> The court concluded that the GPS requirement "violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is arbitrary and capricious, in turn because the Government failed to address Fourth Amendment issues when considering it and failed to rationally consider the associated costs and benefits."
The government does need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on a car.
Although, these days, your car already has one or more GPS devices in it sending that data to third parties. And there are many organizations that run plate readers on public streets.
I'm not sure what the requirements were but the article claimed in an attempt to bolster the argument that the government was imposing unreasonable costs on charter boat operators that charter boat income was only $26000/year and that seems suspect. Sounds like a lot of unreported income for those charter boats.
If I were an auditor I would definitely be booking random fishing trips with the busiest charter boats in these states and double-checking the package cost. Fuel, food, and other things provided on the trip should be easy to cost out so one could determine just how badly these guys are screwing Uncle Sam.
It is a seasonal thing to take vacationers fishing. Charge $1000 a trip, maybe fish 80 days a year accounting for weather. After expenses there isn’t much left over. It is a labor of love. How much do you think people who guide people on backpacking camping trips earn?
I have been a mate on charter boats. My pay was $100 plus $100 expected tip. The workday was 14 hours long. Any fish caught couldn’t be sold commercially.
Taking people out fishing is not a lucrative career but it does provide work for people who lost their jobs commercial fishing.
Using a website where ordinary Joes like myself can book charter boats [0] at various ports from Texas around The GoM to the Atlantic seashore, where the article was focused, doesn't support the article's contention that they do all this work and only make $26000/year. In fact it is a bit preposterous.
As a mate onboard you may not get the big bucks but someone is making bank here.
As far as backpacking camping trips go if you book through a normal site like through REI [1] they can be pretty expensive depending on duration, destination, etc since there is a lot of logistical stuff that has to be handled. It is not cheap, in the thousands per person for multi-day operations. I have not personally booked a trip like that since I lived in a tent in Nat'l Parks, motel parking lots, KOA or similar campgrounds off and on for several years. I can do my own thing and don't need assistance.
Same thing goes for whitewater rafting trips. The costs range from really low for half-day trips to thousands for multi-day trips. A good friend of mine has been river guiding in Idaho since the late 1970's. I would think that if he had been in danger of failing in that business that he would have fallen back on his college degree in the sciences years ago. I have rafted several of the great rivers in the western US and it is fantastic fun. [2]
you would be surprised how cheap some employers get to be .. when you get into other international jurisdictions.. well it appears here regularly that on-board fishing and some cargo ship practices are a modern holdout for actual slavery.
Indentured or forced labor has been the norm not the exception, for a very long time in many parts of the world.
It doesn’t say “annual income”, or “annual revenue”. It is “net income” which is not always well defined for small businesses. It is roughly defined as the amount of money you would expect to make running this operation after paying employees. What is the “net income” of owning a subway sandwich franchise? It is not the same concept as employee pay or revenue.
I wasn't trying to argue, just to point out that the numbers make no sense even as an average number across the whole charter industry.
Income reported on various websites scatters widely from under $20k to over $300k depending on where you are on the totem pole. With many of these jobs being paid on a day rate I can see where your income potential is limited depending on where you are, which species pass through your area versus the ones that are native and whether you limit yourself to specific species or go any time a client books a trip.
Looks like a complex industry. I only have personal experience from one offshore trip out of Coos Bay a long time ago on a boat full of people wanting to fish. We had to book well in advance and it was less than a full day outing. We did catch fish though.
Yeah... not AIS, but NOAA defined VMS (Vessel Monitoring Systems). Not only does it report position, but allows captains to send in their reporting data while at sea, in an electronic format that they could ingest directly into their systems. They also allow "email" and some weather reporting.
I led the development of one of these systems from a software standpoint: https://thoriumvms.com/
They're not cheap -- $2K or $3K depending on options and $40ish/month for service. We were reselling Iridium service as the underlying transport.
Looks like the bottom just fell out of this business -- glad I'm not relying that for my paycheck anymore!
The article specifically mentions GPS and not AIS.
But yeah my questions are around AIS - it's such an important safety technology (to at least have a receiver) I'd assume the boats would already be equipped with AIS. And if the boats had a transmitter it would all be seemingly public information anyway (which is the whole point of AIS if I'm not mistaken).
But I am glad the charters are not Required to maintain GPS tracking specifically for government monitoring - but in practicality it seems to me it wouldn't make that big of a difference due to overlapping positional monitoring technology.
