Modern-day piracy poses growing threats, challenges

in methods,” says Armstrong.

The shipping industry responded by equipping ships with an impressive array of ingenious security devices, among them anti-theft intruder alarms and thermal cameras, as well as deterrents such as high-powered water cannons and electrified fences. The U.S. Navy is now considering using non-lethal weapons for the specific purpose of fighting piracy (see HS Daily Wire of 6 November 2008). The U.S. military is also designing an automated surveillance system that will use artificial intelligence to spy on the seas from space. The system is designed to learn to recognize attacks, and to raise the alarm long before coastguards or ship owners would otherwise notice anything is amiss. Last month the sailors of the Seabourn Spirit, attacked off the coast of Somalia, opened fire with an acoustic gun that emits ear-splitting blasts of noise that can leave attackers stunned. Such sophisticated defensive measures are impressive and effective, but only a small fraction of vessels have them. “Most ship owners have short arms and deep pockets,” says Steve Smith, director of Derbyshire, U.K.-based maritime security specialists C-Vigil.

Countermeasures

  • A small industry has been created to make shipping more secure. Among the products and solutions being offered:
  • C-Vigil provides waterproof thermal surveillance cameras to spot approaching vessels in complete darkness at a distance of up to 3.6 kilometers.
  • If the pirates get close, sailors can fend them off with water cannons that can be operated remotely and have a range of more than 100 meters
  • Another weapon is an “acoustic barrier” created by powerful loudspeakers that emit a disorienting, high-frequency blast at more than 125 decibels.
  • Should the pirates evade these measures and attempt to board, infrared motion-sensing networks on deck can alert the crew to intruders and pinpoint their location.
  • Secure-Marine of Rotterdam in the Netherlands has developed Secure-Ship, a 9000-volt electrified fence that sticks out at right angles from the side of a vessel at deck level. “It creates a very painful shock,” says Russell Cahn of Secure-Marine. “An intruder will certainly jump back and start cursing — if he isn’t thrown into the sea.” The system can also pinpoint exactly where the attempted intrusion took place and alert the crew.
  • Electrified fences are not a good solution for ships carrying flammable cargo because sparks from the fence could cause the cargo to explode. Alternative defenses for ships with hazardous loads could include pepper sprays, slippery foam dispensers, or glue guns that shoot a giant glob of sticky goo at intruders (all these are ideas suggested by Dutch military research organization TNO)
  • Other researchers have tested infrasound — low-frequency noise that is claimed to induce involuntary bowel movements.
  • Shipping firms are increasingly interested in tagging technology. ShipLoc, operated by Toulouse, France-based satellite company CLS, for example, uses a dedicated satellite transmitter hidden aboard a ship to regularly transmit the craft’s position, direction, and speed to a central control center. In an emergency, discreet panic buttons can silently alert the shipping company’s headquarters and the nearest authorities.
  • Another tracking technology, already used by coastguards, is the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Ships equipped with AIS send out a regular radio broadcast to provide port authorities and other ships with their coordinates, identifying information, origins, and destination, as well as details of their cargo. The UN International Maritime Organization has mandated that from the end of 2004 all passenger vessels, and all cargo ships above 300 tons, should transmit the AIS signal.
  • Trouble is, New Scientist writes, “even the best security systems can only do so much to thwart attacks. Sometimes the simplest way to hijack a ship is to bribe the crew, or place a ‘sleeper’ on the inside.” “There is no technology that will entirely prevent piracy,” warns Simon Stringer, managing director for security and intelligence at UK defense research agency Qinetiq. “The real trick is detection of such an anomaly in sufficient time.” DARPA is working on a plan to use satellite surveillance coupled with a bevy of sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms to spot rogue operations. The agency has drawn up plans for an ocean surveillance and intelligence network based on this approach, which it calls PANDA (Predictive Analysis for Naval Deployment Activities). Details released in September show that PANDA aims to digest information from a multitude of sources — satellite images, AIS data, records of vessels and cargo lists, and even weather and business reports. The system will apply algorithms based on pattern recognition to tease out dubious activity as soon as it occurs. “Commercial maritime ships follow motion-based patterns,” Kendra Moore, manager of the PANDA program at DARPA’s Information Exploitation Office, told an audience at DARPA’s annual conference in August. “If you think of a single voyage as consisting of a sequence of events, you can identify movement and other activity patterns that correlate with these events.”