[EuropeOverlords]

starlink can monitor your traffic in ground station. so you do not need ground based listening station. optical links still does not work what i know. it is kind of dumb relay ( atleast today ) darpa had program which wanted starlink like satellites used for military purposes, with sensors AND machine learning onboard, 400 km is not very far from earth either, so you do not need complicated sensors (optics..) to see / hear / feel / receive things + capability of computation ( ML filtering, ML recognition.. ) can provide you with very powerful platform. . plus on top - with optical interconnects you can transmit data without touching "bad" side of globe XD

so with ESA putting this amount of (american made) computation, you can see where it is going.

im proponent of having telemetry not encrypted, we need this for same reason we use ADS/AIS

there are multiple "channels" from / to satellite. not all have to use consumer grade encryption.