Things are run as cheap and fast as possible. AIS? They're lucky if they aer
It's one of the reasons the job is among the most dangerous in the country. Everyone thinks deferring maintenance and repairs and safety equipment is fine - it'll happen to some other boat, and even if it does happen to them, the coast guard will come and rescue them. That duct tape on the wiring will be fine, that bubblegum plugging a leak will hold, etc.
What's particularly infuriating is that fishermen all feel entitled to making a living in fishing, and no matter how unviable it is, they make a huge stink about regulation or fuel prices and beg for handouts from the government and exemption from regulation.
"My great grandpappy fished, grandpappy fished, my daddy fished, and now I fish, and my son is gonna fish. Now let me take as much as I want and let my entire family sit on welfare and give me grant money etc while fishing stocks get depleted and my kid won't actually be able to fish because there won't be any fish left."
The first thing that pops into your head when reading "private vehicle's location need not be streamed to government" is: why would it? What did I miss? These are the relevant sentences from the article:
> It seems preposterous, but the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this privacy-infringing protocol in 2020. [Yes, the verb is missing here, but okay it's some law.... but why?]
> What benefits does the Government point to in response? Next to nothing. [great, lots of detail there]
> The regulation—issued pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976—was proposed by NOAA. [okay we got a headline of a potential reason behind it now, but are rental boats really the culprit in overfishing? Wouldn't it be fishing companies? Why only in 2023? Sounds fishy]
And that's all we get. After 518 words on the topic, the page "goes on" to report on decriminalizing pscyhedelic [sic] plants in some cities.
So.... asking as someone out of the loop... what's this all about in the first place?
Since this involves agencies regulating fisheries I suspect that they are trying to get accurate data about aquatic life taken during fishing activities so that they can make accurate estimates of a species ability to thrive in an area and perhaps to drive legislation that would protect areas from over-fishing.
I don't think they give a shit about knowing which boat was where unless that boat is engaged in illegal activities. Smuggling in the states that are mentioned is still a thing since that is on a direct path from the Caribbean and northern parts of South America where illegal drugs originate.
Knowing which boat was where allows them to determine who might be meeting the smugglers. Once you shut down the airspace to traffickers it is a natural extension to try to limit their ability to shift to maritime assets to ship their products into the country through small ports or marinas in backwater locations.
I don't see this monitoring as an invasion of anyone's privacy. I see it more as an extension of border enforcement mechanisms to domains which have historically been difficult to control.
Your first point is really the issue. NOAA extrapolates catch information into overall health of the species and uses that to issue permits, set quotas, and adjust fishing seasons. Not only did I help build some of the ship-board systems, I built a ton of data analysis tools on the back-end for NOAA.
Red Snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. NOAA will tell you we're devastating the species (boat captains would not agree!) and they adjust quotas and season start/stop dates based on catch info to help balance the business of fishing and the health of the species. It's a tough job because the captains are often at odds with the scientists.
It could be possible to sanitize the data and remove the position information, but they kind of need some general location to do some of the science.
This is important as fisheries globally are over-fished. The scale of the problem is not even known right now. Chinese fishing boats roam the globe taking fish for consumption in China and depleting stocks everywhere they sail including by fishing in marine sanctuaries.
Fish as healthy food has become a big deal in the last few decades and demand grows so the fish have to come from somewhere. If you don't protect your fisheries then collapse of global fish stocks will only be one more domino in the collapse of entire ecosystems.
I agree with this, but I really think the rationale for surveillance legislation like this is "all of the above." Some stakeholders are only interested in protecting marine resources, but others are in fact focused on identifying anglers who are poaching. See https://globalfishingwatch.org.
I have been on salmon charters in Alaska and Canada, and it is surprisingly easy for even a well-intentioned skipper to drift out of a legal fishing zone while tending to everything else happening on the boat. I'm not excusing those mistakes, but I can definitely understand their reluctance to carry surveillance units onboard.
It's a tough problem; all parties have strong arguments, but the interests aren't aligned. I do think there are some actionable areas most folks would agree on, like investing in measures to deincentivize rogue international fishing operations and bottom trawlers/dredgers.
> it is surprisingly easy for even a well-intentioned skipper to drift out of a legal fishing zone while tending to everything else happening on the boat
Skippers do have a lot to deal with, but I don't think it's asking too much of them to have accurate awareness and control of the position of their craft at all times.
If staying out of forbidden areas is difficult, then perhaps one could use a geofencing app that would work offline using GPS signals, which are generally easy to pick up on the water in good weather. You would input some boundary on a map, and the app will periodically check position and alarm if you've entered the forbidden area. I bet this is even a feature on marine navigation systems and even some watches.
