In fact, Berlina was nowhere near its purported location at that time. 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. These anomalies could not be blamed on a technological glitch. 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. Berlina’s movement also defied basic physics, he said. The idle movements did not make sense - keeping such a vessel at sea costs tens of thousands of dollars each day. A tanker called Berlina had been transmitting a strange drifting pattern for several weeks just outside the South American country’s waters. The Israeli company’s research offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the usually opaque and loosely regulated shipping industry.ĭror Salzman, Windward’s product manager, first spotted a civilian ship transmitting a fake voyage early last year, in Venezuela. A large shadow economy risks escalating maritime deception and interference to unprecedented levels. and European Union sanctions on Russian energy imports as a result of the war in Ukraine could drive Russia’s trade underground in coming months, obscuring shipments of even permitted goods in and out of the country. Goward said.Īnalysts and Western security officials say the U.S. “We could be moving toward a point of inflection,” Mr. A Military Upgrade: Satellite images and details in a video that aired on Iran’s state media suggest the arrival of advanced Russian jets at an Iranian underground Air Force base.īut rising tensions between the West, Russia and China could be changing that.A Currency Crisis: The decline of Iran’s currency, which was fueled in part by years of Western sanctions, is adding to Iranians’ sense of despair and grievances against the government.Iranians Return to Streets: Protests calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule erupted once again across Iran after hundreds of schoolgirls were hospitalized for symptoms that some fear might have been caused by deliberate poisoning.Hair as Resistance : Defiant resistance to Iran’s hijab law among Iranian women has exploded in the wake of the nationwide uprising triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini last year.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.Īfter originally discovering the deception near countries under sanction, Windward has since seen it spread as far as Australia and Antarctica. 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. 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. The vessels carry out the deception by adopting a technology that until recently was confined to the world’s most advanced navies. 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.īut 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. 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. According to Reliable’s satellite location transmissions, the ship had not been to Venezuela in at least a decade. Yet, on computer screens, the ship - called Reliable - appeared nearly 300 nautical miles away, drifting innocuously off the coast of St. 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. The scrappy oil tanker waited to load fuel at a dilapidated jetty projecting from a giant Venezuelan refinery on a December morning.
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