What I don't understand is how this is a terminal-side issue.
The satellites should know where they are and where their beams are pointing with sufficiently high fidelity to turn them off whenever overflying areas in which they're not licensed to operate, or am I missing something?
SpaceX knows where every dish in the world is (they have realtime data displays showing it). What they don't know is who owns each dish besides what credit card account is attached to it. Also Ukraine has requested that they not disable service in Russian controlled areas as they want to use them behind enemy lines.
Why would they need to? They could just turn it off over countries they don’t have a license to provide service in!
This is not an 1980s satellite service with global or regional beams that are too course to provide very coarse-grained, continent-sized service boundaries. As far as I know, the Starlink spot beam size is on the order of a few kilometers in diameter, so anything other than border regions should be very easy to control access to.
In fact, not doing so seems to violate the law of most if not all countries covered without a license.
I think you missed what I was saying. Talking about other countries isn't really relevant here. This is about what's going on within Ukraine. Starlink is not active in Russia, for example.
Cypherpunk days, "internet everywhere is better than no internet" was agreed. The arguments that were logical then still hold.
If anyone thinks the NSA can't monitor Starlink better than Elon can, I suggest rethinking the implications of the stuff that Snowden released.
Strategically speaking; wouldn't it be better for the USA to allow and monitor communications from everyone in these areas that has something the need to say? Let everybody's troops use Strava.
Only very few militaries and nation states have adopted cypherpunk doctrines though, I suspect.
> wouldn't it be better for the USA to allow and monitor communications from everyone in these areas that has something the need to say?
Encryption exists, and it would be pretty embarrassing to figure out that what SIGINT thought were enemy troops' strava workout challenges was really guidance for their cruise missiles and attack drones.
The satellites should know where they are and where their beams are pointing with sufficiently high fidelity to turn them off whenever overflying areas in which they're not licensed to operate, or am I missing something?