Control access to the information so that it is less likely to escape to their competitors. They are in competition with each other and no one wants the other to know where they are making their best money.
The real problem is that when a fishery is in decline due to over-fishing, we have no effective way of detecting that condition until there is a serious problem and local stocks, which may be migratory species anyway that are only available seasonally, are near the point where they can't recover.
Each captain sees a small part of the elephant and to him, that elephant is there, it is healthy, and it is available for exploitation. When they go back to harbor they compare notes and it could take a lot of time for any of them to acknowledge that catch levels of some species are down and that they are having to go farther out or to locate new areas that have not been hit as hard.
I don't see a problem with a government agency with the responsibility of safeguarding the health of offshore assets like fish stocks and habitat having precise tools to allow them to determine where the fish are being taken. If this agency did not exist then over-fishing would be the norm as each charter boat did the best to maximize the fun for the clients until they had fished themselves out of a job as the fisheries collapse. In the absence of effective regulation, everyone does their own thing with no regard for anything except maximizing their own profitability. This is the way (of the world).
The first thing I do when fishing a new area is book a half day drift boat trip and mark all the spots they fished on my marine gps app. It's stupid easy (if not free) to find where charter fisherman fish.
It doesn't potentially open anything new. According to the court's decision, boat captains must already report that information:
> charter-boat owners are already required to report all of the information that the Government says the GPS-tracking requirement is designed to collect. That is, before going on a trip, charter-boat owners must tell the Government the type of trip (fishing or otherwise), and if it is a fishing trip, they must also tell the Government where they are going, how long they expect the trip will take, and when and where they expect to return. 50 C.F.R. § 622.26(b)(6).
Also, the decision concerns charter boat fishing, not commercial fishing.
They are out there in public exploiting a public resource, sometimes to the point where that resource has been depleted nearly to extinction.
There is no expectation of privacy and no right to it in this circumstance. There should be no opportunity for them to conceal what they are doing or where they are doing it. This in no way constitutes an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment since they operate entirely in or on public waterways open to all.
As far as allowing the government to know where you are at any given time, that ship sailed a long time ago and it isn't necessarily the government that causes the most privacy invasion issues. Many times it is private industry who tails your activities, your purchase habits, your associates, etc. I hope you see the issue with that.
The constitution makes several attempts to guarantee privacy but the interpretation of the amendments which might be useful for defining individual privacy rights is always a function of the composition of the Supreme Court at the time the case is heard. We need to be vigilant and supportive of all rights enumerated, not just our favorite or we will lose all of them to the wrong court.
So this is like requiring hunters to wear GPS tags so the game wardens can locate and interview them more efficiently. Half the country will think this is a good idea.
Most hunters likely already have their GPS location monitored anyway if they are carrying cell phones into the field. It is not too much of a stretch to see an edge case where one or more of them could become interesting enough to game wardens to find themselves under investigation.
The vast majority of people though have no reason to worry about their government wanting or needing to know where they are at any hour. It doesn't follow though that they will not be tracked 24 hours a day using tools and devices that they make a conscious decision to purchase, thus enabling this tracking, in real time, and facilitating their discovery should the mean old government ever decide that they are worth spending some of the investigations budget to study.
This libertarian leaning publication fails to emphasize the reason behind the tracking, fisheries management, since that might shine enough light on the situation that some of their more 'reason'able readers may end up understanding and offering some support to this data collection.
The federal agencies involved have, as part of their responsibility, the task of managing the health of our nation's fisheries which, believe it or not, requires them to have the data about where the fish are being harvested in order to understand how healthy the population of sport and food species actually are in our federal waters.
Maybe it would make more sense to subsidize the equipment that would be necessary to gather the data.
We subsidize some land crops, charter boats could become like marine combines.
The devices could be tracked without needing to know who owns the boat since the important information is the location where all the fish hang out and how many there are. Catch size and species distribution is already a reportable metric I believe.
Any fisherman worth his salt probably wants to be able to live the fishing lifestyle forever. If their activities contribute to the collapse of local fisheries because they were reluctant to accurately report which species are in their area of operations, how often they are taken, where they are taken, etc then they have no one to blame but themselves when their livelihoods are destroyed.
No one cares who takes the fish. They want to know which fish was taken, where it was taken, how many were taken there, how large they are, etc. This allows people to understand how best to manage fisheries.
