CTM2, IT2 etc… Until you hit chief then you are just called Chief, or senior if you are a Senior Chief, Master Chief doesn’t get abbreviated to Master for obvious reasons, and MCPON is usually referred to as “mic pon” phonetically for Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy.
The link below this parent with the pics shows tweets from Musk saying the point of naming it STINKY is to encourage customizing the name. I guess not everyone knew their LinkSys ID # in the dorms and/or doesn’t immediately turn their wifi into a pun. Just in case anyone else found that default name to be suspicious. They’re supposedly now back to just starlink
Serious question: Was this actually a likely or possible security risk?
Very yes. They could reveal their location for starters, which could spoil a mission and put lives at risk, but if they use the same device on both this and the ships network, you risk compromising the ship’s network or even the Navy itself, giving our enemies all kinds of sensitive info.
We are in the midst of a world war being waged in cyberspace and the US is losing. Incidents like this are a genuine threat.
I was assuming they had their own hidden network going. I can’t imagine they would be dumb enough to mess with the existing ship network.
There are regular unprotected Internet channels, and then there are secure networks like SIPRNet. Devices must not arbitrarily cross from one to the other. That’s where a leak can happen. That’s one thing I learned working for a company with an Army contract 20 years ago. Once a device was set up for secure access on the military network, our policy was to never have it touch the civilian Internet again. It had to be 100% verified destroyed at the end of its lifetime. I don’t know details of how they handle it these days with mobile devices everywhere.
I don’t know the exact details of their setup but I would imagine if they have phones on the ship there’s a network they can connect to on the ship that’s not their starlink internet.
Aside from being able to possibly identify the starlink waveforms with passive RF surveillance or being able to identify the location of the ship through hacking spacex or their satellites, if they went back and forth between being connected on their phones to the ship network and the internet, their phones could have been compromised, leaving the possibility also of them being a perfect pivot point for hackers interested in exfilling important government secrets.
Overall just very bad opsec for a ship and definitely not a good idea.
Yes, it is a likely risk. Having an unauthorized broadcast signal is a security risk because it can be used to locate and target the ship, allows for crew to communicate with the outside world without the oversight that they would normally have, and is outside the control of the ship’s command.
There are many valid reasons for the military to be limited to authorized channels for communication.
And we know that Elmo probably reports directly to Putin, insane that they got such a highly placed asset who’s also the richest man in the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
except SpaceX is selling for all we know to be military starlink with extra capability to the US goverment.
He doesn’t. He may serve Russian interests at times, but he’s not a direct report the way Tim Pool and many of our government elected officials are.
Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.
Itself? Not really.
If a ship is close enough to pick up an SSID they are close enough for any number of other methods. And starlink is theoretically trusted by the us government.
But if they were actually locked down for a real mission (not the stuff you do to make people feel important) then we could have seen the same kinds of telegram leaks Russian has near constantly.
The GPS is recording where they are, which can report to things like fitness applications. These are not so secure and can identify where they are, have been, and likely will go next.
And if there is not immense amounts of “do not have a fucking fitbit” levels of warnings and policies, that is a problem for the US Navy itself. Because a lot of those will also cache data and send the last N days once they get back to shore.
Again, unless they were ACTUALLY doing sensitive stuff (rather than just “sensitive by default” to protect Leadership™ from having to think and make decisions) then we are looking at the same problem the russians have in Ukraine.
Otherwise? It is a policy violation, not a security violation, in and of itself. What people then share on social media is on them.
And a friendly reminder: Policy is made to minimize the risk of a security issue and you should follow it (if only because you are paid to). But it is VERY important to understand what you are actually protecting yourself from so that you understand if policy is even doing anything. Otherwise you get complete insanity as more and more bureaucrats and Leaders™ add bullshit so they can get a bonus for being “security minded”.
Navy isn’t blameless either, the fact that they needed to do it at all means the Navy failed to provide a vital moral service even though they have plenty of options.
I was in the Navy years ago, the official options for connecting on board when underway was an exercise in frustration just to get some time on the limited number of computers and when you did it was like 30 minutes you got with something around <1 Mbps.
From what I hear from friends still in, nothing has improved in years.
First of all, chill lmao. Second, I’m not saying it’s like 50/50 its more like 95/5, they absolutely shouldn’t have done what they did but big navy is not entirely blameless. As chiefs they were probably at 15,16,17+ years in and had already dealt with most of the BS they could have ridden it out to retirement lol They’re going to get what they deserve.
But had Big Navy actually cared about providing a decent upgraded official service to its sailors, this probably would never have happened.
I was in the Navy and I know exactly how the service that is actually provided is and I’m entirely unsurprised by this. Actually I take that back, I am surprised that it took this long to happen. I also know exactly how leadership treats moral services for its sailors (especially sailors on board ship), if it costs money it’s going to be nothing but lip service. It’s a big reason I opted to separate as soon as I could.
