The shield in space.

Brandon Karpf: I mean, this is a situation that we have never seen before. It's not clear the contracting. It's not clear the liability. It's not clear the sources of control. This is a situation that, I think, rightfully brings up the question of nationalizing technology, which is kind of anathema to the U.S. way of functioning, but when you have a technology that is so critical to the functions of national security and defense, there does need to be more control implemented.

Maria Varmazis: Welcome. I'm Maria Varmazis, and you're listening to "T-Minus Space-Cyber Briefing." In this show, we examine the evolution of cybersecurity in the global and orbital infrastructure that powers, protects, and connects our lives. [ Music ] Hi, everyone, thank you for joining me. Now, we don't generally get into current events on "T-Minus," but today's episode is an exception where we are discussing current events regarding Starshield data being throttled without warning in Ukraine. The information we included in this discussion was current at the time of recording, but this story is continuing to evolve. On that note, I highly recommend subscribing to our "Signals and Space" newsletter. If you aren't already subscribed, you can do that at thecyberwire.com/newsletters. Our "Signals and Space" newsletter is where we are sharing the latest on this story as the news continues to unfold. As our understanding of the facts evolves with more information, we will be sure to provide the most updated sources in the newsletter so you can stay on top of the whole story, but in the meantime, over to Dave Bittner, my N2K colleague and host of "The CyberWire Daily," to lead us into this conversation.

Dave Bittner: It is my pleasure to bring our little group back together again. Of course, I'm talking about my co-host, Maria Varmazis here at N2K CyberWire. Maria, great to see you, as always.

Maria Varmazis: Likewise, Dave, thank you.

Dave Bittner: And joining us once again, Brandon Karpf, who is Leader of International Public-Private Partnerships at NTT. Brandon, it's great to have you back.

Brandon Karpf: The little rascals are again together.

Maria Varmazis: Oh, merge idea.

Dave Bittner: Yes, yes, so what I want to touch on today is, sort of, breaking news as we record this, which is the whole situation in Ukraine in relationship to Starlink, the private version, the military version, warfare in general, public-private partnerships, and all those kinds of things. Maybe we just start with some descriptive stuff. Maria, can you take us in with what seems to be happening with this? What's the basic story?

Maria Varmazis: You've got it. This is as of the time of this recording, so things will absolutely have changed by the time this goes live. As of time of this recording, the news was, yesterday, the day before we recorded, that Ukrainian defense ministry officials were saying on the ground they were -- their soldiers are reporting, essentially, some of their drones were being disconnected from the Starshield -- which is the military version of Starlink -- Starshield network whenever those drones would hit an apparent speed limit of 160 kilometers an hour, which did not exist before. They were not told of any such speed limits. They were not warned. It just sort of happened out of nowhere overnight, and the absolute latest, again, as of the time of this recording -- I just found this out an hour ago myself -- was that Elon Musk said that wasn't us because yesterday when we covered this story on "The CyberWire Daily," we'd had absolutely no indication from anyone, either from the DoD or from SpaceX about where this was coming from. Since then, we have learned -- at least Elon Musk has said -- it wasn't SpaceX's idea to impose such a speed limit. As far as I know, some of that seems to have been lifted. I don't think it has been entirely lifted. It's not entirely clear what has happened there, but essentially, SpaceX is pointing the fingers back to, I suppose, the Pentagon saying this didn't come from us, so that is what we know.

Dave Bittner: Okay. Brandon, what's your take on all of this, the broader view of these sorts of operations and the underpinnings?

Brandon Karpf: Yeah, I mean, at the highest level, right? I think this highlights the fact that warfare is now inextricably linked to private-sector resources. I mean, yeah, Starshield is the military version of Starlink, but it's still Starlink--

Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

Brandon Karpf: -- which is managed and operated by SpaceX. The fact of the matter is all of the reporting from Ukraine, basically, says that without Starlink, Ukraine would not be able to defend itself against Russia's invasion, at least not to the extent to which they've been able to. They've been able to take advantage of battlefield communications in a way that has made them incredibly effective, putting pressure on Russia's economy, their oil infrastructure, their communications infrastructure, their transportation infrastructure -- targeting not just Russian forces in Ukraine, but Russian forces in Russia. They've been able to integrate those communications in a lot of their intelligence gathering and operational planning and operational integration. And so just this idea that there's this now civilian communication infrastructure that is so critical to defense of Europe -- which is what is happening in Ukraine, it's like ultimately the defense of Europe -- is a little concerning, especially when it's now being, as Maria alluded to, right, Musk posted on X that the speed limits are not being controlled by SpaceX. That that's a U.S. military and a U.S. president decision, but it's not actually clear who is making those decisions. So if the Ukrainians have a contract for this, and they're not actually in control of what they're getting, that's a really concerning situation with implications that go far beyond battlefield communications.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, yep.