These are public waters and they are taking a public resource. They have no privacy expectations and shouldn't get a pass with a bullshit excuse about their secret fishing spots being leaked to the competition since that will happen anyway as their hired help jumps from boat to boat trying to make a decent living on what looks on paper to be shit wages for the work they perform.
It's good to ponder how something like this can become a slippery slope but you have to avoid sliding down the existing slippery slope that where we don't have actionable information to use to prevent problems (in the fisheries) before they occur.
The entire article was about using location and other information gleaned from those who are regularly in the best position to know and who have a vested interest in the information being accurate to enable them to continue in their chosen profession. The publisher made a conscious editorial decision to tilt the tone of the article towards this being a huge invasion of privacy rights for people who by the nature of their profession should not be not entitled to those protections during the conduct of their operations since their activities occur entirely in public.
] OLE currently manages a grant that provides relief to fishermen for their initial VMS equipment purchases through cost reimbursement. This grant, and any reimbursement under it, is subject to available funding.
That doesn't mean it's actually funded though.
> These are public waters and they are taking a public resource.
Even more directly, this only concerns the "owner or operator of a charter vessel or headboat for which a charter vessel/headboat permit for Gulf reef fish has been issued" (emphasis mine). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-VI/part-622/su... .
> The publisher made a conscious editorial decision to tilt the tone of the article towards this being a huge invasion of privacy rights
Agreed! They didn't mention that it was only certain types of charter boat (see emphasis above), AND they didn't mention how the decision says that all of this information already had to be reported, with no evidence of people faking their trip records.
Hence it cannot be anything about "secret fishing spots".
This is very true. Funds must be allocated from the federal budget towards the program before there will be any actual subsidy. Both parties use this fact to shift federal dollars towards programs they support. Defunding a program or specific parts of one also makes it impossible for someone to use the program even if it has been legislated into existence.
It also helps them plan out their daily boarding and verification activities with a minimum of effort. Governments seem to have an increasing need to know where everyone is, all the time, and what they are doing.
There is no problem controlling the fisheries by simply auditing the catch when it's brought ashore.
I can see a problem with tuna and other fish being transferred directly to Japanese ships and never brought ashore, though.
Since your user name suggests you might be a coder, maybe you and those employed in similar occupations could work on tools that prevent this level of monitoring while still providing data that allows researchers to understand and mitigate problems before they become insurmountable.
There is another post on a similar subject dealing with bottom trawlers off the coast of Alaska where fisheries are in collapse. These are all solvable problems.
The real monitoring issue is less from governments, it is more a corporate issue where users are required to give up details of their private lives in order to use a service. Perhaps stop providing those types of tools since that data can inevitably leak to governments if an individual becomes a target of surveillance or to bad actors trying to extort or to steal identities.
They should cerate a catch report sheet then and issue free permits with the obligation to submit your yearly report sheet, like other European administrations do. Although I fail to see how the permits would be enforced, US Coast Guard?
If drugs are an issue, then run inspections upon boarding or furtger regulate the chartering companies.
>Knowing which boat was where allows them to determine who might be meeting the smugglers.
A signal lamp/ aldis lamp/ Morse lamp during World War I, German signalers used optical Morse transmitters called Blinkgerät, with a range of up to 8 km (5 miles) at night, using red filters for undetected communications.
They continue to be used to the present day on naval vessels and for aviation light signals in air traffic control towers.
This then brings the states mainland communication monitoring into play, because even though some part, some nod of the communication takes place in secret like two people having a conversation passing in the street, subsequent communication channels can be observed over time, which can then expose the use of signal lamps as the form of communication.
I think most people dont realise how easy it is to extract information from people without them knowing.
AIS[1] is basically an airplane transponder, but for vessels and I think it broadcasts position along with identification. For safety alone, seems to me that any commercial vessel carrying paid passengers should have one.
But the Reason article is so vague I literally can't tell if they are talking about AIS, or some other bespoke system.
AIS is a local broadcast. It's like having a number plate that's visible from 10 miles away.
VMS is 'phone home' system. It's like having a gps tracker with cellular connectivity on your car, reporting into a federal agency (not hyperbole, that's the design goal.)
But you don't have to broadcast your tail number to prevent a collision. It makes tracking by ATC easier since the tail number can be traced back to a flight plan, but if the sole reason is to prevent in-air collision, a radio beacon without tail number could achieve that.
A tail number also makes it easier for ATC to know who to give runway landing clearance to, doesn't it? They can't just say "you airplane over there, yes you, you're clear to land".
