This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
First off, not an officer, a high ranking enlisted(E-8) personal was the culprit.
Second, she was a Information systems technician. She literally dealt with making sure communication was safe and secure.
I know congress has to be involved to knock her down below E-7 but they need to get on that.
So she was an NCO and the writter was clueless. Ok.
And for that kind of opsec fuckup there really shouldn't there be discharge/prison time ?
If the military imprisoned soldiers for being dumb, there would be no military.
What this NCO did was not dumb; it was calculated and intentional violations of multiple rules and regulations they (and the others involved) knew very well. Then they tried to cover it up when people started asking questions.
Absolutely no sympathy for them in my book. These are supposed to be the leaders other enlisted look to emulate.
Exactly. You only imprison people for malicious actions. If they're just dumb, demote and reassign elsewhere.
First off, not an officer, a high ranking enlisted(E-8) personal was the culprit.
Typically, anything E-4 or higher is considered a Non-Commisioned Officer.
EDIT further clarification: from my experience in the Canadian Army, what "Officers" means depends on context. Most often (and what !Bluefalcon@discuss.tchncs.de probably meant) it means just Commissioned Officers. Other times, it's anyone in leadership, including NCOs.
I totally understand where you're coming from. It's absolutely not uncommon to casually refer to high-rank NCOs as Officers (in Canada at least)
[Source: Family in CAF and RCMP]
Good that’s a severe risk she* put everyone and the ship in. It was 17 officers in total and they attempted cover up
There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.
Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.
As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.
But why was it hard? Surely they're accessing it w/ wifi, and scanning for wi-fi networks really isn't that hard. A military ship should have a good handle on what networks they expect, and they should be able to easily triangulate where the signal is coming from.
Also, military ships should have really strict accounting for what is brought on board. A Starlink receiver isn't particularly small, and it should be plainly obvious to security when that comes on-board.
I think it's awesome that Starlink is so accessible for the average joe, but that's a completely different topic than what's allowed on military property. This sounds like a pretty big, embarassing security fail for the US military, and more people than this individual should be reprimanded, if not fired.
It was the Chief of the ship who installed it. She was the highest ranked enlisted person on the ship. She would have the access and ability to get just about anything on board that she wanted. The fact she was able to is easy to see. The fact the she was willing to and has obtained such a high rank is pretty impressive (and stupid).
The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/
It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called "STINKY" and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.
It doesn't look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that's because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.
They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.
The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.
The degree of incompetence needed for SIGINT/ELINT operations to fail to discover such a transceiver for 6+ months strains credibility.
I'm guessing this is a ruse to convince adversaries that the Navy can't detect Starlink transceivers even when they are aboard their own ships. This is much more likely to be disinformation intended to drive adversaries to use Starlink than it is to be a legitimate failure of intelligence gathering.
Unless they just turn the satellites off over the country’s that don’t want them to avoid conflict or jam all signals because they do be that way.
How the fuck did she think this was anything close to a good idea?! This shows a profound lack of good judgement, and a huge failure of both respect for her job and for the safety of the crew.
Yeah true, but tiktok
Chiefs are enlisted, not officers. C'mon, AP, this is like day one stuff. Despite the name "petty officer" and term "non-commissioned officer", there's no such thing as an "enlisted officer".
Also, "stinky" was the default SSID on Starlink, not a secret code word they came up with.
Was gonna call you out for messing that up; warrant officers are officers, they just started out as enlisted men.
Then I realized we are talking navy ranks, and my best knowledge of that is from halo.
Enlisted dont even have ranks, they have rates. They also have a rating, which refers to your role, I.e the job you do.
I'd be curious to see the dish install. It's hard to imagine how someone would think it'd go unnoticed, on a warship, no less.
Ship officers heard the scuttlebutt about STINKY, of course, and they began asking questions and doing inspections, but they never found the concealed device. On August 18, though, a civilian worker from the Naval Information Warfare Center was installing an authorized SpaceX "Starshield" device and came across the unauthorized SpaceX device hidden on the weatherdeck.
Heh.
Why the F were they broadcasting the SSID on a "secret" wifi network? That's just asking to get caught. If they had hidden the SSID most people would never have known about it.
You're expecting intelligence and competence from these people? The ones who thought it would be a good idea to violate a half dozen regulations to even install it in the first place?
Supposedly she was an information and IT specialist... Setting the thing up to not broadcast its SSID should have been one of the first things they thought of. But probably she didn't know it could be done, which again speaks to her overall incompetence.
Extra fun is that the head chief never gave anyone else the password. She logged into each of the other chiefs devices.
She could have 100% also typed in the ssid at the time. It would have taken almost no extra effort.
You can view WiFi passwords for saved networks on pretty much every OS. There's no reason to be secretive about entering WiFi passwords, at least to the people whose devices you're entering the password on.
Ugh, Elon continues to have the absolute most inane sense of humor on the planet. I'm not sure if it's him or Zuck who are more clearly aliens wearing human skin
Multiple people were involved, and it was probably mounted in a location where other people were unlikely to know that it was out of place.
Imagine being such a selfish piece (s) of shit that you put the operational security of every single one of your crewmates in jeopardy ~~for social media~~.
Every single person involved in this needs to stand tall before the man.
