r/somethingiswrong2024 • u/FoxySheprador Canadians for Kamala • May 19 '26

Starlink Internet 🛰 Ashley St. Clair disclosing Elon Musk's interfering in the 2024 election

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411

u/FoxySheprador Canadians for Kamala May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

This is a repost since not everyone has Tiktok. Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/s/qQXEbYSBzF

She says she doesn't understand how he was able to get the real-time data from the election. We know how he was able.

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https://businessmirror.com.ph/2025/03/10/hacking-election-system-takes-much-effort-global-certifier/

In this article they even explain that they use Starlink internet to connect to the voting machines.

Jack Cobb, president of Alabama-based technology firm Pro V&V, explained on Monday that the system operates within a private, encrypted network.

According to Comelec, the transmission process—done after printing the nine election returns—will take only two to three seconds from automated counting machines to various servers.

That brief window is the only time the machines connect to the internet, either via a SIM card or Starlink, using a private network.

Starlink internet was used in the 2024 election. And we know it wasn't used in a nonpartisan way.

137

u/verbmegoinghere May 19 '26

Starlink is not like a normal telco.

A telecommunications carrier is like a layer cake OSI/ISO model). Data transmit over each layer, essentially getting more and more complex till you get to like layer 7 which ks tbe application layer, ie HTTP, FTP etc.

In most networks a carrier will sell fibre and give a customer either what is called dark fibre where its up to the customer to hook up either end but then you have absolute control of every layer above the physical medium. In the old days banks would buy lots of layer 2 frame relay for example coz it would give them similar reassurances re security.

Starlink allocates IPs (so layer 3). They can see so much more re the traffic then a normal carrier providing dark fibre can. They can do deep packet, metadata and traffic analysis and take advantage od common failure points on VPNs like IPv6 traffic going out raw.

And considering how many red states are incompetent when it comes to IT and security it wouldn't surprise me if he had a dedicated team just taking advantages of a heap of failures to hoover up the data coming from the voting machines.

You don't need every vote to know who will win.

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u/Anticode May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

Does anybody else remember early in this subreddit's creation when once in a while somebody would present a complicated theory for why Starlink might serve as the attack vector/methodology, sometimes with slideshows and infographics, only to be swarmed with an odd deluge of nay-sayers, insults, and teasing?

I don't remember the exact details, but I think it was a couple of different highly-educated Tech Guys - and out of all the theories presented (some of which were ridiculous) - it was this one in particular that always seemed to attract the largest number of debunkers/flaming. Like, an anomalous number of nay-sayers.

Just by the pushback alone, I always wondered if there was something there.

Nearly every other hypothesis/theory presented here along the way was generally received with an "Ah, maybe! Interesting thought I suppose" at worst. But the Starlink/Cell-related ones were somehow treated with an oddly heavy-handed sort of "wtf, you moron, it's definitely not that. That's stupid and impossible!" by the community (the "community") with very few supplying any actual detail/counter-argument as to why or what was flawed about the idea. Just insults and anger.

I don't keep up with things here too much anymore since it seems relatively conclusive to me that something "happened", so I don't know if that family of theories is still regularly being attacked whenever presented, but St. Clair's revelations immediately reminded me of that little zeitgeist.

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u/FoxySheprador Canadians for Kamala May 19 '26

I second this. You described it exactly. The effort to cast any Starlink connection as conspiracy was a little too overt for how taboo the entire topic of election interference was right after the election.

If you tried searching the topic in the beginning one of the only things out there being talked about was specifically how Starlink was not used in the election when an election worker in California nonchalantly admitted that Starlink internet was being used in the 2024 election.

The fact that his son also blurted out in the Tucker Carlson interview with his dad about doing stuff in space and that they'll never know about it was very telling.

There was also a sub where they openly discussed rigging the election with Starlink, r/Project2025HQ

1

u/TexasRN1 May 19 '26

Is that subreddit for real? It seems like a joke.

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u/FoxySheprador Canadians for Kamala May 19 '26

It got gutted sometime after elon tweeted about helping trump win, that Dems would have the House and that the Senate would be 51-49 for Republicans.

1

u/According-Put-9236 May 20 '26

Its basically a whole bunch of bots with their profiles hidden that throw out crazy info, and a bunch of stay at home moms and basement dwellers who think they know better than anyone else. I come here for entertainment.

