So this is something I work with directly, but for some other agency.
First off, a big reason as to why - is because the laws differ from country to country. Some countries, like Norway for example, require shipping vessels over a certain length to broadcast their positions through AIS, VMS.
This may not be the case for, say, UK.
There are arguments to be had from both systems as to WHY you wouldn't want to broadcast your positions at all times - a typical one is that other could easily infer your fishing fields (fishing patterns are trivial, if you've worked with this you can easily spot what tools they are fishing with, and likely what species they are going for - don't need ML-based systems for that. Any fisher or fisheries analyst can spot the patterns), and thus go after that.
The other is privacy.
A very typical thing is that ships turn off their AIS as soon as they enter international waters. There is no enforcement of that, and many developed countries have practically zero resources to fight illegal fishing, from a technological point of view. UNDP has a program which is aimed at helping developing countries with the tech and training to detect illegal fishing, but there's a long way to go. Developing countries desperately need the data, which is either owned by governments, or private actors. AIS data is either picked up by satellites, or base stations. VMS systems are expensive, but also allow for ships to transfer catch reports and similar - but is unfortunately not always enforced in a good way.
But tech is becoming better. Satellites with NAV/marine radar detectors are in orbit. Long-range drones with sensors are a thing. Countries are hammering through laws that force ships to have certain sensors on them. Lots of ML-assisted tools for automating detection and analysis is being introduced and used.
>> Satellites with NAV/marine radar detectors are in orbit.
Ya, they are called spy sats. For the better part of a century, very smart people have been funded by people with very deep pockets to track ships at sea that don't want to be tracked. If anyone thinks their startup sat company is going to start tracking ships with passive radar, they are entering a very very mature field.
>> The Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) is a series of signals-intelligence satellites that have conducted electronic signals intelligence for the U.S. Navy since the early 1970s.[1] The first series of satellites were codenamed "White Cloud" or "PARCAE", while second- and third-generation satellites have used the codenames "Ranger" and "Intruder".
And for anyone saying "well, our sats are going to be in lower orbit" ... that has been done too. If you ever read about satellites powered by nuclear reactors, those were low-orbit radar sats looking for ships.
Mature yet commercially opaque I assume? That seems like a good business model tbh, an existing bench of talent (likely under paid) and an established science and technology, that’s of broad interest to many companies, NGOs, and governments.
This is essentially Hawkeye360's business model and to a lesser extent Aurora Insight. Both are satellite based analytics of RF signals. Hawkeye360 specifically lists Maritime Domain Awareness as one of their focuses:
Yes, the military (intelligence) community have had these capabilities - and more - for quite some time. Some of the same capabilities are being released for "non-military" use, which just means that regulatory agencies etc. can get the same data for non-military ops.
But, as someone who's working on exactly that, it is not easy - and there's a lot of red tape to wade through. The data gets filtered by the military, and then you get whatever scraps are left. Scans/passes of areas with too much military activity tend to be off-limits.
A big threat is that people could start to fingerprint radar signatures, which in turn isn't ideal if you're a, say, navy or intelligence ship.
Not that your adversaries (read: China, Russia, etc.) probably don't have that exact type of data, but it's just standard practice to minimize exposure.
True in the aviation world. I've noticed that most people under, say, 50 or so, like ADS-B (airplanes broadcasting their location) for the safety reasons. But most of the pilots over 50 will say "It's just the government coming up with another way to track you."
There's some yahoo who buzzes my house twice a week in a Cessna (coming and going). He's often under 500' AGL. No ADS-B and haven't gotten a tail number yet. I think it should be illegal to not have it enabled, for exactly this kind of thing.
In fact I wonder if it's even a licensed pilot—William Bushling apparently flew for 20 years without a current FAA license and also didn't use ADS-B; when he finally lost the dice game it took them days to find the wreckage: https://youtu.be/69NvK6YbNtg
Flight plans are not required if you're just out flying VFR. Someone who doesn't like ADS-B probably also doesn't call uncle sam and tell him where he plans to fly.
