IN THE past year Lloyd’s List has tracked large oil tankers calling at Hindu temples several hundred metres above sea level, seen serious shipping congestion outside Moscow airport and watched the ghostly apparition of vessels long dead.

Spoofing of ship signals is a serious security, safety and environmental problem and it is not going away.

Technically, it should be a resolvable problem. Politically, it is divisive and therefore unlikely to be the subject of a global solution.

Flag states have the means at their disposal to uncover much of the deceptive shipping practices happening under their noses, but lack of resources, political willpower and in some cases state-sponsored complicity prevents this.

The forthcoming push to invoke a holistic review of the Long-Range Identification and Tracking system designed to monitor ships for the purposes of safety, security and marine environment protection, will in all likelihood descend into a political argument over sanctions.

If governments were serious about tackling the issue, there are reliably insightful tools and partners available to help sort out risk and compliance issues.

And there is plenty of innovation they could be actively pursuing.

Inertial navigation systems on board the vessel, essentially an electronic dead reckoning process that could check vessel position against satellite signals, could provide more resilience against the would-be spoofers. But it would require development and come at a cost.

Artificial intelligence could be aimed at old navigational techniques by mapping the electronic signature of the sky to offer a less hackable backup positioning report.

The reality is though there is little innovation activity in this space because the industry has become overly reliant on the established system in place that have proved to be so manipulable. Any such amendment is so caveated in the conditional tense as to be largely hypothetical right now.

That’s because the bigger blocker to any real due diligence in this area has little to do with technical solutions or investment barriers. It has everything to do with flag state responsibilities and oversight.

The shipping industry can be crudely divided into the good, the bad and the compliant. That holds true for government flag state operations as well.

There are flags going above and beyond in terms of best practice and transparency, seeking to analyse the behaviour of those companies and ships they flag. But there are more that are happy to look the other way while offering profitable refuge to the dangerous, substandard end of the industry.

A holistic overhaul of ship-tracking practises, if done thoroughly, would ask some difficult questions of some governments who would likely not want to answer. But the process would be revealing nonetheless and therefore a commendable exercise worth supporting.

LRIT is not perfect and due a serious review, but it is flag state performance that is the real problem here.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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