I’m reading here:
As Starlink’s user base grows, the Iranian government is likely to intensify efforts to restrict satellite internet access.
How could they do so?
By not allowing it to be sold. The antenna is a physical product, that needs to legally enter the country, legally be sold, and Starlink needs to be able to legally charge you monthly subscription fees. If they can’t sell it to you then you are not getting it.
Sure, you can get a fake address and payment details in a neighboring country, get a subscription there, then smuggle the antenna in, but that’s much more difficult, hence the access is restricted.
What if you pay it via crypto or some off the books shit like that?
If you have to do that in order to access something, then the access is restricted, isn’t it?
Yeah but far easier than without it. I do agree, making something just a little harder always means fewer people using it.
You still have to have the equipment to transmit to the satelites. Getting the equipment in the country will need to go through customs. And if they check the package, they will confiscate it (and possibly fine you, or jail you).
Example: The US passed two different laws that were signed into law, in order to stop the sale of DJI drones because of “National Security”. DJI drone imports are getting stopped at customs.
I mean, its not illegal for Americans to buy DJI drones (as of writing this comment), I don’t think they have technically banned the sales yet, but they are already trying to stop DJI drones from entering the country, customs are confiscating it / sending it back. (You can still buy them from resellers in the US if they have old stock, or if they somehow got the new stock in)
nazi Germany make listening to Allied radio illegal.
Same thing with this. They’ll criminialize it, and arrest anyone with Starlink equipment.
(Also much easier to find you, since they can detect your signals when you upload, unlike listening to radio where there’s no EM emission from the receiver)
You can make radio receivers pretty hard to find. I think that shortwave radios are an even better example, where they’ve been used by intelligence agencies for effective unidirectional communications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries.
But yeah, agree with you that if you want to want to have a transmitter, then you’re out of luck. Can’t hide that.
considers
You might be able to run just the downlink over Starlink, if it had a purely-unidirectional mode (which it probably doesn’t today). Most consumer bandwidth use is asymmetric. Hiding the downlink is hard, but the uplink might be easier.
It would have unusual-from-a-traffic-analysis, unidirectional, non-sustained traffic, but because the bandwidth usage is less, easier to hide in other traffic using steganography. Certainly have different traffic properties, at any rate, than a traditional VPN.
Another issue is that the receiver has to be visible from the sky. There are substances which are not radio-transparent but are visible light transparent. I’m sure that someone has done this.
kagis
Ah. Someone doing exactly this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/14blm4x/how_hide_starlink_dish_from_skyview_without/
how hide starlink dish from skyview without signal loss ?
i live in iran and government censored internet
how can i hide its dish or make it hard to trace by government?
which material is not blocking starlink signal so i can cover the dish and hide it visually ?
Fiberglass, styrofoam aka polystyrene foam, various other polymeric foams used in packaging and insulation, not too thick polymeric (such as polyethylene) sheets. But these materials often have a bunch of additives that change RF transparency. You may have to try a few choices.
Also, if the government really wants to find these, I suppose that they could probably go after them with something like high-resolution radar imaging from aircraft.
Why specifically upload?
I meant “transmit from your starlink antenna”, so my brain just chose the word “upload” because my brain is lazy… 😅
So… to clarify: sending a request for “wikipedia.org” is still gonna transmit, which means they will find you, even if you aren’t “uploading”
Wouldn’t that signal be comparatively pretty weak, and difficult to parse from surrounding radiation?
Not really, flying over it with an detector would spot the frequency used pretty handily.
Starlink transmits in a relatively narrow frequency band that wouldn’t have a lot of transmitters (14-14.5ghz) in a random urban area. It also transmits pretty broadly, because it needs to hit a wide area of the sky because of moving satellites.
You’d get some false positives with a detector drone, but not that many.
As others have said, they can punish people harshly for using it.
Then there is also the extreme option, they could jam the signal.
They can make it really fucking suck if you’re caught using it. They may be able to use drones or land based detectors to try and hone in on transmitters… but the classic response from authoritarian governments is just to escalate penalties.
If the have leverage against Starlink
Bribe Musk.
