ICYMI
The former command senior chief of the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew pleaded guilty at a court-martial in March to charges that she installed an unauthorized Wi-Fi system aboard the ship and then lied about it to superiors, according to records obtained by Navy Times.
Before her trial, Naval Surface Force Pacific, or SURFPAC, quietly relieved then-Senior Chief Grisel Marrero from her leadership position aboard Manchester in September, due to a “loss of confidence,” the command said in a statement.
Marrero, whose online biography indicates a background in Navy intelligence, declined comment for this report. SURFPAC officials also declined to discuss further specifics of the case.
She was sentenced to reduction in rank to E-7 in March, according to a trial summary obtained by Navy Times.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/06/03/command-senior-chief-convicted-for-unauthorized-wi-fi-on-her-ship/
The Story Of Sailors Secretly Installing Starlink On Their Littoral Combat Ship Is Truly Bonkers
As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, that it is hard to believe.
It was all so that the chiefs on the ship’s ‘gold crew’ (the LCS alternates between two crews) could check sports scores, text home, and stream movies, investigators learned, according to Navy Times. However, that required a conspiracy involving gathering funds, purchasing the service, and installing the antenna on the 0-5 weatherdeck where it couldn’t easily be seen.
A stock picture of the USS Manchester taken in 2018. USN
The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.
“The installation and usage of Starlink, without the approval of higher headquarters, poses a serious risk to mission, operational security, and information security,” according to a scathing Navy investigation into the matter obtained by Navy Times. “The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship, and the Navy cannot be understated.”
The Manchester chiefs’ Starlink network was “a direct violation of emissions control regulations on board a ship,” Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and Senior Fellow at the Sagamore Institute explained to The War Zone. “As such you could present a critical vulnerability in that it would make the ship more detectable by offboard sensors.”
Having a clandestine communications system onboard could have served as a beacon for adversary signals intelligence collectors, potentially allowing them to pinpoint the Manchester’s location. It could also have served as a portal for cyber attacks and as a vacuum for unsecured data transmitted over the network. Even seemingly mundane personal information about military service members unrelated to their work can be of great interest to foreign intelligence services for various malign purposes.
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https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-installing-starlink-on-their-littoral-combat-ship-is-truly-bonkers