White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.
In any healthy democracy, this would have been seen as a scandal exposing signs of corruption and would have likely resulted in the dissolution of the government and early election.
But the US is not a healthy democracy.
The corruption is clear, obvious, and blatant. Everyone knows about it, but there’s not a whole lot they can do. A good chunk of our citizens picked it on purpose.
There is actually so much we and the courts/Congress can do. We’re just choosing not to do it, unfortunately.
Why don’t you call the police? Serious question, not sure how it works in the US, but there should be some institution where you can report someone on suspicion of committing a crime. They would then need to investigate.
Not to worry, “some cited security concerns.” We’re all set
Besides the security concerns, I want to know what they’re using it for, and how much bullshit they’re hiding by avoiding the official network.
It’s certainly not a speed and convenience thing.
Yes. That’s the joke. I’m unsure how the burning terminator dying with a thumbs up wasn’t clear enough that there is obviously more to this than just “security concerns”
Given it’s unrepresentative voting system I think how much is enough to be a democracy. T hot take for people that see democracy. Two parties to choose from is just one more than a clear dictatorship. If neither actually represents you then yeah it’s not healthy .
Agreed, except for one point. It’s an oligarchy. Our “dictator” was just selling cars on the White House lawn. Capitalism won to get to it’s late stages, happy to let racist hatred and russian influence fester for continued capital self-interest
If you live in the DC area, absolutely do NOT sign up for this service.
100% chance that the government, as well as musks companies would be monitoring you directly 24/7.
Well now the Chinese and Russians just need to get a way into Shartlink and they can also monitor you and your government.
they’re already in, guaranteed
Yeah, we fired the cyber security people.
I recently bought a van and am planning on road tripping while working. I had assumed that I would get starlink so I could work pretty much anywhere.
That is dead and I guess I’ll have to make sure I’m within range of a cell tower on working days.
Run everything through a VPN tunnel instead?
“some areas of the property could not get cell service”
Like the bunkers? Like hell did the white house not have cell service.
I can believe areas of the White House have no cell service, on purpose. Remember when they found those fake cell towers around DC?
https://www.wired.com/story/dcs-stingray-dhs-surveillance/
I bet at some point they installed some cell phone jammers specifically to limit the amount of foreign spying that could be done by fake towers, and they simply “forgot” to tell the incoming Trump administration…
Plenty of federal facilities have garbage reception. I think it’s probably due to the bureaucracy involved in telecoms installing their hardware on sensitive property. The White House in particular probably has lots of thick walls/armor attenuating signals, too.
Also how did they let that excuse get past the technical teams who should be implementing this? They added Star Link to the data center that supports the White House and then have traffic run through hard wires. This does absolutely nothing to improve spots with bad WiFi.
Yalls remember the security concerns when that sailor secretly installed a star link on a US warship?
Are you a white house staffer carrying a heavy stack of top secret documents? Do you desperately need both hands to vape or to text roger stone a progress report? Try DOCDASH!
Just request a docdasher in app and a helpful person like Yvegeny, Dmitri or Boris will show up to the white house on a motorcycle, take your documents from you, not copy and transmit them, and just keep them very safe, like tippy top safe.
Musk is literally a James Bond villain. Literally. Like LITERALLY a Bond villain.
Edit: minus the genius and charisma
Imagine how galling this must be for Jeff Bezos. He’s put so much effort into his Bond villain persona. The guy even now looks like Dr Evil. But he’s being out eviled by a pudgy, dorky-looking South African nepo-baby.
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Goldmember got charisma in droves though
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Ah yes, because what the white house needs is an inferior ISP to plug the gaps that could easily be filled by proper wireless access point configuration and distribution.
This is definitely not going to come back to haunt us later.
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FFS, can we deal with these fucking traitors already?!?
Well it looks like more people need to be screwed over, I guess maybe after it affects enough “Me’s” it’ll probably stay the same. The amount of damage that will be done before the American people stand up will be immense.
I honestly cannot believe that the average American is in agreement with this and that they think holding signs up will do anything. Sorry but they say violence is never the right course of action, but I think in this case you might need to see if that well regulated militia is ready to defend your freedom.
And shame on the Democratic party for just rolling over.
Somebody is going to have to explain to me how starlink is going to boost WiFi availability if it is routed from offsite using their current fibre network.
Yeah, this doesn’t make sense to me. Starlink needs a dish that has to be outside without trees covering it, so it isn’t like they can place new routers around the building that receive Starlink and have wifi capability. They will still have to run a cable from the dish(es?) to new wireless routers. How is that ANY different from just running new wireless routers from their existing fiber?
I do not believe for a second that communications within the Whitehouse are inadequate, or if they were, could not be solved in a secure manner. Slapping a Starlink in a few places sounds like an invitation to backdoor all communications. Not only that, it is an invitation to sidestep obligations to preserve government records.
The existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was “overtaxed” so they just threw up satellite instead of , I don’t know, improving the Wi-Fi infrastructure? There’s perfectly fine WiFi at sprawling work and college campuses, and stadiums that seat tens of thousands of people. What a joke.
Network infrastructure is a science and we don’t need no damn science in this country!
Starlink should be abolished.
With how spacex and Tesla are going I wouldn’t be surprised if it abolishes itself.
Enjoy the high latency.
Are they then routing all starlink traffic to Russia?
It would be a shame if some foreign actor could monitor Starlink internal networks.
