Is this a serious question? You think SpaceX developed the industry-leading orbital rocket, launched hundreds of times to deliver thousands of in-house developed satellites utilizing homegrown, novel argon gas ion thrusters, to develop a global satellite internet system using inter-satellite laser links, their own in-house developed, incredibly inexpensive phased array antenna system, and everything else, and they forgot to use TLS?

Given how well Starlink has held up in Ukraine against Russian interference I expect they're doing better than most internet providers.

so you are asking if the traffic is additionally encrypted? i don't think that additional encryption is needed, like your ISP doesn't additionally encrypt your TLS encrypted traffic, that would be waste of resources

> widely visible

Usual selling point in marketing of ground based free space optical links is that it is very hard to intercept. Compared to P2P microwave the beam is significantly narrower and alignment requirements higher and the link loss budget is usually tight enough that when the beam becomes visible off-axis due the weather efects (heavy rain or ridiculously thick fog) the link fails.

On the other hand one can extrapolate from results of reverse engineering of the starlink dish. Everything that goes through the space segment is encrypted and entirerity of the high-level control plane is mTLS authenticated, so one would assume that the inter-satellite links work in similar way. Of note is that software in the dish seems to share large swatches of code with what is not only on the starlink satellites but bunch of other SpaceX embedded linux systems.

Are they widely visible? Aren't these laser links from one satellite to another?

the DoD and the NSA surely looked closely in the past couple of years. not least because their Russian and Chinese counterparts for sure are trying to look closely, too, especially in the past couple years.

And this is what mind control looks like