Dave Bittner: What about, just, the reality that we have a leader like Musk, who has a reputation for doing things his own way under his own terms. You know, it seems to me like that reality adds a certain bit of messiness to all of this. That, you know, the concern that people are even talking about the possibility that Elon Musk could have his finger on the button of a military operation of one of our allies to me, that's a different situation than we've typically been in the past. Is that fair to say, Brandon?

Brandon Karpf: Totally. Yeah, a totally different situation than we've had in the past. It's not like Oppenheimer was in control of the use of the nuclear weapon -- not drawing a direct comparison between, you know, Starlink and nuclear weapons, but it is a battlefield technology.

Maria Varmazis: Yep.

Brandon Karpf: The fact that there is this individual, to your point, who isn't really accountable, certainly isn't being held accountable, does not have the same mechanisms to be held accountable, is very -- is problematic, to say the least, right?

Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

Brandon Karpf: I mean, this is a situation that we have never seen before. It's not clear the contracting. It's not clear the liability. It's not clear the sources of control. This is a situation that, I think, rightfully, brings up the question of nationalizing technology, which is kind of an anathema to the U.S. way of functioning, but when you have a technology that is so critical to the functions of national security and defense, there does need to be more control implemented. So it is just kind of astonishing thinking that until today, just an hour ago, we were not sure if Musk had just turned this off. Even right now, we have no idea. The Ukrainians don't know. The public does not know how this --

Maria Varmazis: Or even if Elon Musk, what he's saying is true.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Brandon Karpf: Right, or what the mechanism was to actually impose the speed limit, which, this, I mean, the speed limit, the fact that it only affected systems traveling faster than 160 kilometers an hour means that this wasn't an attack, right? This was a setting, and the fact there's no real accountability mechanism here, that's a problem.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking, I remember when I was reading up on this story yesterday morning, just, I was trying to get up to speed on what the heck was going on. I'm just -- I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the Ukrainian officials, just imagining them trying to just triage this, and, just, they don't know who to talk to, and just on a basic level, who are you actually dealing with when a situation like this has arisen? The fact that it took, you know, seemingly 24 hours for it to even -- for anyone to say, Oh, yeah, that was me. I mean, how can does -- how can any -- it just muddies the water so much, and I -- I'm just imagining the discussions happening in Europe right now about the IRIS2 sovereign satellite constellation. That timeline keeps moving up, which, you know, doesn't normally happen in that direction --

Brandon Karpf: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: But I cannot come fast enough.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: It -- truly, this entire situation has just made the case for sovereign space capabilities.

Brandon Karpf: Totally.

Maria Varmazis: You know, it's the poster child for it now.

Brandon Karpf: Yeah, sovereign space capabilities, exactly, more domestic capacity, you know, investment in alternatives that are not based in the U.S. companies or U.S. infrastructure, right? I think this pushes U.S. allies further and further away from the U.S.

Maria Varmazis: It sure does.

Brandon Karpf: And, like, to ground this, right, if, you know, we're talking about battlefield technology that is both used offensively and defensively, right? Imagine you are in a Ukrainian unit near the front line, and you get -- you are under attack by a Russian drone unit. You're relying on technology to sense where they are, and then to respond. And you have, kind of, seeker drones that can go and then find that unit that is attacking you -- attacking you attacking civilians, attacking Ukrainian civilians, Ukrainian critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure -- which Russia has done in the last couple days, attacking their energy infrastructure, again, as we're moving towards winter. The drones used to counter-target the Russians are going to be moving more than 160 kilometers an hour. And so now you're in a situation where suddenly you're relying on a technology to defend yourself, and that technology is just shut off without any indication, without any communication, without any sort of accountability. That is akin to a war crime, turning that technology off that is actively being used to defend civilians against Russian aggression. That's a huge problem, and someone needs to be held accountable for that.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: I'm reminded, just as sort of a quick aside, years ago, I learned that, like, your run-of-the-mill, your GPS device and even the ones built into our phones today, like, they don't work in an airplane because of velocity. Like, they, they, if you're going faster than a speed, if you're going at jet speed, the GPS devices don't report back to you. Evidently, this is originally a safety factor to keep people from building their own guided missiles. Yeah, so this just reminds me of that. I guess they sort of rhyme with each other, you know?