When I started paying attention to airspace as part of my 107 drone cert, the amount of extreme bullshit flight behavior out of the two local small fields genuinely surprised me. It makes me think it's no wonder general aviation has so many accidents.
(The fields are San Martin and Watsonville in the Bay Area, FWIW.)
You can track them with sites like FlightAware or FlightRadar24. Just zoom in to where your house is. Click on a plane. If it's not on the map, it likely isn't broadcasting ADSB
These services rely on volunteers setting up receivers and feeding them data.
It is entirely possible that there is just no local coverage that would receive the low flying aircraft.
A 30usd rtl-sdr dongle is enough to receive local ads-b signals, if one wants to test it.
They aren't visible on these sites, first thing I checked. Maybe they've requested delisting but I think they're just not broadcasting—specifically to avoid consequences of their reckless flying.
As others have noted these commercial services don't show every plane, the owners of planes may request to hide their planes there, that's why I asked how you can be sure.
Other sites like https://globe.adsbexchange.com or https://globe.adsb.fi don't filter aircrafts, they even show military planes (well, if they have ADS-B enabled). Though they don't have coverage above oceans, as satellite ads-b is expensive. (These sites look nearly the same, as they both use tar1090 as the webui, but they may have different coverage)
These sites, may sometimes have less coverage, as the sites you mentioned are way more popular. But if your area has coverage by these sites, you can be sure that you'll see every plane if it has ADS-B.
You could even replay, if you know the time and date when the plane passed, by appending ?replay to the URL.
Have you tried a super long telephoto lens? If you got like 100 photos in a row you might be able to use some kind of software to blend them and infer the number.
It's only been a couple times a week on random days and times; I'd basically have to camp on my roof to catch them. And they're going full tilt (at least 90 knots) so there's only 5-10 seconds of opportunity. I do have a pretty good long lens on my digital camera, maybe I'll set it up and have it by the door.
4 days late on this but - if an airfcraft is in a sparsely populated area then it is allowed to be below 500' AGL so long as it is 500' away from "person, vessel, vehicle, or structure." This rule is suspended if the aircraft is in the process of taking off or landing (includes "flying the pattern"). I don't know where you live, so it may not apply to you. If you're in a rural-ish area, the person could be taking off from their own land or an airport you're not aware of.
I'd love to hear a genuine argument from someone, of any age, who is anti-ADS-B.
I don't understand the impetus to allow someone to fly a massive, deadly hunk of metal over a community without clarifying their telemetry to that community.
I think it's an act of wanton corruption that law enforcement is now exempt from this requirement in some situations.
> ADS-B data is broadcast every half-second on a 1090MHz, digital data link.
For more than a decade I worked airborne geophysical surveying - hundred thousand to a million+ line kilometre grid draping at 80m ground clearance on routes planned in advance.
The planes ran stable known instrument configurations and were calibrated weekly to measure their individual magnetic and radiometric signature.
Aircraft positioning signals on long haul flights Australia -> India -> Fiji -> Mali weren't an issue.
Extraneous non required signalling during grid surveying was an issue.
A reasonable comprimise was to blip a quick position fix at the end of every fourth or fifth 20 kilometre line run (say) ... otherwise no broadcasts during instrument recording times .. and glow in the dark divers watches for the pilots or random chunks of metal casing there one day and gone the next.
There is no legitimate argument against ADS-B other than "I don't wanna." Not to say that that isn't legitimate and doesn't at least deserve a discussion, but that's really it. There's really no Constitutional or statutory argument against requiring ADS-B.
> There's really no Constitutional or statutory argument against requiring ADS-B.
You could argue it's not a very good one, but it does exist:
"This rulemaking provides an exception to ADS–B requirements, removing the transmission requirement for sensitive operations conducted by Federal, State and local government entities in matters of national defense, homeland security, intelligence and law enforcement."
Yeah I probably wasn't clear in that I meant I'm not aware of any legal basis for saying that requiring ADS-B for private/commercial air traffic is wrong. For example operating a 172 is not a constitutional right so tracking you while you do isn't isn't necessarily a violation of any particular right.
