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What’s new: A “European perspective” from my colleague Peter Gutierrez at Inside GNSS.
Why it’s important: Peter makes a number of important points:
- “The AIS spoofing incident is not an isolated incident but part of a broader signal-integrity crisis.” If it is a “crisis,” it is one that has brewing on for a long time. The world started seeing publicized spoofing of ride-share apps in Moscow and of maritime in the Black Sea in 2017. The Russians were using it as a first line of defense against drones that might be targeting their VIPs.
- “AIS spoofing has become a hallmark of opaque, sanctions-busting operations,” – It is not just oil tankers evading sanctions. All manner of vessels wishing to conceal their location and activity, whether it is illegal fishing, human trafficking, or any other malicious activity, can and often do spoof their location. See this item from 2020.
- “The episode underscores the urgent need for resilient positioning, authentication, and cross-sensor verification.” – True that. Pretty much RNTF’s theme for over a decade.
- “Without such measures, the dark fleet will continue to navigate invisibly, even as its shadows extend across continents.” First, government leaders need to care about resilient PNT and the bad things that can happen without it. Once they do, they will find they have lots of tools to sanction spoofing and lots of ways to institute resilient PNT.
What else to know:
- There were lots of reasons under international law for the U.S. or other nation to board and seize M/T Skipper. Peter mentions sanctioned oil. The ship was also violating ITU regulations by broadcasting false information.
- What makes this seizure a slam-dunk, though, is that the ship was flying the Guyana flag, but when the US Coast Guard checked, Guyana said “it’s not one of ours.” That means the ship was “stateless” – the same category as a pirate. Since maritime is lightly governed, any nation can board and take enforcement action against a stateless vessel.
- We were involved in the earliest stages of Maritime Domain Awareness and AIS being implemented. At the time, we all realized spoofing was possible. The “common wisdom,” though, was that spoofing wasn’t something to worry much about because it could be easily detected and the bad guys would just be inviting enforcement action. Anomalies would be a good thing. As it turned out, there are so many bad guys in maritime, and there are so many anomalies, few nations are willing to devote the resources needed to take action and address the problem. Doing things right takes time, effort, and money. And doing things wrong doesn’t work…
This has been going on a long time. See for example this NY Times article from 2020. We have to conclude that authorities have been turning a blind eye for some reason…