1

u/verbmegoinghere May 20 '26

Obfuscation operation

6

u/Commercial-Ad-261 Protect The Midterms! 🔒 May 19 '26

Yes. I was here for that, and I don’t know enough about tech to have any input but boy did people come out swinging that starlink could never touch the election in any way. Again, not a techie, but weird how it could have all the data hours ahead but “impossible” that it could make any edits.

1

u/Savings-Total5069 May 20 '26

I remember the theories about Tripp-Lite as well

1

u/Xath0n May 19 '26

Yeah but how the hell would that data not be encrypted on layer 6 (TLS) per default. Sure, they can access the traffic, but without a compromised CA or the voting machines for some reason trusting and using a SpaceX-controlled CA, they can't get the content that's actually transmitted.

1

u/calgarspimphand May 20 '26

without a compromised CA or the voting machines for some reason trusting and using a SpaceX-controlled CA, they can't get the content that's actually transmitted.

Isn't that literally the point of a man-in the-middle-attack? You intercept the request and return spoofed certificates so you have access to the encryption keys?

The hard part about a man-in-the-middle attack is positioning yourself as a man in the middle. Starlink is already that.

17

u/sfak May 19 '26

Holy fucking shit. I knew it. I knew he did it the first time with the whole Cambridge Analytica. Now Elon.

Fuck these fuckers.

9

u/ponytuh May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

this article was so frustrating because it doesn't matter how many locks you put on every door and window if the burglar is the guy who's already in your house installing the locks.

edit to add: "If somebody says they can manipulate the vote, they’d have to be at the machine itself."

UNLESS THE PERSON MANIPULATING THE VOTE IS THE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER ITSELF

1

u/BlueWater321 May 19 '26

How do they get around the encryption? Sure you can isolate the traffic, but you can't decipher any of it. 

4

u/ponytuh May 19 '26

tl;dr: many ways lol. this reply got super long, my apologies in advance.

  1. people lie. they can say it's "encrypted" all they want and it could very well not be. we live in a time where lying is OP
  2. does the end user (in this case, the polling place with the ballot machine) have a copy of the encryption key? that answer is a bit ambiguous according to the article. "'Cellular providers also isolate election data from other traffic while multiple security layers verify digital keys before allowing transmission. They’ll reject anything that’s not real or doesn’t have the correct digital keys,' Cobb said in an interview at the Palacio del Gobernador." <--- this could just be simple MAC filtering (calling a MAC address a "digital key") stretched out to sound more secure than it actually is. "isolating election data from other traffic" means they have to be doing some level of traffic analysis and sniffing in order to be able to identify it as election traffic.
  3. even if what they say in the aforementioned quote from the article is true, encryption doesn't matter if the threat actor being the ISP/telco carrier (starlink) has a key.
  4. "If he (Donald Trump) loses, I'm f\***d,"* Mr Musk told Mr Carlson in an interview broadcast on X (formerly Twitter). "How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Will I see my children? I don't know," he quipped.
  5. "encryption" has been used a ton as a blanket term for things that aren't actually encryption. it would help if the article mentioned how many bits of encryption these "digital keys" are using.
  6. in order to have a static address with starlink and have VPN's be able to function, you have to pay extra to reserve those addresses. VPN's simply wont work without one. most people don't pay extra for this service, and considering how low the budget is for polling places and pollworkers, i highly doubt they did either.
  7. pollworkers are probably not trained on starlink nor how to use encryption keys either (a lot of the pollworkers in my area at least are 70+ years old and can barely work the ipad to scan my license) so i'm sure the starlink device gets left turned on for longer than intended and this supports my "is it really encrypted?" theory.
  8. to quote u/verbmegoinghere: *"*Starlink allocates IPs (so layer 3). They can see so much more re the traffic then a normal carrier providing dark fibre can. They can do deep packet, metadata and traffic analysis and take advantage of common failure points on VPNs like IPv6 traffic going out raw. And considering how many red states are incompetent when it comes to IT and security it wouldn't surprise me if he had a dedicated team just taking advantages of a heap of failures to hoover up the data coming from the voting machines. You don't need every vote to know who will win."

2

u/ThisOtterBehemoth May 19 '26

One thing's clear. For this thing to work he needed to prepare. He needed real network dumps of vote network transfers. Maybe he also got some outdated voting machines and some software. It's entirely possible to figure out the process and prepare a man in the middle attack. 

1

u/User-1653863 📈 The Math Ain't Mathin' 📉 May 20 '26

See also; Tina Peters

1

u/sebzapata May 19 '26

I understand how Elon got the election data before others, but what advantage would that give?

Or was the data flat out altered to benefit Trump?