Whats broadcast is not the tail number but a ICAO ID assigned to the aircraft, that database is public. The FAA can assign anonymous IDs to aircraft that need privacy for some reason and still be able to identify which aircraft it is in their systems.
in our coming future of things like star shield the government won’t need gps or phones to track us. Enough satellites in space to have high res images of all high population areas and real time ai tracking of all objects. Lol crying emoji
If you don't build the technology then it can't be used against you. If you do build it then you need to build in effective controls so that you can limit or minimize these types of undesirable impacts.
None of these things - AI, software to remotely track users, etc needs to exist. We were doing fine without it and the potential for abuse is so high that there should be a pause on adoption until stakeholders, including ordinary citizens, have an opportunity to legislate concrete protections for privacy.
This is true and we have to have processes in place to understand who is responsible for the fishery destruction and to prohibit their activities, levying penalties and jail time for the most egregious violators.
I'm sure given the history of politics in the state that keeping things private is a high priority. Don't feed the prosecutors unless they're your kin and in that case, invite them for some gumbo.
Amazing. Private businesses have been tracking everyone for decades, but when it's gov trying to solve life-threatening problems - it suddenly becomes privacy issue.
Satellite imagery can't achieve resolutions needed to identify people. It is physically impossible. Especially so when slewed at an angle necessary to see faces.
The spatial resolution of the current state of the art satellite images have pixels the size of a person's head. They're taking photos from a very, very long way away.
And even if they resolved that particular problem, most people would struggle to recognise most other people by looking only at the top of their head and shoulders from almost directly above...
25cm is the allowed limit for commercial satellites. That isn't enough to identify anyone. The atmosphere limits the best possible resolution to not significantly better. Imaging off axis through a longer column of air makes everything worse.
It's not necessarily about tracking the boats - that's just a byproduct of collecting all this data. NOAA is mainly interested in near-realtime fish harvest stats so they can regulate fishing permits and quotas. You can't see that with a camera!
First synthetic aperture satellite was launched in 1978 and was able to image things day and night. Sentinel-1's data isn't real time but it is publicly accessible and has been up for nearly a decade.
Amateur hour. Simply say you will restrict coastguard emergency services if you voluntarily comply. They won’t be able to get insurance. The market at work.
Or seatbelts, drunk-driving laws, and speed limits! Constitutional rights laundering to interfere with our god given freedom to do anything we want!
I'm being facetious. Politicians threatening to censor internet sites unless they censor themselves is completely different than withdrawing the support they provide to a system.
I saw a documentary on YouTube about boats leaking into industrial oil into oceans far from land instead of disposing them properly via hazmat. And this was done in bulk intentionally to avoid the cost of disposal. For the longest time a non profit was finding this on satellite images. But could not trace it until transponder data started appearing publicly.
Came across the video through some random recommendation engine when I was not logged in. wont find it now.
77 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWould similar reasoning apply to cars?
Although, these days, your car already has one or more GPS devices in it sending that data to third parties. And there are many organizations that run plate readers on public streets.
Yes. Like Flock Safety (YC S17)
TLDL: licence plates can be stolen, but they still can identify cars by unique features like scratches, dents, mods, tyres, etc.
The Coast Guard collects all AIS track data, and publishes it on a 6 month delay via the NOAA Marine Cadastre program.
Maybe the requirement was for some other technology rather than AIS.
If I were an auditor I would definitely be booking random fishing trips with the busiest charter boats in these states and double-checking the package cost. Fuel, food, and other things provided on the trip should be easy to cost out so one could determine just how badly these guys are screwing Uncle Sam.
I have been a mate on charter boats. My pay was $100 plus $100 expected tip. The workday was 14 hours long. Any fish caught couldn’t be sold commercially.
Taking people out fishing is not a lucrative career but it does provide work for people who lost their jobs commercial fishing.
As a mate onboard you may not get the big bucks but someone is making bank here.
As far as backpacking camping trips go if you book through a normal site like through REI [1] they can be pretty expensive depending on duration, destination, etc since there is a lot of logistical stuff that has to be handled. It is not cheap, in the thousands per person for multi-day operations. I have not personally booked a trip like that since I lived in a tent in Nat'l Parks, motel parking lots, KOA or similar campgrounds off and on for several years. I can do my own thing and don't need assistance.
Same thing goes for whitewater rafting trips. The costs range from really low for half-day trips to thousands for multi-day trips. A good friend of mine has been river guiding in Idaho since the late 1970's. I would think that if he had been in danger of failing in that business that he would have fallen back on his college degree in the sciences years ago. I have rafted several of the great rivers in the western US and it is fantastic fun. [2]
[0] https://fishingbooker.com/
[1] https://www.rei.com/adventures/a/backpacking
[2] https://www.iwuraft.com/
I don't see that $26000 annual income is relevant for anyone except the lowest paid seasonal guide. That has to be a low number.
