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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
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/
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.