Yes, they can—but they still need a security screening to do so. The point of the security screening is precisely to figure out whether you're "just" a reporter/fisherman/etc., or you're actually a spy or catspaw for a foreign power.
Though, to be clear, "security screening" is a bit of a misnomer here. It isn't a one-time thing. The point of giving someone a security screening isn't really the pre-screening that occurs when you first sign up; it's the continuous monitoring you are implicitly signing up for.
My understanding, from conversations over beers with a few friends retired from the US Navy and NSA:
Signing up for a satphone (or a NEXUS card, or a private pilot's license, or any of a number of other things—including, obviously, secret clearance or access to a security compartment) marks you as a Person Of Interest in PRISM and other monitoring systems. In response, the monitoring systems begin actually caching the event data they see about you into an online data warehouse, rather than just feeding it all into a data lake. The data warehouse is queried out, for each new PoI, to build an individualized ML model (Palantir Intelligence, I think is the software?), where the data initially gathered during your pre-screen is used as the training data—in est, a behavioural baseline. Once the individualized ML model for you is established, it will be run as a batch process (along with thousands of other ML models), about once per day, against any/all newly-arrived PoI event data in the data warehouse. The ML model spits out prediction error; and the system flags anyone with consistently high prediction error as being in need of re-investigation.
In other words, by signing up for a satphone, you're asking the government to keep a detail on you to see if you do anything out-of-character. Just, y'know, a detail that's 99% automated.
Though, to be clear, "security screening" is a bit of a misnomer here. It isn't a one-time thing. The point of giving someone a security screening isn't really the pre-screening that occurs when you first sign up; it's the continuous monitoring you are implicitly signing up for.
My understanding, from conversations over beers with a few friends retired from the US Navy and NSA:
Signing up for a satphone (or a NEXUS card, or a private pilot's license, or any of a number of other things—including, obviously, secret clearance or access to a security compartment) marks you as a Person Of Interest in PRISM and other monitoring systems. In response, the monitoring systems begin actually caching the event data they see about you into an online data warehouse, rather than just feeding it all into a data lake. The data warehouse is queried out, for each new PoI, to build an individualized ML model (Palantir Intelligence, I think is the software?), where the data initially gathered during your pre-screen is used as the training data—in est, a behavioural baseline. Once the individualized ML model for you is established, it will be run as a batch process (along with thousands of other ML models), about once per day, against any/all newly-arrived PoI event data in the data warehouse. The ML model spits out prediction error; and the system flags anyone with consistently high prediction error as being in need of re-investigation.
In other words, by signing up for a satphone, you're asking the government to keep a detail on you to see if you do anything out-of-character. Just, y'know, a detail that's 99% automated.