Brandon Karpf: Yeah.

Dave Bittner: Put a speed limit on something, but if you're the U.S. military, are you thinking about building your own constellation?

Maria Varmazis: I mean, they're working on it.

Brandon Karpf: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: It's being actively developed. There are -- that is that is certainly in process, but there are, I mean, there are a number of private companies. I mean, this is not new news. There are a number of private companies that are developing military-only low-earth-orbit constellations. I know Iridium is, like, a very famously one that's been working on this for the U.S. military for a while. I think, to me, that the difference here is just I, all of these behaviors that we're hearing about either Starlink or then later Starshield, it is or it isn't working, or it's not working at capacity. I just can't imagine a company generally operating this way. It just seems anathema to decent business practices. So that's, I think, part of the confusion, and I'm not trying to be naive. I understand there's a whole level of geopolitics that one can conjecture about going on here, but it's just not how, generally, I think of businesses wanting to run, and yet here we are. [ Music ] And here we are, at a time for a break in our show now. We'll be right back. [ Music ] Let's get back to the conversation now, where Brandon Karpf will start us off.

Brandon Karpf: Dave, to your point about GPS, you know, working at speed like that, I mean, the whole justification for creating Starshield, right, as kind of a subset architecture to Starlink, or its own distinct architecture was, one, some security requirements for a military-only-type architecture, but also, so that you can enable things like drone control, like missile control, like offensive weapon control, through that architecture without crossing over with a civilian architecture, right? And so, I mean, what we're talking about here is the Ukrainians are using Starshield. They had access to Starshield. So, ostensibly, they're using it within the bounds of what it was designed to be used for --

Maria Varmazis: Yes.

Brandon Karpf: -- and should have some sort of contract to use that. This situation kind of reminds me of what happened this past summer where the U.S. federal government shut down international access to U.S. frontier models like Mythos, suddenly without warning, and our allies were left kind of scrambling to try to get ahead of the curve, using those frontier models for things like cybersecurity and vulnerability testing and wanting to be a part of that, but not being allowed to suddenly, without warning, even if they had a relationship or contractual relationship with Anthropic and OpenAI. It's similar to this kind of, like, erratic policy setting that is affecting our allies internationally and removing their effective use of U.S. technology to defend themselves, to use that technology for their own benefits. It's just this bizarre situation where we're retrenching and, basically, convincing the world to get off the U.S. tech platform.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that what adds insult to injury, a whole level to it, at least for me when I think about this story, is when the war originally started in 2022, defenders in Ukraine were using Starlink because that was available to them. It was being provided via USAID, I believe. Then during the Biden administration, Starshield was sort of spun up as a, hey, we don't want the military using the civilian tech. Let's create a contract that the DoD will manage, and it will be Starshield. That's sort of my very basic nutshell understanding of that. As sort of a, we want the Ukrainian military to be able to use this technology, but in, you know, as you mentioned, Brendon, like ways that are safe for them and also not getting conflated with civilian use. It was, essentially, the SpaceX and the U.S. government going, you can use this technology. Use it over here. Use it in this way, and we're all hunky dory.

Brandon Karpf: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: And then suddenly, it's just this rug pull. Like, they did what we asked of them to do, and now, we're just completely changing the rules on them with no warning. What can you even say?

Brandon Karpf: It does not bode well for long-term relationships built on goodwill and trust.

Dave Bittner: I mean, that's probably the highest-level story in all this, is the U.S. is shifting roles as a reliable ally or not. As you mentioned, Brandon, you know, how do our allies around the world look at something like this in terms of making their own plans?

Brandon Karpf: Well, and all of this is happening under the context of the President, the U.S. President, allegedly lifting sanctions on Russian diesel. It's actually just a very limited amount of diesel that he's claiming that we're going to be purchasing, which set aside the fact that it is illegal, even for the President to import Russian diesel to the U.S. --

Dave Bittner: Right.

Brandon Karpf: That there's a congressional statute that does not allow that. The President cannot just wave a wand and change that, but that is also happening right now, and so that's us. Allegedly, we'll see if any diesel actually ends up getting transported, but that is the U.S. paying cash to Russia for oil, while Russia is actively attacking Ukraine and Europe, right?

Maria Varmazis: Yep.

Brandon Karpf: They've put explosive drones in Germany and Poland, and while they funnel offensive weapons to Iran, who is attacking U.S. forces and killing U.S. service members? So we are actively funding the murder of U.S. service members. It's absolutely insane.

