Angry Planet - Libya, China, and the Outlaw Ocean

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThe ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. Thousands of miles from any coast, power belongs to those who seize it.On this episode of Angry Planet, journalist Ian Urbina stops by to discuss the Outlaw Ocean Project and the second season of its incredible podcast. Urbina and his team of investigative journalists are telling stories about human rights, labor, and the environment on the vast swaths of the planet covered in water.The hidden cost of the seafood supply chainWhy the ocean is such a lawless place“Crimes at the intersection of environment and human rights.”Libya is “hell on earth” for migrantsAliou’s journey to LibyaHow Europe enables Libyan militias to police its bordersThe migration to slavery pipelineA team of journalists at gunpointLife on a Chinese squid fishing vesselLow tech and high tech reporting gets the job done“That is what life is like in that niche of hell.”Listen to the Outlaw Ocean PodcastInside a migrant detention center in LibyaChina: The Superpower of SeafoodSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. Today we're going to talk about another podcast that has just entered its second season, or I guess not just now. Most of it has aired, I believe.

Half of it has aired. And that is the Outlaw Ocean and its host and creator. You are the creator, correct? Yes. The lovely Ian Urbina is here to talk about that show. It's kind of hard for me to summarize exactly what everything is about. But I was listening to kind of the end of the portion about China this morning. And it kind of struck me that it's about a lot of different things.

but about what forced labor and slavery looks like in 2025 is kind of one of the big themes, I would say. Do you think that that's accurate? It is. Yeah. Yeah. And also just, you know, if you look at one product, in this case, seafood and kind of follow it from origin to arrival, where are the many hidden costs and blind spots within that supply chain. Yeah, it was, we're going to jump all over the place today. But it was fascinating to listen to it.

Because one of the things you guys do is map out supply chains for seafood in a way that I don't think that apparently no one else has done, especially not the people that are monitoring for human rights abuses. And kind of discover or reinforce maybe what you already knew that people aren't following the rules. as far as like where you get your labor for how to deal with seafood. But let's let's let's back way up. Let's back way, way up. What is Outlaw Ocean? And why is the ocean so full of outlaws? All right.

So the Outlaw Ocean Project is this organization I run. It's a nonprofit. It's a journalism shop. It came from, I spent 17 years at the New York Times and doing investigative for much of it. And the last big project I did there was called the Al Ocean. And it looked at, you know, kind of wild and weird things that happen at sea, especially on the high seas. And quite especially kind of crimes at the intersection of environment and human rights.

You know, 50 million people work at sea. And, you know, there's very little journalism happening about those people and what's happening out there. So that series ran in the New York Times. And then I went back out to sea for two years and produced a book. And then when I came back from that, I said, to open up a boutique kind of investigative journalism shop that just works on those stories. So the podcast is born out of that. Why is it the Outlaw Ocean and why is that space, I think, aptly described as such?

Because it's a weird realm that's sprawling. And legally, in terms of the kind of history of ideas and literature and philosophy, in terms of how it's handled in the commercial space, from a government regulatory perspective, in all these different ways, the high seas are different than most on-land jurisdictions. The only other place are the poles, you know, the North and South Pole that are equally weird.

But these are, this realm is sort of a space that belongs to everyone and no one and has very murky and thin rules and no police force to enforce those rules. And all that adds up to, you can kind of do what you want. Yeah, it's a place where might makes right, really. And that has led to all sorts of, and there's no, we're so used to in the modern world, there being a camera everywhere, whether that's in your pocket or on a street corner. And the ocean is a place where if you're lucky, it's in the pocket of someone that's on the ship.

But other than that, there's not a lot of oversight. No one's watching, so you can get away with a lot. That's right. That's right. So the first three episodes of this second season of the podcast are about kind of where the migration crisis is in Europe, what's going on with it. And specifically, like, Europe's relationship to Libya, which is very prescient or very relevant, rather, because it's one of the places that Donald Trump has teased sending America's own. migrants and immigrants. I think the second episode calls Libya hell on earth.

