MY Manila Times columns from February 27 and March 11. Starlink has recently been granted a license to operate in the Philippines, and that is something that should be stopped. I’m not done yet, but these two columns are a decent start.
Comelec supports fascism with Starlink plan (February 27, 2025)
LAST week, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) announced that it would be deploying “about 7,000” of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet stations for use in transmitting voting results in the upcoming May elections. Whatever excuses Comelec may provide for making this ill-advised decision, an obvious conclusion that can be drawn from it is that it is apparently now government policy is to materially embrace fascism, at least when doing so may result in a small bit of convenience.
According to Comelec commissioner George Erwin Garcia, the Starlink units would be used in areas identified as having only one telecommunications provider or none at all. In justifying the choice of Starlink, Garcia was quoted by news reports as saying, “Starlink will provide around 200 megabits (Mbps) per second bandwidth, ensuring that election returns can be transmitted in real time,” adding that he expected that the results of the May polls could be provided with “unprecedented speed.”
I would certainly not accuse Garcia of lying about that, but he certainly seems to be uncritically repeating whatever sales pitch he was given by the Starlink people. So far, there have been no published tests that indicate Starlink operates reliably at anywhere near 200 Mbps. Starlink’s own website for business customers, who can presumably pay more for higher speeds, only advertises download speeds of between 40 and 200 Mbps, upload speeds of 8-25 Mbps, and latency (the time it takes to connect to the network in order to upload or download something) of between 20 and 60 milliseconds. The most recent test results I could find online were from late July of last year, wherein Starlink’s median download speed was 48.14 Mbps – about half the 94.42 Mbps of the country’s fixed broadband operators – its median upload speed was an equally unimpressive 12.63 Mbps, compared with 94.13 for its ground-bound competitors, and its average latency was 50 ms, roughly twice that of the fixed broadband providers.
Anecdotally, on the three different occasions I have had a chance to connect to Starlink in rural areas of the country, most recently in Palawan, the performance of the network has been no better than a weak cellular data signal. On my latest trip when I needed to be online to do a bit of actual work, I could not connect for more than a few moments at a time; using my phone as a wi-fi hotspot with my regular old, technically boring Smart data signal saved the day.
Certainly, in those areas where there is no internet connectivity whatsoever, a slow and intermittent Starlink connection is better than nothing. But the unimpressive performance of Starlink generally, and the uncertainty about its reliability in some places may very well raise questions about whether or not something as important as voting tabulations should be entrusted to it.
Those questions may become even more pointed when the cost of the system is considered, which as far as I could determine from a diligent online search, has not been officially disclosed. Back in mid-2022, when the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT) was working on an initiative to provide internet connectivity with Starlink in rural areas, one of the challenges DICT said it was trying to resolve was the budget, as the equipment for each ground unit – the lower-cost residential type – cost $599 (or P34,660), with each having a monthly subscription fee of $99 (P5,729). If Comelec opts for the presumably better-performing Starlink equipment for business customers, those units cost P153,942 each, according to Starlink’s website, with monthly connection plans starting at P3,920. With 7,000 units needed, an estimate of the total cost for Comelec’s plan thus ranges from about P283 million, up to about P1.1 billion.
Surprisingly, security is not one of the biggest concerns with using the Starlink system, although Musk has candidly said on a number of occasions that the system gathers a large amount of data which he sees no problem with using as he sees fit. Recently, a conspiracy theory has made the rounds in the US that Musk used Starlink to manipulate the results of last November’s presidential election. While Musk is the target of several lawsuits accusing him of election interference, those pertain to his use of his Twitter (now called X) social media platform to spread disinformation; Starlink was actually not used by election officials in the US – as transmitting results over the internet is generally considered unsafe – save for in one county in California. Even then, so long as the data being transmitted is securely encrypted, there is not much that Starlink can do with it. It can collect geolocation and time of use data, and that certainly will be collected and stored by Musk’s minions, for whatever purpose it might serve, but the actual voting data should be safe, provided Comelec does the rest of its job properly.
Nevertheless, Comelec’s decision to willingly hand over hundreds of millions of pesos in public funds to the personal coffers of an avowed fascist is questionable in the extreme. Not just any right-wing nutjob, but an avowed fascist who, apart from being in the midst of carrying out an authoritarian coup in the US, has engineered the sudden cancellation of at least P20 billion in development funding from the Philippines, to the severe detriment of many of this country’s public health, education, livelihood, and governance capacity-building goals; is accused of election interference on behalf of right-wing extremists in three different countries other than the US; and about whom a soon-to-be published biography says, “there is no evidence he has any intellectual achievements.” Associating with this kind of individual in any sense, let alone doing business with him, is mockery of Comelec’s mission to ensure free and fair democratic elections. Even if the Starlink product was the most fantastically capable and advanced internet service the world has ever seen – and it is quite far from being that – the moral hazard simply cannot be overlooked or justified.
