I remember reading that drug cartells in South America are using disused military communications satellites.

These satellites simply takes a signal recieved on one band and rebroadcast it on another band over a wide area, so as long as the satellite can pick up your signal you can basically talk to an entire continent at once, all while remaining anonymous.

Original pdf paper: Don’t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites

A fascinating read, thanks for sharing :-)

“Generally, our users choose the encryption that they apply to their communications to suit their specific application or need,” says a spokesperson for SES, the parent company of Intelsat. “For SES’s inflight customers, for example, SES provides a public Wi-Fi hot spot connection similar to the public internet available at a coffee shop or hotel. On such public networks, user traffic would be encrypted when accessing a website via HTTPS/TLS or communicating using a virtual private network.”

Can't decide the side of the fence I am on for this. Of course the vast majority of Internet traffic across the world is unencrypted. Anyone could be on the line between me and this Lemmy instance, just as they could if there was a satellite between us. However, you're also broadcasting it to like 25% of the globe and not even making any kind of physical infrastructure efforts.

Quest can't entirely guarantee nobody will snoop a fiber line, but they do bury them.

Everything old is new again.

Reminds me of the documentary called Spin from 1995. It was built from behind-the-scenes footage captured from live satellite feeds from the 1992 Presidential election and the 1992 Rodney King LA riots.

Crazy idea, maybe things should be E2EE? I know, crazy!

Oh hello the 1980s called and they want their breaking news back.

Still waiting to see the inevitable hack of a communications constellation (starlink and the likes) resulting in worldwide outages and / or a worldwide firework show.

This is why VPNs.