So there's a migration crisis in Europe right now. Can you kind of describe the shape of it and how Libya plays in? Yeah. I think, you know, the, so in the Mediterranean Sea, the body of water that separates North Africa from southern Europe, quite especially Italy, but other states, as well are the sort of front line of undocumented arrivals to the tune of, you know, tens of thousands of people per year. The most common route for these people, and let me pause there, these people are largely desperately poor, often sub-Saharan Africans, but also increasingly Yemenis and Afghans and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans. They're coming from

other places outside of Africa and typically following this route through the Saharan Desert, through Niger, and up to Libya. Why Libya? Because of the states that are launching, potential launching points, Algeria, Tunisia, you know, all the way down to Senegal, most of them have functioning states. And those states fairly control the existence of traffickers who might take you in a boat across the water. But then there's Libya, right? 2011 U.S. led forces toppled Qaddafi, bad guy that he was textbook capital D dictator. Nonetheless, he also kept the place pretty locked down. And so kind of migration control was a thing. Post-Kaddafi, it was not. It has not been. And the place is now essentially divided in three parts.

Benghazi is one section of northern Libya. Tripoli runs the other section. Then South Libya is kind of an out war zone. But all three sections are run by various militias. And the industry of trafficking, of putting people in boats and helping them get across that body of water has just blossomed and it's become a central part of the one financially viable thing that keeps Libya running. So tens of thousand people are going there because it's a lawless state.

What that also means is it's hell on earth because it is just what I described. It is a marketplace for traffickers and the militias have solidified the infrastructure so that they can most exploit that commodity that is desperate migrants. And so typically they're raping and extorting the migrants that are sometimes brought back to shore and put in these detention centers. Now, what's the EU's role? Really, the EU is desperate to prevent people from arriving to their shores and the way that the world is going. The U.S. does it, Australia does it, and Europe does it, and especially Italy, is outsource migration control to some other state. The U.S. even under Obama was paying the Mexican government to stop

Venezuelans, Guatemalans, whomever, from making it to U.S. soil by paying the government in Mexico to house them in Mexico. Why? Fewer journalists, fewer lawyers, fewer constitutional rights, etc. Okay. So the U.S. has been doing this for a while. Trump put it on steroids and started sending folks to El Salvador, even talking about sending them to Libya. Australia is doing it also in keeping folks in Papua New Guinea and other places. So this is not unique to Italy, but Italy has been and the EU has been really refined it. And they use the Libyan Coast Guard to capture people at sea and to prevent them from ever arriving to European shores and keep them instead in Libya. What's driving the mass migration? A bunch of things, you know, A, the standard and increasing

poverty levels. Poverty is caused by corruption, bad government, terrorism, you know, kind of imperial policies from the global north, i.e. the U.S. and Canada and the European Union, sort of exploitative, extractive policies that have been going on for a long time. These things drive poverty, but so does climate change, quite frankly. And in the case of the story we did, we looked at sort of a quintessential climate migrant who fit the very textbook story of someone who, you know, was sustainably living in this dirt poor country called Papa, called Guinea-Bissau. He had a farm. He had a wife. He had a couple kids. He had his parents to look after. but increasingly in recent years before his departure, the ground simply was becoming too hard to plant.

It was not reaping anything. The cows were too emaciated to actually produce milk. The weathers were wildly, you know, kind of monsoon was too wet, dry season was too dry. So basically he and his brothers said, we've got to get out of here. If we're going to have any chance of these kids not starving, then we need to go someplace where we might have a chance of earning something. So his two brothers made it, you know, on separate journeys. One in Italy now, the others in Spain. The third, Al Yuconde, the guy we focused on, decided he was going to try his luck and make the track and didn't go so well for him.

Yeah, can you tell us what happens to Alleyu? Alu sets out on the path that many have followed before. He initially wanted to launch from Algeria. Price of getting in the boat was too expensive. He didn't have the money. so he decides to go to Libya. Folks said, don't go to Libya. It's just too dangerous.

He goes. He finds a trafficker who he can afford. He gets in the boat with about 150 other folk. They try to make the crossing. Frontex, which is the border agency of the EU, which is flying drones and propeller planes 24-7 over the Mediterranean, specifically looking for migrant boats to try to stop them. Frontex spots, a drone spots Aliyu's boat.

