High Seas Deception: How Shady Ships Use GPS to Evade
International Law
"A technology enabling the transmission of fake locations to
carry out murky or even illegal business operations could have profound
implications for the enforcement of international law.
The scrappy oil tanker waited to load fuel at a dilapidated
jetty projecting from a giant Venezuelan refinery on a December morning. A
string of abandoned ships listed in the surrounding turquoise Caribbean waters,
a testament to the country’s decay after years of economic hardships and U.S.
sanctions.
Yet, on computer screens, the ship — called Reliable —
appeared nearly 300 nautical miles away, drifting innocuously off the coast of
St. Lucia in the Caribbean. According to Reliable’s satellite location
transmissions, the ship had not been to Venezuela in at least a decade.
Shipping data researchers have identified hundreds of cases
like Reliable, where a ship has transmitted fake location coordinates in order
to carry out murky and even illegal business operations and circumvent
international laws and sanctions.
The digital mirage — enabled by a spreading technology —
could transform how goods are moved around the world, with profound
implications for the enforcement of international law, organized crime and
global trade.
Tampering this way with satellite location trackers carried
by large ships is illegal under international law, and until recently, most fleets
are believed to have largely followed the rules.
But over the past year, Windward, a large maritime data
company that provides research to the United Nations, has uncovered more than
500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide
their locations.
The vessels carry out
the deception by adopting a technology that until recently was confined to the
world’s most advanced navies. The technology, in essence, replicates the effect
of a VPN cellphone app, making a ship appear to be in one place, while
physically being elsewhere.
Its use has included Chinese fishing fleets hiding
operations in protected waters off South America, tankers concealing stops in
Iranian oil ports, and container ships obfuscating journeys in the Middle East.
A U.S. intelligence official, who discussed confidential government assessments
on the condition of anonymity, said the deception tactic had already been used
for weapons and drug smuggling.
After originally discovering the deception near countries
under sanction, Windward has since seen it spread as far as Australia and
Antarctica.
“It’s a new way for ships to transmit a completely different
identity,” said Matan Peled, a founder of Windward. “Things have unfolded at
just an amazing and frightening speed.”
Under a United Nations maritime resolution signed by nearly
200 nations in 2015, all large ships must carry and operate satellite
transponders, known as automatic identification systems, or AIS, which transmit
a ship’s identification and navigational positional data. The resolution’s
signatories, which include practically all seafaring nations, are obligated
under the U.N. rules to enforce these guidelines within their jurisdictions.
Source: Windward
The spread of AIS manipulation shows how easy it has become
to subvert its underlying technology — the Global Positioning System, or GPS —
which is used in everything from cellphones to power grids, said Dana Goward, a
former senior U.S. Coast Guard official and the president of Resilient
Navigation and Timing Foundation, a Virginia-based GPS policy group.
“This shows just how vulnerable the system is,” he said.
Mr. Goward said that until now, all major global economy
players had a stake in upholding an order built on satellite navigation
systems.
But rising tensions between the West, Russia and China could
be changing that. “We could be moving toward a point of inflection,” Mr. Goward
said.
Analysts and Western security officials say the U.S. and
European Union sanctions on Russian energy imports could drive Russia’s trade
underground in coming months, obscuring shipments of even permitted goods in
and out of the country. A large shadow economy risks escalating maritime
deception and interference to unprecedented levels.
U.S. intelligence officials confirmed that the spread of AIS
manipulation is a growing national security problem, and a common technique
among sanctioned countries. But China has also emerged in recent years as a
source of some of the most sophisticated examples of AIS manipulation,
officials said, and the country goes to great lengths to conceal the illegal
activities of its large fishing industry.
Windward is one of the main companies that provide shipping
industry data to international organizations, governments and financial
institutions — including the United Nations, U.S. government agencies and banks
like HSBC, Société Générale and Danske Bank. At least one client, the U.N.
Security Council body that monitors North Korea’s sanctions compliance, has
used Windward’s data to identify ships that breach international laws.
The Israeli company’s research offers a glimpse into the
inner workings of the usually opaque and loosely regulated shipping industry.
Dror Salzman, Windward’s product manager, first spotted a
civilian ship transmitting a fake voyage early last year, in Venezuela. A
tanker called Berlina had been transmitting a strange drifting pattern for
several weeks just outside the South American country’s waters.
The idle movements did not make sense — keeping such a
vessel at sea costs tens of thousands of dollars each day. Berlina’s movement
also defied basic physics, he said. The ship, at one point, turned its
270-meter body 180 degrees in only a few minutes; its perfectly straight drift
defied the effects of the tide and the Earth’s rotation.
These anomalies could not be blamed on a technological
glitch. Because AIS transmissions are compiled by multiple sources — including
nearby ships, satellites and onshore stations — experts say they tend to track
a large vessel’s movements nearly perfectly, especially in busy shipping areas
like the Caribbean.
In fact, Berlina was nowhere near its purported location at
that time. It was loading oil in the eastern Venezuelan port of José, according
to Vortexa, another shipping data company that identified the ship through port
sightings, and shared its findings with Windward.
