the article also has a crucial detail: Starlink is NOT FedRAMP compliant. Verizon is. this shouldn't even be a question to be plugging unvetted devices into safety-critical government networks. anyone who's ever suffered through FedRAMP knows exactly how much work goes into it. what an insult. - ThreadSky

lizthegrey.com • 11 days ago

the article also has a crucial detail: Starlink is NOT FedRAMP compliant. Verizon is.

this shouldn't even be a question to be plugging unvetted devices into safety-critical government networks. anyone who's ever suffered through FedRAMP knows exactly how much work goes into it. what an insult.

Reposted from Kathleen Clark

Of course, Ted Malaska has a whopping conflict of interest here.

He is both:
- a SpaceX employee (identifying himself as a "SpaceXer" on his Twitter/X profile),
&
- federal employee -- and important one at that --"leading an engineering unit inside the FAA."
...

Comments

ennui.org•11 days ago

oh no FedRAMP

botono.bsky.social•11 days ago

This did psychic damage to me personally

shayelk.in•11 days ago

I think FedRAMP isn’t the correct framework here (it’s for CSP & CSP deployed services), but starlink is a consumer product, and as such i would be surprised if it had whatever certification is needed for federal deployments.

lizthegrey.com•11 days ago

dunno, just going off article: "When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended [it], among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not"

shayelk.in•11 days ago

That’s trivia for folks who are familiar with that compliance regime. Any federal security certification is a long and arduous process, which Verizon, as it already sells to the fed went through, and spacex obviously did not.

shayelk.in•11 days ago

Like any good compliance regime, there probably is a way to approve a deviation that required when there’s no other choice, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. No one is picking starlink over Verizon because of technical merits, but because of that company’s ownership.

shayelk.in•11 days ago

Or, similarly to what i was told by compliance folks when we were discussing a certain DR: even when the rationale presented is all true, you aren’t supposed to use it to just delay a deadline.

corb555.bsky.social•11 days ago

I’m sure DOGE can easily waive security and reliability requirements for this.

teresarothaar.bsky.social•11 days ago

We're gearing up for our annual FedRAMP audit at my work right now.

Doesn't seem right we're being held to an exponentially higher standard than Elno.

polittlecat.bsky.social•11 days ago

This is the kind of thing that has to be explained, in detail, to judges. They just don't understand the harm being done and how difficult it would be to mitigate that harm.

c20d.us•11 days ago

That doesn’t even begin to address that SL is a terrible engineering choice for this. As secondary, or primary when fixed wireline is unavailable (likely nonexistent problem here) I could *maybe* get behind, but from what I’ve seen they’re pitching it as primary connectivity (I could be wrong here).

bsky.tdunning.com•11 days ago

FedRamp comes out of GSA which means it's just an Executive branch rule. Those can obviously be made to disappear on a whim, much like lots of other security requirements such as background checks.

No argument of the form "Trump promised to X" or "Trump is bound by precedent to Y" ever stands.

grunteledboomer.bsky.social•11 days ago

👍People who have never worked in the Defense Industry can't possibly understand the detail and effort that goes into the products made and used there, AND the QC and traceability of them.

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