They call in the coordinates to Italian authorities. Italian authorities then call the Libyan Coast Guard. Libyan Coast Guard races out there to try to intercept Aliyu's boat. What typically happens in this case, too, is that a legitimate humanitarian entity, typically Doctors Without Borders, which has a vessel on the water, is also trying to get to the boat as fast as they can. but they don't have the benefit of air support, so they don't know the coordinates. Anyway, they usually lose Libyans get there first.

Libyans get their first. They grab everyone off of Al-Eu's boat at gunpoint, beat some folks, force them onto Libyan Coast Guard vessel, take them back to shore. Then again, with EU-funded guns, EU-funded tablets, EU-funded SUVs, the whole thing is orchestrated and funded by the EU. The Libyan militias then take hundreds of these migrants, Al-U included. to a place called Alma Boni, which was at the time it's since been closed, the worst, most notorious detention center of the dozen or two dozen that were in operation at the time. He goes in there

and is put in cell block four. And speeding up the story weeks later, a fight breaks out between a bunch of different migrants, some who want to escape and roll the dice and try their luck at prying open the door. Others who say it's a terrible idea and the guards will demonstratively sort of performatively beat and kill folks for even trying. And so they argue against it. The fight breaks out. The guards open fire on the migrants in the prison and Ali, who takes a bullet to the neck and dies. Is there no law governing? It's the level of cooperation between the EU and Libyan militias feels like it should not be a thing. feels like there should be laws against this.

It is not as if we don't know what will happen to these people if the Libyan militia gets a hold of them, right? It's been clear for a long time. Yeah. So is this just a, is it really the, like, EU is trying to keep its hands as clean as possible while still outsourcing border patrol to Libyan militias? Yeah. Okay. So let's imagine if the spokesperson for this migration control policy. for the EU was here, what would they say? And I'll try to be as fair in rendering their perspective.

What they would say is what we are doing by funding Frontex to spot the vessels, by donating Coast Guard vessels to the Libyan Coast Guard, by calling in coordinates to help the Libyan Coast Guard capture these people, and also by providing funds to key players on the ground in Libya, so as to process and transport the migrants. What we are doing there, they would say, is humanitarian work. What we're trying to prevent is people drowning and people being taken advantage by traffickers. And we're supporting what players exist, even if they're flawed, to engage in that humanitarian effort. Okay, that's what they would say.

Now, why is it bullshit? Because, number one, the entire world recognizes that it's illegal on an international law, not to mention unethical, to return people to a war zone. That's not a rescue. That's something else. Point one. So it is illegal to be orchestrating the return of people back to Libya when you know what's going on in Libya. Number two, it would be a arrest that. the real term of grabbing people at sea in international waters where you don't have jurisdiction anyway, you being the Europeans or the Libyans, grabbing them and demanding that they come on the vessel and firing, opening fire on their vessels if they don't, that's not a humanitarian intervention. That's an arrest, right? So let's call it what it is. You are arresting people at sea because they're doing about to do something you don't want done, which is they're about to enter Italian waters and you don't want that. And then thirdly, what the EU

spoke to people often say is, look, we don't like what happens to these migrants when they arrive to the detention centers. That's why we don't directly fund the guns that are used and we don't fund the bricks and mortar that are used. What we do fund is the rescues at sea and the handoffs in an orderly fashion.

It's complete bunk. They know full well. exactly what happens when they return to Libya. But this is the rhetoric. These days, they're getting a little bit less spinster on what they say they're doing. And they're being a little bit more brutally honest because the world has shifted to the right since the investigation was done. And it's now kosher to say, we just don't want those people here. And so we're paying folks to prevent them from getting here who are willing to do the work. Okay, well, that's at least a step towards candor. You're not humanity.

You're not doing anything for them. You're doing something for you. Okay. But at the end of the day, it's still brutal, unsustainable, illegal, what they're doing. Yeah. And can you tell me what happens in these detention centers and like what becomes of, I mean, obviously LU died. But what is life like for you when you end up in one of these places? It's pretty formulaic.

