Brazilians hijack US military satellites

[Peter Gutmann]

The whole story's at:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2009/04/fleetcom

it appears that Brazilians wanting to communicate on the cheap are using US
FLTSATCOM links to talk to each other.  This works because "the communication
channel was open, not encrypted, lots of people used it to talk to each other"
(later they talk about hearing encrypted military voice comms, so I assume
they mean that there's no access control, not necessarily encryption).
Truckers use it because you get better quality voice than with CB. Drug
dealers use it to coordinate operations, rogue loggers use it to warn of raids
by the authorities.  As the story says "Until [they get upgraded to use
crypto], the military is still using aging FLTSAT and UFO satellites - and so
are a lot of Brazilians".

Peter.