No Captain, We Have Not Illegally Installed Starlink On This Warship

September 7, 2024 3:03 AM

The recent court-martial of a US Navy Chief Petty Officer revealed how the senior enlisted crew of the USS Manchester conspired to install a Starlink-based WiFi network aboard ship.
posted by Major Clanger (42 comments total)

The crime was not telling the Commanding Officer. The mistake was not letting the junior enlisted have access.
posted by Major Clanger at 3:05 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

I had to look up ranks and pay grades on Wikipedia, but it seems she got demoted one rank and pay grade (from senior chief to chief petty officer. Is that oddly mild? If you worked for me in a private company and you did something so outrageous to security, I would fire you for serious misconduct. I am amazed that you can so clearly know better (majored in digital security!) and be in a leadership position and lie about it and still stay in service.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:15 AM on September 7 [17 favorites]

The aspect of this story that I find the most astonishing is that it's even possible to run a wifi network on a Navy boat whose access points nobody but the conspirators who installed it is capable of tracking down. The fact that it wasn't found until somebody outside the conspiracy physically recognized the Starlink dish just boggles my mind, as does the fact that the boat apparently had no security system capable of flagging the existence of a strong but unauthorized wifi signal for further investigation. What the fuck, US Navy?
posted by flabdablet at 3:32 AM on September 7 [19 favorites]

The person who was not court martialed was not just a "a chief" but the ship's Command Senior Chief, the most senior enlisted person on the ship. And the rest of the chief's mess, the other senior enlisted personnel, were also in on the deception and later subject to commodore's mast. They're all in positions of trust and have more years of experience than anyone else on the ship so them banding together to lie and deceive to hide something can be wickedly effective. This is an incredibly disturbing series of events and I hope that many careers have been ended (but I also know of too many instances of careers, including those of Navy chiefs, that should have been over but continued and even thrived).
posted by ElKevbo at 4:28 AM on September 7 [12 favorites]

The thing that's interesting to me about this, is that it's a perfect example of an insider threat. There's no way someone outside could have done this. It also reflects how intertwined the internet has become with our lives that someone would do this so that they could have fast, reliable internet.
posted by Art_Pot at 4:42 AM on September 7 [5 favorites]

Navy commander relieved of duty after photo showed him firing rifle with scope backward
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:47 AM on September 7 [6 favorites]

And these clowns never even disabled SSID broadcast, so their secret network was shouting HI I’M STINKY 10 times a second? And it still took four months to notice it? 🤦🏼‍♂️
posted by McCoy Pauley at 4:58 AM on September 7 [10 favorites]

Aren’t these the ships that are totally useless? Which, presumably, explains why during a period of extreme tension in the Middle East they were doing a tour of the West Pacific. Perhaps we should let them check sports scores, if they have to tool around Micronesia in a busted ship.
posted by The River Ivel at 5:51 AM on September 7 [5 favorites]

Which, presumably, explains why during a period of extreme tension in the Middle East they were doing a tour of the West Pacific.

Empires don't work that way.
posted by mph at 6:07 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

Empires don't work that way.

Also, if you're of the mistaken impression that there are no ongoing international naval tensions in the West Pacific, the South China Sea would love a word...
posted by Inkoate at 6:22 AM on September 7 [19 favorites]

I’m assuming that they were able to get away with it for as long as they did because a) it was a bizarre thing to do, so higher ups weren’t looking for it and b) the people in charge of day-to-day monitoring of things like the communications infrastructure were in on the plot. It probably could have run longer, but the conspirators were pretty brazen and sloppy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:37 AM on September 7 [4 favorites]

It's a ship, not a boat. A boat is capable of being brought aboard a ship. (My dad was in the US Navy for 20 years from the '60s - 80s and will be extremely upset about this story.)
posted by SoberHighland at 6:53 AM on September 7 [7 favorites]

It's pretty nutty that the thing works on boats at all, the old HughesNet system specifically forbids using it on a moving platform. LEO vs GEO I guess.
posted by credulous at 7:17 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

I expect Starlink to work on a moving platform because it is purpose-built to provide internet to billionaire yachts.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:19 AM on September 7 [8 favorites]

if you're of the mistaken impression that there are no ongoing international naval tensions in the West Pacific, the South China Sea would love a word…

The western philippine sea conflict - if conflict is the right word? - is a different area to the western pacific, which seems to be the area around NZ/australia. Perhaps there is a different US Navy description of areas I’m not privy to - after all, a function of empire is to collapse the identity of everybody not of the ruling class into “citizens and non-citizens” - but assigning a malfunctioning warship to five eyes territory seems to be the very definition of scut work.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:43 AM on September 7

Someone with military experience can correct me if I’m wrong, but losing rank is a big deal. Their career is done and it is only a matter of months before they are out.

