The World Is A Battlefield

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today on Starlink’s entanglement with an assortment of black markets that are funneling devices and service to regions and actors that some might prefer were denied access. Fully unpacking the challenges a commercial provider may face in this realm involves considering multiple facets which include attempting to adhere to disparate legal regimes, avoiding picking sides in a conflict, and limiting use cases to an approved list. Imagining technical, procedural, and legal solutions necessitates holistically examining a staggeringly complex world, making difficult value judgements, and accepting uncomfortable trade-offs.

Setting The Stage

Imagine you are Elon and trying to navigate Starlink’s usage by Ukraine as it finds itself embroiled in existential conflict with Russia. Perhaps circumstances tempt you to help blunt an humanitarian crisis as battle roils densely populated areas and a refugee crisis mounts. To get the ball rolling you open up your geo-fencing of that country, you waive subscription fees, and you start providing devices. As events cascade the US DoD begins to underwrite some of those expenses and European nations commence shipping terminals from their own stores. As the tides of battle continually shift, so, too, do the geographical lines of the conflict blur, and in turn what constitutes appropriate involvement by Starlink becomes a matter of increasingly heated debate.

To support armed forces in a besieged capital is one thing, to enable cross-border drone-powered counter-strikes another, and to support operations in an area annexed in an earlier conflict another still. How does the world feel about one of the world’s richest people possessing such power? How does that man experience the pressure to wield such clout for the benefit of various actors? Such leverage and fragility imply a host of risks. Various actors may choose to accept many of those risks for the time being as a matter of expediency and yet also seek increasingly to mitigate them as the opportunities arise to build better systems and in-house more capacity.

Considering Technical Solutions

At a high level, a service provider such as Starlink can employ a few overlapping controls, those controls spanning geographical fencing, device authorization, and account management. With each of these controls, however, the provider and the users will have to make difficult trade-offs between the risks of unauthorized use and the disruption of legitimate operations. Not only are black markets supporting the flow of terminals from all over the world into Russian hands but Ukrainian devices may also fall under Russian control during the frenzy of combat. The “front-lines”, meanwhile, are continually shifting and always fuzzy, making geo-fencing an unreliable technique when used in isolation at the boundaries. What beleaguered operator wants his terminal to prompt him to re-authenticate in the middle of a firefight? “Can you hear me now?”

We could probably imagine a few ways in a more idealized system to navigate all these challenges. Perhaps in certain theaters you require explicit whitelisting for terminals to stay operational. Maybe you require some kind of continual re-authorization of a login but with a generous windowing and related alerts to prevent surprise drop-out as well. Perhaps you complement that with the ability for remote commanders to immediately decom a terminal by hardware ID when captured. These techniques allow you to begin to deal with seized and illicit terminals around the blurry edges of meatspace battlefields. For extra credit maybe blend in some biometrics such as we’re now seeing in the consumer realm exemplified by continual wearing of a watch keeping it in an authenticated state and continual contact between that watch a related phone keeping the latter in an authenticated state. Also there is just no replacement for well engineered mission management systems and solid awareness of procedures which comes from continual re-design and re-education.

These are the messy realities and imperfect solutions that purpose-engineered tactical communications systems have been navigating for eons. What we are presently seeing, whether it be with Starlink terminals or commodity drones, the kind of technology previously limited to advanced militaries but now available to the genpop, is what you might expect when desperate circumstances engender furious innovation that lacks the time and resources to wrangle all the angles. Only the passage of time and the accumulation of brutal lessons will allow for the emergence of more robust solutions.

Pondering Who Benefits

Wireless communications infrastructure enables technological leapfrogging by actors who have lacked the capital to build out expensive wired communications systems but who can now relatively quickly and inexpensively operationalize wireless ones. This can mitigate, to a degree, the competitive advantage that many nations have historically enjoyed. It does, however, also come with a risk to the up-and-comers in many contexts, particularly when the solutions involve relying on expensive infrastructure such as satellites that other nations control, and it further implies a corresponding obligation and pressure to make decisions by the infrastructure owner, those decisions flowing not just from the immediate financial bottom line but also consideration of politics and optics.

Meanwhile, to the extent that infrastructure providers do throw their weight around and make values judgements, those choices will cascade into decisions by other players to grow their own networks for fear of finding themselves held hostage to the whims of foreign governments and corporations. Consider, for instance, the weaponizing of the western-controlled financial systems infrastructure to enact sanctions on Russia and seize assets. Play this forward to the rise of competing financial infrastructures and the potential decline of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The farther we go along this timeline the more likely we are to careen away from a singular and open “The Internet” toward a patchwork of proprietary “the internets” as national and corporate interests attempt to reduce the risks of dependency and capture returns on the investment of capital. It’s a crummy timeline but it seems to be our timeline. I miss the Internet of my childhood but I don’t see it coming back anytime soon.