Tech helping U.S. foes evade sanctions
MIAMI » Technology to hide a ship’s location previously available only to the world’s militaries is spreading fast through the global maritime industry as governments from Iran to Venezuela — and the rogue shipping companies they depend on to move their petroleum products — look for stealthier ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
Windward, a maritime intelligence company whose data is used by the U.S. government to investigate sanctions violations, said that since January 2020 it has detected more than 200 vessels involved in over 350 incidents in which they appear to have manipulated their GPS location electronically.
“This is out of hand right now,” Matan Peled, cofounder of Windward and a former Israeli naval officer, said in an interview. “It’s not driven by countries or superpowers. It’s ordinary companies using this technique. The scale is astonishing.”
Peled said U.S. authorities have been slow to catch on to the spread of technology that has been part of the electronic warfare arsenal for decades but is only now cropping up in commercial shipping, with serious national security, environmental and maritime safety implications.
Windward was able to identify suspect ships using technology that detects digital tracks that don’t correspond to actual movements, such as hairpin turns at breakneck speed or drifting in the form of perfect crop circles.
William Fallon, a retired four-star admiral and former head of U.S. Pacific Command, said U.S. authorities have been aware for some time of the threat from electronic manipulation, one of a growing number of so-called “gray zone” national security challenges that cut across traditional military, commercial and economic lines.
“Any time you can deceive somebody into believing you’re somewhere where you’re not is concerning,” said Fallon, who is now a board member of the American Security Project, a Washington think tank. “It illustrates the extent to which people who don’t have any scruples are willing to go to achieve their objectives and the ease with which they can do it.”
One of the more egregious examples found by Windward involves a 183meter-long oil tanker that could be tracked sailing to Iraq even as it was in reality loading crude in Iran, which is banned from selling its oil by U.S. sanctions.
The tanker, whose name Windward asked to be withheld so as not to disrupt any potential U.S. government investigation, set sail on Feb. 11, 2021, from the United Arab Emirates, reporting its destination as Basra, Iraq. When it was 20 nautical miles away, its global navigation system began exhibiting strange drifting patterns. Twelve days later, its transmission stabilized, and it could be tracked heading back through the Strait of Hormuz, this time fully laden with crude.
Satellite imagery shows that during the two-week voyage a ship of identical length and with the same red deck broken up by a white pole and bridge was spotted dozens of nautical miles away, in Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal. That vessel was then followed on satellite sailing back to the UAE, its course merging with the reported position of the original ship after it resumed its normal transmission.
Under a United Nations maritime treaty, ships of over 300 tons have been required since 2004 to use an automated identification system to avoid collisions and assist rescues in the event of a spill or accident at sea. Tampering with its use is a major breach that can lead to official sanctions for a vessel and its owners.
But what was intended as an at-sea safety mechanism has driven a proliferation in ship-spotting platforms such as Marinetraffic.com.
Experts say such websites can be tricked easily because they partly rely on data gathered from thousands of amateur base stations that function like police radio scanners picking up maritime movements. Last year, two journalists from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation managed to register online a fake base station near Somalia and insert the false coordinates of a real vessel. Seconds later, the falsified location popped up on Marinetraffic.com.
“To minimize errors and always ensure data integrity, Marinetraffic has introduced a series of key actions in the last few months as we strive to keep securing incoming data further,” Marinetraffic’s Anastassis Touros said in a statement. Steps include blocking specific stations and IP addressees that consistently transmit false data.
Despite such quality-control efforts, the sheer volume of data has cut into the utility of such open-source platforms, two U.S. intelligence officers said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what they described as the latest — and most extreme — tactic in the catand-mouse game between authorities and bad actors.
Another blind spot: China. The recent implementation of a harsh data privacy law has cut by nearly half the amount of terrestrial data on maritime activity in Chinese waters, making it harder to track activity at busy ports key to global supply chains or the movements of the world’s largest distant water fishing fleet.