My brother, who is a chief petty officer, told me that to get any further promotions above his current grade means he must agree to a specific billet (assignment). Since the person in this story is no longer qualified for their billet (because they lost their rank), the Navy has no more room for them and they are now in the process of getting fired. They will leave with reduced benefits due to their loss of rank, as well.

To get immediately fired in the Navy, means you are losing all retirement benefits and leaving with essentially nothing. What the CMC did is a serious breach of trust that absolutely warrants loss of rank prior to formal dismissal but probably doesn't rise to the level of elimination of all benefits earned by their prior years of (presumably) good service.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:45 AM on September 7 [3 favorites]

They were smart enough to know how to do it, but not smart enough to know why they shouldn't have done it.
posted by tommasz at 7:45 AM on September 7 [3 favorites]

I read this when a friend who's married to a former Naval intelligence officer posted it. There were a lot of shock-face responses.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:56 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

the people in charge of day-to-day monitoring of things like the communications infrastructure were in on the plot

And it seems it also didn't occur to them not to put up a separate wifi network, but hang their own router off the existing wifi that bridged to starlink. Very doable and if you are really clever about it you just have a "printer" or "NAS" that is getting a lot of encrypted traffic from the lan and is pretty unremarkable.

Stinky is even the default ESSID, good grief people. Opsec!
posted by joeyh at 8:16 AM on September 7 [5 favorites]

Caption FTA, emphasis mine: An image included in a Navy investigation shows where the enlisted leadership of the littoral combat ship Manchester secretly installed a Starlink internet satellite dish on the outside of their ship last year. The red arrow was added. (Navy)

If they'd been really clever, they would've made a giant plywood arrow, painted it red, and affixed it to the hull pointing directly at the dish. Anyone spotting it would be "Yeah, right... nobody's that dumb..."
posted by xedrik at 8:28 AM on September 7

The red arrow was added to the photo, not to the ship.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:32 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

Someone with military experience can correct me if I’m wrong, but losing rank is a big deal.

I knew a 14-year veteran E-6 in the Army who lost a rank on fraternization charges. The "up or out" policy of "make E-6 by 13 years or you're out" went into effect the second they processed his demotion, and out he went.
posted by mph at 8:44 AM on September 7 [4 favorites]

Good grief. As a retired Air Force officer, I am shocked that the punishment was not more severe. The level of deception and outright lying is almost unbelievable.

And her background in digital security:
Marrero’s background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography. The investigation notes that she should have known better. “Her time in service and specialized training makes it clear the member knew or should have known the risks associated with an unauthorized Wi-Fi system,” the investigation states.

Again - amazed that the punishment was not more severe.
posted by davidmsc at 9:00 AM on September 7 [8 favorites]

it seems it also didn't occur to them not to put up a separate wifi network, but hang their own router off the existing wifi that bridged to starlink.

I mean, I'd like to think that anybody involved would simply have thought of a civvy-grade connection between the the ship's internal networks and an uncontrolled Internet gateway as a bridge too far, but given that they didn't even think to change Elon's deliberately annoying default SSID preemptively, I don't think I get to think that, I think they just didn't think of it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:45 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

It's a ship, not a boat. A boat is capable of being brought aboard a ship. (My dad was in the US Navy for 20 years from the '60s - 80s and will be extremely upset about this story.)

Then the status of boat and ship is pegged to how large the largest ship is. The biggest ship in the world today could fit inside a much larger ship in the future, and that one into another, until the entire universe is a boat. Unless they find a bigger universe...
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:53 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

_Cole_ got sent home on a ship, so that makes everything at least up to the Burke DDGs (about 9000 tons, 60x500 feet) boats rather than ships.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:01 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

I expect Starlink to work on a moving platform because it is purpose-built to provide internet to billionaire yachts.

It's currently providing it to my house as well. Download and upload throughputs according to speedtest.net are almost always above 300Mb/s and 30Mb/s respectively, literally ten times the performance I used to get from my old National Broadband Network connection. Average ping to 8.8.8.8 is typically 20ms, also better than NBN's 23. All of which is utterly bonkers, given that my Starlink dish is talking to sats over 500km from my house while my NBN fixed-wireless antenna links to a tower in direct line of sight across a valley, literally a thousand times closer.