Indentured or forced labor has been the norm not the exception, for a very long time in many parts of the world.
Income reported on various websites scatters widely from under $20k to over $300k depending on where you are on the totem pole. With many of these jobs being paid on a day rate I can see where your income potential is limited depending on where you are, which species pass through your area versus the ones that are native and whether you limit yourself to specific species or go any time a client books a trip.
Looks like a complex industry. I only have personal experience from one offshore trip out of Coos Bay a long time ago on a boat full of people wanting to fish. We had to book well in advance and it was less than a full day outing. We did catch fish though.
I led the development of one of these systems from a software standpoint: https://thoriumvms.com/
They're not cheap -- $2K or $3K depending on options and $40ish/month for service. We were reselling Iridium service as the underlying transport.
Looks like the bottom just fell out of this business -- glad I'm not relying that for my paycheck anymore!
But yeah my questions are around AIS - it's such an important safety technology (to at least have a receiver) I'd assume the boats would already be equipped with AIS. And if the boats had a transmitter it would all be seemingly public information anyway (which is the whole point of AIS if I'm not mistaken).
But I am glad the charters are not Required to maintain GPS tracking specifically for government monitoring - but in practicality it seems to me it wouldn't make that big of a difference due to overlapping positional monitoring technology.
It's one of the reasons the job is among the most dangerous in the country. Everyone thinks deferring maintenance and repairs and safety equipment is fine - it'll happen to some other boat, and even if it does happen to them, the coast guard will come and rescue them. That duct tape on the wiring will be fine, that bubblegum plugging a leak will hold, etc.
What's particularly infuriating is that fishermen all feel entitled to making a living in fishing, and no matter how unviable it is, they make a huge stink about regulation or fuel prices and beg for handouts from the government and exemption from regulation.
"My great grandpappy fished, grandpappy fished, my daddy fished, and now I fish, and my son is gonna fish. Now let me take as much as I want and let my entire family sit on welfare and give me grant money etc while fishing stocks get depleted and my kid won't actually be able to fish because there won't be any fish left."
> It seems preposterous, but the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this privacy-infringing protocol in 2020. [Yes, the verb is missing here, but okay it's some law.... but why?]
> What benefits does the Government point to in response? Next to nothing. [great, lots of detail there]
> The regulation—issued pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976—was proposed by NOAA. [okay we got a headline of a potential reason behind it now, but are rental boats really the culprit in overfishing? Wouldn't it be fishing companies? Why only in 2023? Sounds fishy]
And that's all we get. After 518 words on the topic, the page "goes on" to report on decriminalizing pscyhedelic [sic] plants in some cities.
So.... asking as someone out of the loop... what's this all about in the first place?
I don't think they give a shit about knowing which boat was where unless that boat is engaged in illegal activities. Smuggling in the states that are mentioned is still a thing since that is on a direct path from the Caribbean and northern parts of South America where illegal drugs originate.
Knowing which boat was where allows them to determine who might be meeting the smugglers. Once you shut down the airspace to traffickers it is a natural extension to try to limit their ability to shift to maritime assets to ship their products into the country through small ports or marinas in backwater locations.
I don't see this monitoring as an invasion of anyone's privacy. I see it more as an extension of border enforcement mechanisms to domains which have historically been difficult to control.
Red Snapper in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. NOAA will tell you we're devastating the species (boat captains would not agree!) and they adjust quotas and season start/stop dates based on catch info to help balance the business of fishing and the health of the species. It's a tough job because the captains are often at odds with the scientists.
It could be possible to sanitize the data and remove the position information, but they kind of need some general location to do some of the science.
This is important as fisheries globally are over-fished. The scale of the problem is not even known right now. Chinese fishing boats roam the globe taking fish for consumption in China and depleting stocks everywhere they sail including by fishing in marine sanctuaries.
Fish as healthy food has become a big deal in the last few decades and demand grows so the fish have to come from somewhere. If you don't protect your fisheries then collapse of global fish stocks will only be one more domino in the collapse of entire ecosystems.
I have been on salmon charters in Alaska and Canada, and it is surprisingly easy for even a well-intentioned skipper to drift out of a legal fishing zone while tending to everything else happening on the boat. I'm not excusing those mistakes, but I can definitely understand their reluctance to carry surveillance units onboard.