I think it's wrong that the government exempts themselves from it if they're going to require it of everyone else, but that's so far down my list of grievances with the government it's barely worth thinking about :)
The only thing I can think of is for individuals who have credible threats against them. It could be easy enough to delay the relay of that information to the general public by 24hrs or something so that the data is available but poses less use to potential threat actors.
Probably not with the current tech, but there are lots of ways to do it. You don't need to delay the signal, only the information tied to that signal. If you get away from static identifiers and use something like a rotating RSA key, then the data associated with that key could be released at a later time. Not ideal for transparency unless there's a strict retention/audit process for the gold copy (perhaps one of the few legit use cases for immutable block chain since all identifies should be unique too).
Yeah, I mean, I'm a full-time cyclist, so you won't find a lot of car love from me. :-)
But I do think there's a difference in risk. Aviation has a pretty dang good record, and I think that the tradition of transparency in comms and telemetry is a huge part of that.
Both general aviation and motorbikes have a track record (at least in relative terms) that's pretty good _with respect to injuring or killing third parties_, which I thought was the thrust of the inquiry.
And yet somehow flying is safer than driving! As a sibling comment mentions, a lot of that has to do with all of the safety controls in place.
My point is that driving at modern speeds in modern vehicles is actually pretty dangerous, even if not as dangerous as aviation, and yet we as a society exercise very little oversight over the activity.
There are good reasons to not have "ADS-B for cars", mostly related to privacy. Unlike flying, many people heavily rely on cars to carry out their day-to-day activities. But I think it's at least worth thinking about.
Commercial aviation is safer than driving. General aviation is no safer than riding a motorcycle, and may be even more dangerous, so it is definitely not safer than driving. And the people complaining about ADS-B are going to be almost exclusively grumpy old guys flying around in J3 cubs.
Man, that discussion has been around for a long, long time- I'm a grumpy old guy that's been riding motorcycles of one type or another since I was 11, and flying since I was 16. Btw, I'm a huge fan of both ADS-B as well as TCAS... TCAS when I'm flying, ADS-B when I get to watch my son training at Navy Corpus.
Hanging around FBOs/flight lines/bars with pilots that also ride, it's come down to this:
After countless attempts and arguments while trying to normalize accident/fatal accident rates by converting hours flown/miles ridden, statistics do support that GA does seem to be a bit more dangerous than riding.
That having been said, my opinion is that most of the GA risks are in the hands of the pilot, while most of the risks of riding are external to the rider. Most of the worst motorcycle accidents I've seen or heard of involved the rider getting schwacked by a car or truck, while most of the worst GA accidents involved the pilot schwacking him or herself with poor judgement and/or skills that are below MIF. I put a lot of effort into minimizing pilot-induced risk when I fly, so scientifically speaking and all, I -feel- safer when flying than riding, and probably am.
Could you please reference some stats? I've googled before and have never been able to find motorcycle / GA stats... right now your comment sounds like someone quoting a nurse/doctor friend saying "donorcycles"
I don't think that's comparable since there is no rideradar24 where you could check out every ride anyone takes with their car. Also, who owns which plate is not public information.
I believe that plenty of people would object to that level of tracking citing privacy reasons.
True, I suppose that is more like the tail call signs it whatever they're called - only recorded (possibly automatically like ANPR) if someone bothers too, not broadcasted or squawked and ident'd.
There are EU regulations requiring fishing vessels over 15m to use AIS (the UK also abides by these) so within Europe the standards are reasonably consistent. Regulations are considerably more relaxed or less effectively enforced in other jurisdictions which is reflected in the data; it's possible the 98% of all fishing vessels operating off Thailand without AIS are all legal. But given the reputation of larger vessels operating in that region for slavery, perhaps not.