Starlink makes no kind of economic sense at its current price point and its absurdly huge LEO constellation will fuck terrestrial astronomy for the foreseeable future, but it really does work better than any other Internet access technology for those of us in under-served rural areas.
posted by flabdablet at 10:10 AM on September 7 [3 favorites]

And her background in digital security:
Marrero’s background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography. The investigation notes that she should have known better. “Her time in service and specialized training makes it clear the member knew or should have known the risks associated with an unauthorized Wi-Fi system,” the investigation states.

This alone is enough to make me think the possibility of involvement by a foreign power cannot be foreclosed, and that every avenue of investigation should be pursued on a continuing basis.
posted by jamjam at 10:44 AM on September 7 [2 favorites]

I used to be part of a team that installed ad-hoc satellite networks on USN ships. Doing so following procedure takes at least 6 months (*) and lots and lots of paperwork, because you have to take into account power, interference with other ship's comms, making sure you don't accidentally microwave someone, etc. I'm amazed that the punishment wasn't more severe.

(*) The one time we fast-tracked the process was when Bushie wanted to do the "Mission Accomplished" thing, and even that took a couple weeks.
posted by Runes at 10:49 AM on September 7 [6 favorites]

the possibility of involvement by a foreign power

The fact that this isn't being treated as an immense breach of security and possibly espionage by an enemy force is the biggest flaw in all of this: people do stupid shit when they're bored but for it to have gotten this far should set up alarms all up and down the chain. Not even that these guys were spies, but once the switch was flipped 'on' it literally became "somebody left the garage door all night" situation and who knows what access was gained.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:16 AM on September 7 [1 favorite]

master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management

To me this sounds like a heavy-on-the-MBA situation. I'm not so sure I would have expected the "information security and digital management" specialty to be worth the paper it's written on compared to a similar thing from an engineering background (something like, "master's in Computer Science with a specialty in cryptography and digital security" -- that's a person who's heard of things like back doors in more-than-passing and would immediately start making some interesting faces when reading this story... it's me I made those faces).

All of which is not to say this is excusable. Quite the contrary, as as this thread is making clear, a lot of people see why this is an incredibly stupid idea even without (presumably) special expertise. I have to wonder if there is something else at play here, some reason she seemed to go to such unreasonable extents of deception and general WTFery to keep the system up. Like, surely you take it offline the moment you get wind of suspicion from the higher ups? Is there some kind of internet addiction disorder angle at play?
posted by axiom at 11:17 AM on September 7 [2 favorites]

Starlink with intersat laser comms is a cool 21st century technology. Basically Elon could provide his Xitter antisocial media service to Brazil with zero ground presence anywhere in or near the country, other than overflying its cities @ ~300 miles up & 17,000mph...
posted by torokunai at 11:43 AM on September 7

It's pretty nutty that the thing works on boats at all, the old HughesNet system specifically forbids using it on a moving platform. LEO vs GEO I guess.

It's the satellite dishes and how the infrastructure works. HughesNet dishes have a tiny field of view and have to be aimed at the satellite. Since it stays in the same place this isn't really a dealbreaker. You'll also generally be assigned to a single spot beam. If you're moving you run the risk of losing the field of view to the satellite and/or moving into a different spot beam. The first is the user's problem, which most people would then make HughesNet's problem. The second is a big HughesNet problem because they've probably calculated spot beams in advance. They barely work at the best of times and when an oversubscribed spot beam at peak times has yet another person they weren't expecting wander into it the problem becomes worse for everyone in the beam.

Starlink on the other hand has phased array antennas. The antenna is literally constructing a beam pointed at the active satellite based on the phase differences of over a thousand mini antennas. It's only possible based on the fact that we can put enough computing power on a chip so cheaply to do the math involved in this black magic fuckery of pointing a radio beam at a satellite on a 90 minute LEO. They are flat and have massive views of the sky, like 100+ degrees. Point it up and you basically can see satellites. Which is good because the satellites are moving pretty quickly and you're switching them about every four minutes.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:02 PM on September 7 [6 favorites]

"Basically Elon could provide his Xitter antisocial media service to Brazil with zero ground presence anywhere in or near the country, other than overflying its cities @ ~300 miles up & 17,000mph..."