It's pretty consistent. You're brought in. it's a pretty clear business model, and militias wouldn't deny any of this. You get to the facility. Usually the women and children are put in certain cell blocks and the men and others. The men are from all over the place, and that already spells trouble because religion, tribe, nationality, kick in. So you've got a lot of tension within that. And most of them are still men. All right, now you're there. Then what happens is they're housing you not because the IOM, the international organization of migration from the UN is going to then arrive a week later and start boarding people on planes and sending them back. IOM is pulled out. There is no infrastructure for which they're actually seeking to then send you back someplace. They're holding you there because now they're going to squeeze finances out of you. And that's a they walk around and they're designated folks who go around. and they have cell phones and they say, you need to call someone and tell them this is how much

they need to send and how for you to be released. And if you don't have, and most of these people are coming from even poorer settings, then they're in now. And so that's where the brutality begins. And they begin, first they get the numbers from you. That's key. They need the numbers of your family. Then when you call the, they call the families. The families say, we don't have it, but we'll try to find it. If the families can't scrounge it up, then the keepers, the prison keepers, begin to torture. And so they do performative on video or audio abuse so that the families, the pressure on the families escalates, you know, in a really dark way. And if that doesn't work, then they sell, and that usually takes weeks to months, you know, if there simply is no money

behind this guy. There's no way that anyone he can get to has any money that's even, then they sometimes sell the migrants, and this is legal in Libya. It's actually legal to sell them into labor. So they get sent to either militia prep, so they get sent to different places to work on cars or stack ammo or clean up or whatever, or they get sent to domestics, so they're used in households, or they're sent to construction or agricultural sites. however, they get sold downstream, which is a step down on the money you can make. So you don't want to do that because it's not big money. The big money is if you get someone to wire you what you're asking.

And that whole process usually takes, you know, six months to 15 months that they're held there and it's just escalating. And then if they can't sell you and they can't squeeze you, then they release you typically in one or two places. Either in Tripoli, there's a slum called, Gargresh, and that's where all these folks have, you know, consolidated and typically they begin planning their next attempt to cross. Or they dump you across the border in the desert. And that's been a huge problem where hundreds and thousands of folks have literally just been

dropped off in the Saharan desert just inside of Algeria, just inside of Niger and left there to roam or die. And in those places, we know those stories and we have footage. and, you know, it's a regular thing because there are outposts, sparse, but outposts of UN rescue workers who are like, okay, we just got another batch of 200 folks who've been wandering the desert for two weeks, and they say they were dropped after being released from a prison. So it's possible that you might get, you might try to cross, get picked up, go through that process, get out, try to cross again and get picked up and just get kind of caught in this cycle until eventually you end up in the slum, or end up dumped in the desert? Look, last week, I was talking with a journalist who is working with a migrant. She's 22. She's eight months pregnant.

She has a 10-year-old with her. She's from Yemen. She's in Tripoli now, hiding out, trying not to get grabbed up. She's tried twice already to cross, gotten caught, brought back. I don't know how she didn't get put in. She's been raped twice already in the last six weeks. This is like a typical story. This journalist who's following her trek said that she was with her husband initially,

and they got separated and the husband made it onto a doctor without boarders boat, and he made it to Germany. And she got sent back to Tripoli. And she's about, even though she's eight months pregnant and has a 10-year-old with her, she's about to try to board the third time to cross. And this is the story. You said earlier that this isn't sustainable. How do you, like this is the most.

migrant crisis, like people are going to be moving around, right? And it's gotten worse. It's gotten worse because heat is increasing. And it is kind of, it reinforces all those other things that you kind of listed it at the beginning. Like food insecurity, you know, crime, failed states, terrorism. Like, people are going to leave these places. It seems like we've got a, the, you know, the global north and the west has to have some sort of moment where it says, we have to, we have to, we have to, have a plan for how to deal with this that is not just shipping people to to Libya, right? Yeah. Is anyone talking about like what that looks like or what to do here? Does anyone have any idea? Yeah. I mean, look, the answer here, which I'm willing to put forward because I've heard it from folks that I think are smart and trustworthy is not a silver bullet.

