As if they didn’t already have more than enough.

Marijn Markus

AI Lead | Managing Data Scientist | Public Speaker

April 9, 2024

📡 “The black market that delivers Elon Musk’s Starlinks to #USA foes. The #satellite internet devices are helping Russian fighters in #Ukraine and paramilitary forces in #Sudan – SpaceX hasn’t shut them off”, – WSJ

😳 A salesman at Moscow-based online retailer “shopozz” has supplemented his usual business of peddling vacuum cleaners and dashboard phone mounts by selling dozens of Starlink internet terminals that wound up with Russians on the front lines in Ukraine.

❗️Although Russia has banned the use of Starlink, the satellite-internet service developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, middlemen have proliferated in recent months to buy the user terminals and ship them to Russian forces. That has eroded a battlefield advantage once enjoyed by Ukrainian forces, which also rely on the cutting-edge devices.

💡 Every Starlink has a user ID.
So they must have #Data on which Starlink us being used by which side.

🙄 But when Elon was asked if he can turn off the Starlinks terminals that are being used by Russia against Ukraine, he did not answer the question, and instead answered another question that nobody asked him:

Elon said that SpaceX does not sell #Starlink terminals directly to Russia 🤡

Intelligence #Ethics

StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦

Comment from :

Oleksiy Statsenko

The key point here ‘SpaceX hasn’t shut them off’. If SpaceX does, there won’t be any black market of starlinks…..which our comrade Muskovich most probably doesn’t want.

Nathan Wood

This is why state security apparatuses swear oaths to protect their nations and people from all enemies foreign *and* domestic. Musk and those like him may like to play the part of impartial, perhaps even benevolent actors just trying to do some good, but they are just as much the foot soldiers of tyrants and war criminals. The only difference is that Musk provides far more material and other aid than any foot soldier of Putin ever could.