It's a tough problem; all parties have strong arguments, but the interests aren't aligned. I do think there are some actionable areas most folks would agree on, like investing in measures to deincentivize rogue international fishing operations and bottom trawlers/dredgers.
Skippers do have a lot to deal with, but I don't think it's asking too much of them to have accurate awareness and control of the position of their craft at all times.
If staying out of forbidden areas is difficult, then perhaps one could use a geofencing app that would work offline using GPS signals, which are generally easy to pick up on the water in good weather. You would input some boundary on a map, and the app will periodically check position and alarm if you've entered the forbidden area. I bet this is even a feature on marine navigation systems and even some watches.
The real problem is that when a fishery is in decline due to over-fishing, we have no effective way of detecting that condition until there is a serious problem and local stocks, which may be migratory species anyway that are only available seasonally, are near the point where they can't recover.
Each captain sees a small part of the elephant and to him, that elephant is there, it is healthy, and it is available for exploitation. When they go back to harbor they compare notes and it could take a lot of time for any of them to acknowledge that catch levels of some species are down and that they are having to go farther out or to locate new areas that have not been hit as hard.
I don't see a problem with a government agency with the responsibility of safeguarding the health of offshore assets like fish stocks and habitat having precise tools to allow them to determine where the fish are being taken. If this agency did not exist then over-fishing would be the norm as each charter boat did the best to maximize the fun for the clients until they had fished themselves out of a job as the fisheries collapse. In the absence of effective regulation, everyone does their own thing with no regard for anything except maximizing their own profitability. This is the way (of the world).
> charter-boat owners are already required to report all of the information that the Government says the GPS-tracking requirement is designed to collect. That is, before going on a trip, charter-boat owners must tell the Government the type of trip (fishing or otherwise), and if it is a fishing trip, they must also tell the Government where they are going, how long they expect the trip will take, and when and where they expect to return. 50 C.F.R. § 622.26(b)(6).
Also, the decision concerns charter boat fishing, not commercial fishing.
I do! I consider a requirement that the government know where I am to be an invasion of privacy.
It really is too bad the constitution doesn’t actually include a right to privacy.
There is no expectation of privacy and no right to it in this circumstance. There should be no opportunity for them to conceal what they are doing or where they are doing it. This in no way constitutes an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment since they operate entirely in or on public waterways open to all.
As far as allowing the government to know where you are at any given time, that ship sailed a long time ago and it isn't necessarily the government that causes the most privacy invasion issues. Many times it is private industry who tails your activities, your purchase habits, your associates, etc. I hope you see the issue with that.
The constitution makes several attempts to guarantee privacy but the interpretation of the amendments which might be useful for defining individual privacy rights is always a function of the composition of the Supreme Court at the time the case is heard. We need to be vigilant and supportive of all rights enumerated, not just our favorite or we will lose all of them to the wrong court.
The vast majority of people though have no reason to worry about their government wanting or needing to know where they are at any hour. It doesn't follow though that they will not be tracked 24 hours a day using tools and devices that they make a conscious decision to purchase, thus enabling this tracking, in real time, and facilitating their discovery should the mean old government ever decide that they are worth spending some of the investigations budget to study.
The federal agencies involved have, as part of their responsibility, the task of managing the health of our nation's fisheries which, believe it or not, requires them to have the data about where the fish are being harvested in order to understand how healthy the population of sport and food species actually are in our federal waters.
Maybe it would make more sense to subsidize the equipment that would be necessary to gather the data.
We subsidize some land crops, charter boats could become like marine combines.
The devices could be tracked without needing to know who owns the boat since the important information is the location where all the fish hang out and how many there are. Catch size and species distribution is already a reportable metric I believe.
Any fisherman worth his salt probably wants to be able to live the fishing lifestyle forever. If their activities contribute to the collapse of local fisheries because they were reluctant to accurately report which species are in their area of operations, how often they are taken, where they are taken, etc then they have no one to blame but themselves when their livelihoods are destroyed.
No one cares who takes the fish. They want to know which fish was taken, where it was taken, how many were taken there, how large they are, etc. This allows people to understand how best to manage fisheries.
These are public waters and they are taking a public resource. They have no privacy expectations and shouldn't get a pass with a bullshit excuse about their secret fishing spots being leaked to the competition since that will happen anyway as their hired help jumps from boat to boat trying to make a decent living on what looks on paper to be shit wages for the work they perform.