Like it's not, it feels like academic and overly aspirational. and yet it's probably the only answer there is. And that is you have to look at the push factors and there has to be like actual sustained, serious commitment by all the Global North players to basically confront what's causing the folks to leave in the first place. And that is the exact opposite of the perspective that's popular right now. Like, you know, pulling back from USAID and state, for example,

or Peace Corps is, the 180 degree inverse of what actually needs to be happening and building a wall, whether it's bricks and mortars and marines on the southern border or an invisible wall across the Mediterranean, is utterly foolish. Even if you put the ethics and legality aside, you cannot build a wall high enough to handle the number of people that are going to be coming across and heading towards you. And right now, the numbers are just going up and up and up. And no amount of fear is going to like top. what it's like to be a 22-year-old in Sana'a Yemen right now, like with a newborn. Like, there is no fear that you could say, don't come to Italy because we're going to make it worse for you. Don't come to the U.S. because we're going to make it worse for you than it is where you're coming from.

That's not possible because those places are literally the worst it can be. So I think the factors, when you hear academics who are sober, you know, not just sort of bleeding heart liberal types that high in the sky. you know, kind of notions, they say like, we need to begin confronting the places where all these folks are coming and figure out ways to try to not have them come and have them stay where they are. And that means aid and training and all sorts of things. So that feels pretty grim then because you're right, it is all trending not in that direction right now. Yeah. You know, we, America's pulled way off.

destroyed USAIDs, and is very interested in simply building walls digital and otherwise in shipping people out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only hope is, and like pull back from climate and speed up cold pens. You know, it's like in every place you look, pull back from even militarized partnerships that might mitigate the recruitment of terrorists, right? Like, let's pour gas on the flames that cause terrorists to become terrorists.

Like, every single front you look, we're pushing in the exact opposite direction of what, if you asked me, which you have, I think has to happen to prevent this from increasing. So we did one of the first episodes of the show 10 years ago was about the Mediterranean. And it was interesting because we had, we had Robert Young Pelton on. And I remember Jason, I pitched it to Jason and he was like, how is this an angry, or it was war college back then. Like, how is this a military story? And I was like, it's going to get, I was like, it is.

It's going to be much worse in 10 years. And I don't like to be proved correct. But it seems like it has gotten a lot worse. Can you kind of tell me what's changed in a decade? Well, look, I mean, I'm going to get blowback for saying this, but have you seen World War Z? Yeah. We've had we've had hit Max Brooks on the show before, actually. Yeah, I mean, that's a metaphor. Like, you know, the zombies are, so I'm not, I'm not dehumanizing migrants and turning them into zombies. That's not what I'm doing. Okay. But as a metaphor of the notion that there will, there will, and can come a moment when desperation or something else,

like causes uncontrollable migration, when that happens, which we're already boiling in that direction, it is a 100% military situation. You know, like it is chaos. And so security and controlling the movement of people is going to be, you know, know, a diplomatic and an aid issue until it becomes a military issue. And so what I think has gotten,

so you asked what has gotten worse? Well, the flow of people is increasing because what thin barriers, humane legal barriers, were there along the way to try to slow that down and make it more managed have all been removed because there's no money for it. Drivers like disease are also, because who's paying for the research to control that Ebola breakout or whatever in a place where everyone's like, hey, I'm getting my kid out of here. I'm in Ankara. I'm in wherever, and I'm leaving those drivers are also gone. So all of these things are removed right now. And I think we are seeing the marching numbers happening. And I also think, like, you look at conflicts, border conflicts,

and you dig deep enough and often you find water issues, you find, you know, anger towards lack of jobs or lack of resources, kind of weaponizing a perspective on those others who are taking them from you and have crossed the border in the last three years. So like you've got tensions that become clashes between local players that then we're also probably going to have to get involved with because we have assets and companies and citizens. You know, if that's all that motivates you, folks are going to be in harm's way. I have a great fear that it's going to, that is going to take something really big and really terrible before anything changes. That's usually the way it happens.