They're in fixed, predictable orbits. I wouldn't think weapons most governments have (and quite a few others [lasers and such]) would have a problem. If agreements breakdown.
posted by aleph at 12:46 PM on September 7

Loose lips sink ships

Rogue wifi kills my guy
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:53 PM on September 7 [9 favorites]

Then the status of boat and ship is pegged to how large the largest ship is.

To be fair, there are plenty of ships that are not designed to go on other ships, so that's not quite as much of a problem. It is, however, a bad metric, since there are plenty of boats that can't go on other boats and/or ships -- think tugboats, river boats, many fishing boats, etc. A more sensible definition is that boats operate in coastal and inland waters and ships operate in deep waters. This discounts boats that are carried by ships for purposes of ship to ship or ship to land transport, safety, maintenance, and the like.

Amusingly, the littoral combat ships are designed to operate in coastal waters (that's what the "littoral" means, so they are closer to boats than ships from an operational point of view.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:15 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

a submarine is called a boat but technically a ship.

I'm not helping.

Chapman Piloting concurs that one of the major aspects of a boat is that it can be put on a ship.
posted by clavdivs at 4:15 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

The Command Master Chief (sometimes "Command Senior Chief" if they're not a Master Chief in a smaller command, generically Senior Enlisted Advisor) is basically the person indirectly in charge of all enlisted sailors on the ship. A sailor technically has a Chief Petty Officer and a Division Officer in their reporting chain of command, but the CMC is like the combined union rep and mafia boss. All the chiefs would say they "technically" work for a division officer, but really work for the CMC.

As such, she was supposed to be the stern parent, the enforcer of standards, the mentor for chiefs in their professional development, and the friendly encouragement and/or kick in the ass for junior enlisted sailors. That she herself was involved in misconduct absolutely removes her ability to do that job. All credibility lost immediately.

She must have had a lot of dirt on a lot of people, for another chief to volunteer to take the rap and for the CSO to continue to keep something so obviously a big deal from the CO. And I don't see the actual sentence in the story but she would be incredibly, lottery-winning lucky not to be punitively discharged. Doing the thing would be bad enough, regardless of her degree rigorousness, she was an IT specialist by rate and knew the score. The jaw-dropping part is the cover up, false official statements, and falsifying documents. That's a super-quick way to get the biggest hammer legally available.
posted by ctmf at 5:33 PM on September 7

You don't have to be ignorant of the technical risk or even the rules for networking equipment to recognize, at the point you're lying and falsifying documents, you're doing something you would kick a junior sailor out of the Navy for.
posted by ctmf at 5:36 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

Okay, as a non Navy person, why did the people involved not just go "Sorry, we had a bet about having full wi-fi under sail and it got out of hand" from the first questioning by officers.
posted by indexy at 5:55 PM on September 7

That's exactly what they should have done, that's when they had the chance for someone to take the rap, get a wrist slap (the CMC would have a lot of influence in that if not implicated), and everyone moves on, no harm done.

That's what they should have done the minute the rest of the crew started getting wind of it and asking. Whoops, this is unsustainable, we need an exit strategy stat. (But an experienced sailor would have know ahead of time that was destined to happen; there are no secrets on ships for long).

But that's also when they had a big (completely foreseeable) problem: they can't just go up there and throw the thing overboard. There are lookouts stationed all around the ship who would see something, but you could probably play that off as something else. But up there by the masts is an exclusion area. You need special "working aloft" permission and safety precautions to go up there where rotating radars and RF energy are. I haven't heard the term "blanket aloft" in the story, but I'm betting that was an inport period where everything was made safe up there and tagged out, and kept that way for general work without the need for specific work authorization tracking.

So I guess their strategy became deny, deny, deny but it kept getting more and more difficult and outrageous with each desperate cover up. (As anyone with half a brain would have predicted).

I just wonder how many of those chiefs were caught in an awkward spot. I bet many of them would have vehemently objected and prevented it from happening, but finding out once it's already too late? Do you report it and almost certainly blow up the whole chief's quarters? Legally, the correct answer is yes, but that would be really hard.
posted by ctmf at 7:28 PM on September 7

The point of no return was the CO announcing at all-hands call (which is often on TV throughout the ship) that there were no wifi networks. She didn't say that to tell the junior sailors. It was basically a coded last-chance amnesty announcement. The next step in the playbook would be for one of the perpetrators to knock on the stateroom door and say "Maam, you just said there are no wifi networks. That's incorrect, and until now I had thought you knew." She would have pretended to believe them.
posted by ctmf at 7:38 PM on September 7