It's good to ponder how something like this can become a slippery slope but you have to avoid sliding down the existing slippery slope that where we don't have actionable information to use to prevent problems (in the fisheries) before they occur.
The entire article was about using location and other information gleaned from those who are regularly in the best position to know and who have a vested interest in the information being accurate to enable them to continue in their chosen profession. The publisher made a conscious editorial decision to tilt the tone of the article towards this being a huge invasion of privacy rights for people who by the nature of their profession should not be not entitled to those protections during the conduct of their operations since their activities occur entirely in public.
I believe it is subsidized. Or more precisely, from https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2021-11/06-102-Revision_sig... :
] OLE currently manages a grant that provides relief to fishermen for their initial VMS equipment purchases through cost reimbursement. This grant, and any reimbursement under it, is subject to available funding.
That doesn't mean it's actually funded though.
> These are public waters and they are taking a public resource.
Even more directly, this only concerns the "owner or operator of a charter vessel or headboat for which a charter vessel/headboat permit for Gulf reef fish has been issued" (emphasis mine). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-VI/part-622/su... .
> The publisher made a conscious editorial decision to tilt the tone of the article towards this being a huge invasion of privacy rights
Agreed! They didn't mention that it was only certain types of charter boat (see emphasis above), AND they didn't mention how the decision says that all of this information already had to be reported, with no evidence of people faking their trip records.
Hence it cannot be anything about "secret fishing spots".
This is very true. Funds must be allocated from the federal budget towards the program before there will be any actual subsidy. Both parties use this fact to shift federal dollars towards programs they support. Defunding a program or specific parts of one also makes it impossible for someone to use the program even if it has been legislated into existence.
There is no problem controlling the fisheries by simply auditing the catch when it's brought ashore.
I can see a problem with tuna and other fish being transferred directly to Japanese ships and never brought ashore, though.
There is another post on a similar subject dealing with bottom trawlers off the coast of Alaska where fisheries are in collapse. These are all solvable problems.
The real monitoring issue is less from governments, it is more a corporate issue where users are required to give up details of their private lives in order to use a service. Perhaps stop providing those types of tools since that data can inevitably leak to governments if an individual becomes a target of surveillance or to bad actors trying to extort or to steal identities.
If drugs are an issue, then run inspections upon boarding or furtger regulate the chartering companies.
A signal lamp/ aldis lamp/ Morse lamp during World War I, German signalers used optical Morse transmitters called Blinkgerät, with a range of up to 8 km (5 miles) at night, using red filters for undetected communications.
They continue to be used to the present day on naval vessels and for aviation light signals in air traffic control towers.
This then brings the states mainland communication monitoring into play, because even though some part, some nod of the communication takes place in secret like two people having a conversation passing in the street, subsequent communication channels can be observed over time, which can then expose the use of signal lamps as the form of communication.
I think most people dont realise how easy it is to extract information from people without them knowing.
Wait till you hear about "airplanes".
But the Reason article is so vague I literally can't tell if they are talking about AIS, or some other bespoke system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
AIS is a local broadcast. It's like having a number plate that's visible from 10 miles away.
VMS is 'phone home' system. It's like having a gps tracker with cellular connectivity on your car, reporting into a federal agency (not hyperbole, that's the design goal.)
None of these things - AI, software to remotely track users, etc needs to exist. We were doing fine without it and the potential for abuse is so high that there should be a pause on adoption until stakeholders, including ordinary citizens, have an opportunity to legislate concrete protections for privacy.
Overfishing doesn't need to exist either, but unfortunately we live in a world where it does.
I'm sure given the history of politics in the state that keeping things private is a high priority. Don't feed the prosecutors unless they're your kin and in that case, invite them for some gumbo.
And even if they resolved that particular problem, most people would struggle to recognise most other people by looking only at the top of their head and shoulders from almost directly above...
Are you sure?
They were talking about commercial satellites seeing dinner plates in back in 2014 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/latest-commercial-...) and seeing cell phones from space in 2015 (https://www.businessinsider.com/satellite-image-resolution-k...) and AI could help turn even blurry faces into clear images (https://trinity.duke.edu/news/artificial-intelligence-makes-...)
I suspect that if the ability to identify people doesn't already exist in military satellites, it will very very soon.
Wonder what such a tactic should be called; perhaps "constitutional rights laundering".
I'm being facetious. Politicians threatening to censor internet sites unless they censor themselves is completely different than withdrawing the support they provide to a system.
Ah, but ubiquitous ALPR is OK. Got it!
Came across the video through some random recommendation engine when I was not logged in. wont find it now.