SoylentNews

Fnord666 writes:

The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a vast, barely explored region outside national boundaries, teeming with undiscovered species and dramatic undersea terrain. A few organizations monitor activity here, mostly international fisheries management groups, but it's easy for a vessel to get lost in the enormous distances. That's exactly what many pirate fishing fleets depend on.

Though normally we associate the term piracy with rogues who commandeer other people's ships, it's also used as shorthand to describe illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing. The Pacific is crawling with fishing pirates. Often their ships are crewed by malnourished slaves who don't see land for months at a time, a practice that has been documented by rights groups and exposed in a 2015 Associated Press investigation. They make their money by fishing illegally or in poorly regulated areas and then offloading their goods to the crews of large refrigerated cargo vessels called reefers in a process called transshipping. The reefer crews mix their legal catch with the pirate catch and then sell it all in port.

[...] Catching the anonymous pirate fishing vessels in uncharted international waters took less than a minute. More precisely, it took a minute of satellite time and three years of complicated signals analysis.

The majority of large vessels on the ocean broadcast their identity and location using the automatic identification system (AIS), which is mostly used to prevent ships from colliding. These days it can also be used to track ship locations, as most AIS data is relayed through satellites. If you want to hide on the sea, the first thing you do is make your vessel "dark" by turning off your AIS broadcasts. What's interesting about pirate fishing vessels, however, is that they need to rendezvous with legitimate reefers if they want to get paid for their catch.

To find the pirates, Amos told Ars, he and Bergman needed to look for odd patterns in the behavior of reefers. The group partnered with Google and Oceana to found Global Fishing Watch, which maps satellite AIS data. After over two years of research, patterns began to emerge. "Often with reefers they come to a halt in the middle of the ocean,"

[...] Certain reefers stood out. They spotted the Panama vessel Hai Feng 648, known to have previously taken illegal transshipments from a Russian pirate fishing ship, lingering oddly off the coasts of Argentina. Meanwhile, the Thai vessel Leelawadee took the same path again and again, traveling between Thailand (already a known source of pirate fleets) and the Dogleg.

[...] Enter DigitalGlobe, a company with five private satellites. DigitalGlobe Senior Director Taner Kodanaz told Ars that his company likes to devote a small part of its satellites' time to causes like SkyTruth's search for pirates. It also happened to have the perfect satellite for the job: WorldView-3, which orbits every 90 minutes, and whose high-resolution cameras can "capture objects that are 1 foot in size."

Source: ArsTechnica

Original Submission