Comelec’s internet provider enables enslavement of Filipinos (March 11, 2025)
THE decision by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to procure internet services from Elon Musk’s Starlink for the upcoming midterm elections at first seemed to be merely morally and practically questionable judgement, but recent news reveals that it is far worse than that. Signing a contract with Starlink was an utterly reprehensible decision and a gross dereliction of duty. Whether that action violated any laws, I am not qualified to say, but it is possible that it ran afoul of laws and rules on government procurement.
On February 27, which was coincidentally the same day my first column about Comelec and Starlink was published (“Comelec supports fascism with Starlink plan”), Wired published an in-depth report (https://www.wired.com/story/starlink-scam-compounds) on the use of Starlink by the “scam hubs” in Southeast Asia, mostly located in Myanmar and Cambodia. These are the very same compounds where tens of thousands of foreign workers – including Filipinos numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands – are enslaved, tricked by offers of legitimate work and then forced to work on various online scams.
The conditions in these compounds are appalling, as described by the people who are fortunate enough to escape from them. Workers are subject to torture if they try to escape or do not meet their quota for scams carried out successfully. Living conditions are miserable, and the workers are not paid – or if they are, their pay is withheld and applied to a massive fee ($15,000 is commonly mentioned) those who control these scam hubs demand to secure a worker’s release. In reality, because they are carrying out criminal activity on a massive scale, none of the enslaved workers are ever allowed to leave; in the unlikely event that a worker manages to pay off the fee, the amount demanded is simply increased.
SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company responsible for Starlink, was formally notified as far back as July 2024 that its services were being used to carry out criminal activity, in a letter sent to SpaceX’s attorneys by the deputy district attorney of Santa Clara County in California. The deputy DA, whose concern was for victims of online scams in her area, “offered to share more information to help the company in ‘disrupting the work of bad actors’,” the Wired article said.
Neither SpaceX nor Starlink replied to the deputy DA’s letter, the article reported. Likewise, Wired reported that it had “sent SpaceX a list of questions about the alleged use of Starlink at scam compounds, including coordinates of suspected scam compounds where phones have connected to the Starlink network. SpaceX did not respond to the request for comment.” This, despite its terms of service clearly stating that “SpaceX may terminate services to users if they participate in ‘fraudulent’ activities or if a system is used in unauthorized locations. In addition, in a post on Twitter (X) addressing the use of Starlink in Russia and Dubai (it is neither officially available nor supposed to work at all in either of those countries) back in February 2024, Starlink said, “If SpaceX obtains knowledge that a Starlink terminal is being used by a sanctioned or unauthorized party, we investigate the claim and take actions to deactivate the terminal if confirmed.”
According to those conditions, none of the scam compounds in Myanmar – there are about 40 of them in the Myawaddy region – should be able to use Starlink, as the country’s military junta has banned it. However, enforcement is obviously non-existent due to the country’s ongoing civil war, and Starlink, despite having been informed of the situation, has turned a blind eye to it and not acted to cut off the service. In fact, according to local reports in Cambodia, Starlink has recently agreed to increase its service in that country, including in the rural areas where an estimated 100,000 people are held as slaves in scam compounds. The Wired article, citing UN data, said that there were another 120,000 in Myanmar.
How many of those are Filipinos is unknown, but the accounts of 12 Filipinos who were among 250 people who were rescued last month when the Myanmar military raided the compound where they were held suggested there are hundreds more.
The only way a government or anyone else on the ground can block a Starlink internet connection is by physically removing the receiver unit. Starlink, however, can easily block connection for any ground terminal, or even for entire geographical areas; for example, it blocked the service for all of Russia, in accordance with sanctions imposed by the US government when Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet the company’s response to its system being used by slave labor in Southeast Asia has been to ignore the notifications, and even expand its service in the areas where these scam hubs are mostly located.
This entire situation instantly renders Starlink ineligible to be a contractor for projects by any of the international ODA agencies, multilateral banks and funding organizations, and UN agencies, under the procurement rules each of them follow. Yet Comelec, either through sheer ignorance and failure to carry out proper due diligence, or through an intentional lack of concern that Starlink facilitates the enslavement in foreign countries of Filipino citizens, has gone ahead and signed a deal with Starlink to provide 7,000 ground stations for connectivity in remote and isolated areas of the country.
Doing business with Starlink makes Comelec complicit in the human trafficking of Filipinos, as well as thousands of other innocent victims from other countries, and Comelec Chairman George Erwin Garcia owes the country an immediate explanation for it. If Comelec was unaware of Starlink’s support for slavery and internet crime and is only learning about it now, that indicates a very sloppy job on Comelec’s part of vetting a potential service provider, but the proper authorities can address that. The correct thing for Comelec to do in this case is to immediately cancel the Starlink contract.
If, on the other hand, Comelec was aware of the manner in which Starlink facilitates criminal activity and has refused to take action despite being informed about it, and then went ahead and signed a contract with Starlink anyway, that is simply unacceptable. Severe consequences by the authorities with oversight of Comelec should follow.
(Image: Starlink satellite burning up over Switzerland last year; from a Twitter post)
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