The United States is the only country that bans dealings
with Venezuela’s state oil company, meaning that Berlina’s oil transfer was not
illegal in Venezuela or Cyprus, where the ship is registered. But because of
Washington’s outsize role in global finance, many ships try to hide their
presence in Venezuela to avoid being ostracized by banks, insurance companies
and customers.
After learning to spot fake ship movements, Windward
researchers realized the technology was proliferating at lightning speed. “What
seemed to be a localized practice at first has soon spread to nearly all known
maritime regions,” the company said in a report late last year.
The spread of the deception tactic could be mitigated by the
United Nations’ adopting stricter security protocols for the software that is
installed in the AIS transponders by commercial manufacturers, maritime officials
and satellite data experts said.
The technology to fake satellite signals, either from the
ship itself or from a remote location, has existed for decades, but was
previously confined to military use, according to Windward. In the past two
years, however, military grade AIS transponders, or at least the software that
replicates its effects, appear to have become available for sale on the black
market, spreading rapidly among dealers of sanctioned and illicit goods.
The sanctions on Russia are likely to accelerate its adoption.
After the sanctions began in February, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s
Maritime Administration reported an increase in cases of AIS manipulation and
jamming in the Black Sea, coinciding with U.S. and Ukrainian claims that Russia
was trying to hide its oil exports.
The Department of Transportation referred questions to the
United States Coast Guard, which confirmed an increase in reported cases of AIS
manipulation.
U.S. officials declined to say how they would react to the
spread of the deceptive technique, for fear of exposing intelligence-gathering
operations, but in the past, the U.S. Treasury Department has banned ships from
doing business with American entities, or even confiscated their cargo, for
violating sanctions.
In the future, the technology could also become available to
airplanes, which use a similar satellite transponder to AIS, with potentially
significant implications for terrorism, smuggling and people’s ability to cross
national borders undetected, said Windward’s Mr. Peled.
“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he said.
Attempts by ships to hide their tracks are as old as
seafaring. Pariah states like North Korea, weapons runners and Iranian oil
traders have for decades tried dodging detection by constantly changing ships’
registrations, painting fake ship names on hulls and assuming identities of
different vessels.
After satellite navigations systems became dominant in the
2000s, those seeking to avoid detection adapted by turning their trackers off
while carrying out illicit activity, a practice known as “going dark.”
But the tactic had shortcomings. Ships with dark activity
spells are shunned by banks and insurance companies and scrutinized by
regulators.
The proliferation of AIS manipulation has once again tipped
the scales in the deceivers’ favor by allowing them to carry out illicit
business while maintaining a veneer of respectability, said Mr. Salzman of
Windward. By transmitting a fake location, a ship can claim deniability.
The technology behind this deception tactic is also becoming
increasingly sophisticated. The impossible movement patterns that Mr. Salzman
noted last year are being replaced by transmissions of coordinates stolen from
other ships, replicating real voyages.
The result has been the expansion of illegal activity to the
mainstream sectors of the shipping industry.
About 40 percent of all AIS manipulation cases identified by
Windward were carried out by ships registered in countries with at least some
ability to enforce international laws. For example, Reliable and Berlina, the
tankers shipping Venezuelan oil, both manipulated AIS while being registered in
Cyprus, a member of the European Union that markets itself as “Europe’s largest
ship management center.”
Overall, Windward says its analysis of AIS transmissions has
identified 18 Cyprus ships that have manipulated their location coordinates.
Separately, Lloyd’s List Intelligence, another shipping data company, has found
that many of the same ships have recently started trading Venezuelan oil that
is under U.S. sanctions.
The spread of AIS manipulation by E.U.-registered vessels
shows how advances in technology allow some shipowners to earn windfall profits
from commodities under sanction while benefiting from European financial
services and legal safeguards.
Cyprus’s deputy shipping minister, Vassilios Demetriades,
said illegal manipulation of on-ship equipment is punishable by fines or
criminal penalties under the island’s laws. But he has downplayed the problem,
saying AIS’s “value and trustworthiness as a location device is rather
limited.”
According to Cyprus’s corporate documents, Reliable belongs
to a company owned by Christos Georgantzoglou, 81, a Greek businessman. The
ship crossed the Atlantic for the first time shortly after Mr. Georgantzoglou’s
company bought it last year, and has transmitted locations around eastern
Caribbean Islands since, according to Windward’s analysis.
But Venezuela’s state oil company records reviewed by The
New York Times show that Reliable was working for the Venezuelan government in
the country during that time.
Mr. Georgantzoglou and his company did not respond to
repeated requests for comment.
Their Venezuelan dealings appear to contradict a promise
made by Greece’s powerful shipowners association in 2020 to stop transporting
the country’s oil. The association did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Reliable is still moving fuel around Venezuelan
ports or loading crude onto Asia-bound ships in open waters to hide its origin,
according to two Venezuelan oil businessmen, who asked not to be named for
security reasons. It still broadcasts coordinates of a ship adrift in the
Caribbean Sea.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/world/americas/high-seas-deception-how-shady-ships-use-gps-to-evade-international-law.html