More terrible than what's already happening. And or like maybe there will be a shift in the players. I want to say this carefully. There may be administration change at some point where not everyone in our country believes in the current path. A lot of people don't. And right now those who are leading the country do and they're doing what they promise to do in extreme. But that's not forever. Yeah, that's something I do cling to is like, this was not a Nixon and 72 margin.

Those margins were pretty slim. Yeah. Yeah. And then I think also what's happened since the election is also confronting folks with, well, wait, I didn't realize, I kind of like this about him, but I didn't realize all these other things. This is just not what I'm about. It's not what I believe in in terms of the Constitution and rule of law and treating judges. and all sorts of things. And so I hope that those folks,

who might have even voted last time, may say, yeah, I'm not going to put those people back in power. All right, let's switch tracks here a little bit. It's a good place for an ad break. I'm noting to myself. So one of the strengths of the podcast, I think, is that you are really adept at finding characters to build the stories around.

Whether that's L.E. Or Daniel in the beginning of the China portion. But at the end of the Libya run, you and your team become the characters that the story is kind of focused around. And you tell us what happened at the end of your time investigating this in Libya. So I took a team. The team consisted of myself and three other people, one woman, two males. one was a guy named Joe Sexton, who was an editor of mine at the New York Times, and he had since left the Times, and then he went to ProPublica, and then he came and worked with me.

Another was a guy named Pierre Qatar, videographer. Both of them are American. Pierre also is Lebanese. He's got Arabic, amazing videographer. He now works mostly for NPR. And then the third person was a woman named Maya Dahl's Dutch documentary filmmaker, who was making a film about the work we do. We went there. We had a good run. We pushed the envelope, as investigative reporters do.

We went into the country officially as journalists under the sort of ostensible protection of the Red Crescent Red Cross. Government had said, yeah, you can come in. We'll let you see Mabani. We'll let you go out with the Coast Guard. We're going to give you access. That quickly, within five hours of being on the ground, became clear that was not happening. and they were not really going to facilitate our access to do the reporting we told them we aim to do, which is look at the migrant situation, quite especially in including Europe's role in the migrant situation, not just Libya is screwing it up. But so we had armed protection. We reported for five days.

We talked to migrants in Gargresh. That got us in trouble, got us reprimanded, put under house arrest at the hotel. We talked to diplomats from various countries that also got us a scolding and on and on and on. Ultimately, we also put a drone. They said, oh, it turns out we're not going to be able to let you into Mabani or any prison. So we said, okay, this is not what we agreed to and you guys are giving us a run around. We put a drone up over Mabani discreetly got the job done and did a bunch of other reporting. We were a day away from leaving Sunday night, 8 o'clock.

The other three are hungry. they're going so crazy, they're exhausted, and they want to go out to for dinner. So the armed guards take them out in a convoy to a restaurant. I had too much work. I'm on the phone at the hotel with my wife, knock on the door. I thought I was sexton, my editor, opened the door, and it's 12 yelling guys and fatigues. Gun to head, come in the room, put me on the ground. My wife is still on the phone.

I dropped the phone. They hood me. They beat the shit out of me. they hang up the phone. They drag me out, put me in a convoy. The whole hotel is locked down. It's a pretty big thing they're doing here. Very spectacle.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, my three colleagues are having similar happen to them. They're halfway to the restaurant, again, with armed guards. They get hit from multiple sides in the middle of an intersection, rammed, guys jump out, pull the guards out, beat them pretty badly in the middle of the intersection. hood the other three reporters, put them in a van, take him to the same secret facility. Now, what did I know at the time? Nothing. I just knew some guys came for me and it was not good

and I was in bad shape. What I later found out, they put us in me in solitary confinement in this prison. The other, the Maya, the female is also in solitary, has in her own cell. And then the two guys are together. I didn't know where they were. that even been taken.

This is a militia. Al-Nawasi is the name of the militia. They're part of the federal government in Tripoli. They're the intelligence, living intelligence service is their official name, but they're just a militia that runs that sector. And over the next subsequent days, luckily my wife heard the beginning of what was going on.

So she had activated a plan, and much thanks to Samantha Power, who was head of USAID at the time, interestingly. her kid was a student of my wife who's a teacher and my wife contacted a bunch of folks, John Kerry and a bunch of others and said, we've got a situation here where we need help. He's just been taken. And so the State Department and USAID began figuring out who took us and where were we.