Maria Varmazis: Yep.

Dave Bittner: So where do we suppose this all goes? I mean, if the rest of the world says we want to have sovereignty. We're going to launch our own constellations. We're not going to rely on the U.S. to provide these sorts of services. In terms of our place in the world, I think, you know, we've been comfortable being the tech leader for -- in many categories for decades. Is our star no longer rising?

Maria Varmazis: Elon Musk with Starlink optimized a service that had already existed, which was satellite communications. He did it much better. He was definitely a disruptor. I mean, there's no denying that, but Starlink is not the only game in town anymore, and that technology is certainly not exclusive to his company. There are a lot of competitors spinning up all over the world who are working very fast to, you know, bite at his heels. And, you know, I'm not going to pretend he's not at the top of the game right now, but that's not an inevitability of him staying there. And certainly, as I said earlier, if this isn't the poster child for putting a lot of money into sovereign space tech, I don't know what is. I think there's an arrogance behind, you know, Starlink being at the top of things, and you know, it's going to remain that way. That is certainly not a given, and this is only going to accelerate now with incidents like this.

Brandon Karpf: Yeah, I'll corroborate that just with my own observations working for a Japanese corporation. You know, Japan, the fourth-largest economy in the world, but, you know, even the largest economies in the world, their tech sectors are nothing compared to the U.S. tech sector, historically, certainly for the last 30-40 years. But that is starting to shift, and we're seeing even in Japan, and from my perspective, we're seeing a lot more international interest coming from traditional U.S. partners in Japan looking for alternate sources of technologies and softwares and platforms. It's not necessarily that there's a direct competitor that exists right now for some of these things, but it doesn't take very long to invest and spin something up. Just in the last six months, I've seen a market increase in international partners exploring Japan, and that's just Japan. I'm sure Germany is seeing the same thing. I'm sure the U.K. is seeing something similar. In --

Maria Varmazis: Australia.

Brandon Karpf: Exactly, other large partners as well.

Maria Varmazis: India. Yep. Yeah, I can't help but also reflect -- this is a little bit of a personal reflection -- but my father came to the United States as an immigrant to work in the U.S. tech sector as part of the Massachusetts Miracle in the '80s to work on semiconductors. Inevitably, a lot of the work that my dad did was with the U.S. military as a subcontractor. I just -- I know now that if my family's story was shifted forward a few decades, my family would have stayed in Greece. My dad would have been able to find those jobs there, working for the EU instead, and I can't help but reflect how many people like my dad are not going to be coming to the United States anymore, because there's no need and how much damage we're doing to our own national story. You know, to say nothing of our alliances where, you know, it's great for the rest of the world, but we didn't need to do this to ourselves. Yeah, it really gets to me when I think about it.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. No, no doubt, it's a volatile time, and what's the old curse? "May you live in interesting times," right? We're certainly doing that.

Brandon Karpf: I do hope we find out who set the speed limit, though, because it is clear to me that it was a setting, so that's a feature, right, not a bug.

Maria Varmazis: Yep.

Brandon Karpf: I think it's going to be important that whoever it is, they're held accountable.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Maria Varmazis: Absolutely.

Dave Bittner: Do you think, in addition to Starlink, maybe we'll see Sonylink? [laughter]

Brandon Karpf: No comment. NTT does have a space program, I will say.

Dave Bittner: I just -- I'd love to see Sony on the rise again. Who cares how they function? Boy, they would look good. Those satellites would look good.

Brandon Karpf: Oh, sleek, sleek, sleek.

Dave Bittner: All right. Well, I'm glad we can all still laugh.

Brandon Karpf: Thanks for bringing it back around.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is sort of one of those "time will tell" things where it is so volatile and changing so quickly. I think we all hope for the best but are also cautious about where it seems like things are heading, and we're all going to live through it.

Maria Varmazis: And that's it for "T-Minus Space-Cyber Briefing," brought to you by N2K CyberWire. As I said at the top of the show, if you like what you heard today and you want to learn more about the latest on this story, you should definitely check out our newsletter, "Signals in Space." You will get research and notes pulled together by our producer Ethan Cook and me, along with this week's top space cyber news stories, in addition to the one we discussed today. Make sure to subscribe by visiting thecyberwire.com/newsletters. We would love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. Thank you for listening to "T-Minus." I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. The show is produced by Ethan Cook and Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tré Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Eiben, with Content Strategy by Ma'ayan Plaut. Peter Kilpe is our Publisher. See you next week.