Amazon Worries That Musk's Starlink 'Knows More Than Brazilian Government Itself' ()image @Starlink
Brazil’s Amazon rainforest says ‘cannot survive without Starlink’, the satellite internet firm owned by Elon Musk. The US billionaire had locked horns with Brazilian authorities over his social media platform X, which is now blocked in the country. However, it appears that the Starlink antennas are everywhere. From illegal mining operations to jungle ranches, and even military bases, Starlink is scattered across the vast rainforest.
Reportedly, Starlink has been caught from scores of criminals, including from illegal miners. “It’s a satellite internet antenna that provides communications to this whole criminal network…We find it everywhere now. Every mining dredge has at least one of them”, special forces combatant told The Guardian.
As per the report, Starlink claims to have more than 250,000 clients in Brazil, up from fewer than 20,000 in February 2023. Nearly 70,000 of those dishes are in the Amazon. The company operates in more than 90% of the municipalities.
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“Starlink is a revolution in the way it brings good quality internet connectivity to pretty much any remote place in the world…It’s revolutionary, and I’m not sure that many people in [the political capital] Brasília understand how – especially in the Amazon – you can’t live without Starlink any more”, said Pedro Doria, a prominent Brazilian tech writer, as quoted by The Guardian.
A tech lawyer, Ronaldo Lemos said Starlink changed the profile of the Amazon region with its connectivity. It helped the people in connecting to the outer world and education and business opportunities.
However, it appeared that Starlink is more trouble than help. Lemos feared that the Starlink’s massive penetration of the region potentially gave the US company access to highly sensitive information about a resource-rich region long seen as central to Brazil’s national security and sovereignty.
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The lawyer said Starlink is aware of every locations of their equipment. With such information and little data mining, the company can easily determine the positions for mineral resources.
“A company like Starlink might right now know more about the Amazon and the occupation of the Amazon by human activity than the Brazilian government actually does”, he said.
He also said that Starlink’s almost complete dominance of the Amazon’s satellite internet market gave Musk huge and potentially dangerous leverage over Brazil’s government. “The events that we’ve seen in the past few days demonstrate that unfortunately Elon Musk has become really unstable and even juvenile in the way that he is behaving”, Lemos told The Guardian.
“[This] erratic behaviour [means] it’s very hard for a country to actually depend on a person like him for critical applications like connecting the Amazon and so on”, he further added.