And long story short, a lot of interrogation and bad stuff at the facility. But state eventually negotiated first through the president, then down to the Attorney General. Attorney General then turned to the militias and said, whoever's got these guys, you got to step up and you don't want what's about to happen. We need to negotiate the release of these guys. And so ultimately, we were rescued, taken out of the country. I think I've got a lot of questions about that. but I also want to get to China. And I think that there's nothing.

People should just listen to that episode to really get a detailed version of the events and kind of like what you were thinking and feeling as it was happening. I think it's probably the best way to cover that. So I will kick to you guys have got to listen to this. You guys got to listen to the show. It's really great. I like that for a lot of reasons, including I don't have to keep talking about it.

You don't have to keep talking about it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've already, you've, I think you've produced. I think you produced the statement about it in the version of the show, right? Like, I, yeah. Well, then let's talk about one of the other characters.

Tell me about Daniel. Daniel Ayrtonong. So Daniel Ayrtonong, um, uh, Indonesian guy from a small village in rural Indonesia. Um, again, from a very, very poor corner of that already poor country. Uh, graduates from high school, not many. options applies to the local factory, no job, applies to local mini-mart, no offer. Him and his buddy are kind of killing time figuring out what to do. They see some random other dudes come back to the village, buy a new moped, maybe put a new

roof on their mom's house or whatever. And some of them had earned some money working on distant water fishing vessels, industrial scale foreign vessels on the high seas. And they thought, you know, let's roll the dice and give that a try. get to see the world and adventure and maybe actually make some money and come back. And so they scrounge up some money because you've got to pay your way into a job offer. It's a debt bondage kind of situation. And they begin down a path, which literally thousands of Indonesians especially,

but also Filipinos of experience, which is they sign up with a manning agency, which is an employment firm that specializes in seafaring work. And they say, hey, we got a job for you on an Asian ship. you got to pay your own way to fly to Jakarta and then you've got to pay your own way to fly to Busan, South Korea, and then you'll wait in a hotel, and you're going to pay that, and we'll get you all papered and licenses, and then we'll assign you to a ship and off you go, and it's a two-year tour, and we'll give you details once you're there. So, you know, these guys don't, they're, you know, bumpkins, you know, they don't really

have much savvy about the risks of industrial fishing and the right questions ask and what does that contract even say? it's not in my native language, etc. And Daniel heads down the path, hoping for the best, with his best friend. They end up on a Chinese vessel, the Zenfa 7, and they head out to sea. It's a squid vessel. And that's when things get dark and beatings and kind of just brutal days and slow motion malnutrition begins occurring. A disease called Barry Berry, Barry.

It's a lot like scurvy is the vitamin C deficiency. Barry, Barry is vitamin B deficiency. It's super reversible, easily preventable, you know, shouldn't be happening in the modern day. It doesn't on land. But at sea, if you're eating rice and ramen every day and not enough other healthy stuff, it's going to happen. It's a terrible way to go, bloating of the hands and feet and water retention and, you know, kidney and heart failure, etc. But all in slow motion and painful. He gets Barry Barry, as do other crew, the beatings, etc.

He begs to be let off. Captain says, no, I'm not taking you or unloading you. It's going to be a headache and logistically embarrassing. And I got to keep fishing. Anyway, Barry, jump to the end of the story. 2 a.m. Daniel A.tonong is discreetly dropped off on a dock in Montevideo, Uruguay. His body is covered in bruises. He has ligature marks, meaning rope marks around his neck.

He's clearly been hung at some point. His hands and feet, and I've seen pictures. So I'm describing this from that, you know, freakishly swollen. He's barely alive. Folks see him, call an ambulance, take him to the hospital. He dies a couple hours later. And so this is striking in and of itself, but even more striking when you backdrop it against a statistic, which is in the prior five years to Daniel's death, every six weeks, one dead body was being dropped

off in that port, mostly off of these same ships, Chinese squid vessels. And that's an insane number. You know, that death rate is colossal. And so I thought... And that's just one port, too. That's just one port, right? Yeah. And that's with very little investigation as to foul play or anything.