Agree there are privacy-related reasons why you might ideally not want competing vessels seeing which waters you fish, but AIS alone doesn't tell anyone whether it's any better than other waters (and fishermen have no shortage of other data points to plan their activity or other boats to follow if they really don't have any better heuristics). Regulatory evasion is rife even in effectively-regulated areas not least because the industry is convinced some of the regulations are actually wrong, especially when it comes to localised quotas. You knows there's an issue when a former operator of a commercial fleet in Europe tells you candidly, that their skippers (who are all tracked by AIS/VMS) would definitely expect any catch logging system to allow them to lie about which points on their voyage yielded most of the fish....
I have worked with some catch logging data, and there is certainly some weird stuff in some of the data that points to something like that (but super interesting to untangle and figure out, from a personal perspective). It really is a game of finding clear, understandable regulations, but at the same time put a lot of work into checking whether they are upheld.
> Countries are hammering through laws that force ships to have certain sensors on them.
Yeah but as long as no one dares to stand up to the worst offenders - particularly China, who have been under fire for years from their neighborhood in the Philippines [3] all the way to Africa [1][2] - with actual navies to stop and either seize or sink non-compliant ships all of this will be in vain.
The open sea is the last remaining place on Earth where darwinism in its purest form still rules. Might makes right...
Couple of years ago we were relocating my friend's sailboat from Croatia to Mallorca. During my night watches I routinely saw how Italian fishing vessels nearby Calabria turning their AIS off and on, despite local law mandates it to be on during the night.
As a sailor, it was infuriating when I would come across a container ship or some grain hauler with their AIS turned off.
Luckily I have other safety systems in place but damn is that a buzz kill at 3am on a new moon night.
Also another reason you would turn off AIS is if you are hauling precious cargo and don’t want pirates to know your whereabouts. I know this sounds cliche but it’s true. Cargo vessels traveling near pirate activity will often “go dark” to avoid detection and dealing with a Capt. Phillips situation.
So yeah, it’s difficult to get a fix on just how many vessels are out there, big or small. I’ve seen a lot of weird designs and contraptions out at sea.
Since I've observed a bunch of countries directly, it is more the following:
- Fisheries may not (historically or present day) be a huge part of their economy, and has therefore been neglected for years.
- Not enough infrastructure due to economic neglect.
- Huge revolving door of officials. One month you deal with one person, six months its another one. You don't know if they are real professionals, or someone placed there (party stooge, nepotism, you name it).
- No cooperation between fisheries/marine agencies, and navy/police/coastal guard.
- And, yes, some corruption I'd assume.
I have a concrete example:
We were invited to a developing country to assess their systems, and consult them on how to move forward. They were/are losing millions and millions due to illegal trawling.
Arrive at the HQ, which was a run down office where a handful of people were working. All data was shared via excel spreadsheets, no real systems to work on, lots of paper forms that someone had to digitize. Someone looking at MarineTraffic from time to time.
That's the state of some of these countries.
The illegal fishers are long out of their EEZ before anyone can react.
First off, a big reason as to why - is because the laws differ from country to country. Some countries, like Norway for example, require shipping vessels over a certain length to broadcast their positions through AIS, VMS.
This may not be the case for, say, UK.
There are arguments to be had from both systems as to WHY you wouldn't want to broadcast your positions at all times - a typical one is that other could easily infer your fishing fields (fishing patterns are trivial, if you've worked with this you can easily spot what tools they are fishing with, and likely what species they are going for - don't need ML-based systems for that. Any fisher or fisheries analyst can spot the patterns), and thus go after that.
The other is privacy.
A very typical thing is that ships turn off their AIS as soon as they enter international waters. There is no enforcement of that, and many developed countries have practically zero resources to fight illegal fishing, from a technological point of view. UNDP has a program which is aimed at helping developing countries with the tech and training to detect illegal fishing, but there's a long way to go. Developing countries desperately need the data, which is either owned by governments, or private actors. AIS data is either picked up by satellites, or base stations. VMS systems are expensive, but also allow for ships to transfer catch reports and similar - but is unfortunately not always enforced in a good way.
But tech is becoming better. Satellites with NAV/marine radar detectors are in orbit. Long-range drones with sensors are a thing. Countries are hammering through laws that force ships to have certain sensors on them. Lots of ML-assisted tools for automating detection and analysis is being introduced and used.