It's just, so I thought, okay, we've got this guy who died under horrifically brutal, clearly, conditions, and he's representative of a pattern that says something about the larger industry. We've got to piece together this guy's life. So we spent two and a half years doing that, going to his village and investigating very intensely and figuring out what happened to him and why. So that's what that story was about. And it speaks to, he's a person that got caught in the gears of a machine. And that machine is what you call the Chinese seafood superpower, right? Or they are, the China is a seafood superpower, right? So it's Chinese fishing. Can you describe the scale of this thing?

Because I don't think, I think people need to understand, like, how big. this is. Yeah, I mean, I think so China, the superpower of seafood is this concept, right? Which is legitimate, and if I, I would argue, because in every metric, China is the monopoly power. Okay. So seafood, it's a product, just like your Nike shoes or your iPhone or your T-shirt. it comes from across the water and then it ends up on land. So if you're going to follow this product from bait to plate, then you need to look at the two universes distinctly. Okay, so let's start with the water.

Okay, on the water, basic question, how many distant water fishing vessels does China have? Distant water meaning fishing in foreign or high seas waters. Okay. The Chinese government says 2700. Think Tank has put it at 17,000. We crunched the data and we came up with $6,500. If you even take the Chinese number, which is the most conservative,

it's still bigger than the next three fleets globally combined. Okay. So now you've got in the water capacity, China is bigger than everyone. Now let's look at the on-land capacity. The processing, you know, it comes to shore, it gets clean, it gets parsed, it gets frozen, it gets shipped, okay? the processing capacity is not just massive, if you measure it in terms of tonnage of seafood or a number of factories. It's also massive in the sense that American, Spanish, French, Canadian ships, typically, even if they're catching seafood in their own waters, don't process it in those countries.

They freeze it, send it to China. Those guys process it, send it back. So that means China is bigger even than its own footprint. It's really bigger than, okay. So that means China's super power seafood. So we thought China is also a black box journalistically. It's hard as heck to know what's going on inside. So all the more reason for us, an investigator shop, to really look at it.

And then seafood as a product, if you look at any supply chain, palm oil or iPhones or whatever, it's a thing. And you try to trace it from where it starts to where it ends up. And then there's seafood. It's like saying, I want to trace like the cobalt that came from Saturn. Okay, good luck with that. Like, it's hard to figure out what's happening in outer space. And that's like seafood and that the on water portion is really tough. And then the on land portion being in China is really tough.

So we thought, let's go for it. And so that's what we followed and looked at each stage. Is there forced labor in the factories? And if so, what type and how can we prove it? And then is there forced labor on the vessels and other types of illegality? It was really fascinating to listen to this because, the reporting process is some of the lowest tech I've ever heard, literally things from like Robert Louis Stevenson novels,

and then also the highest tech cutting edge of journalism, just like open source investigation. Can you tell me first, what do you do to, what does it take to talk to a squid vessel? What is the thing that you had to do? And then, like, how do you find out what's going on in a factory? Yeah. Okay.

So the low tech is putting a message in a bottle, putting rice in the bottle. The message is a piece of paper. It's three pieces of paper, one in English, one in Bahasa or Indonesian, and one in Chinese. The message says, I am this person. I'm a journalist. I'm here for this reason. I have a bunch of questions. Here's a pen if you'd be willing to write the answers as quickly as possible in whatever

language and then you ask your questions. You roll it up all three copies, put it in a water bottle, put some rice in there to weigh it down, some hard candies, some cigarettes because everyone smokes at sea. You close it up. You put a little homemade buoy around it, a little piece of styrofoam connected to fishing line. And then you get in a skiff, a fast boat, because to be out on the fishing grounds, you're hundreds or not thousands of miles from shore, you're on a big boat. Those boats are slow. So you have a crane, put a skiff in the water. It's a fast boat, outboard motor, boat and you pull in behind the Chinese squid vessel. Now, the only reason to use the bottle approach is because the squid vessel is running. So seven out of ten times that we pulled up to a squid vessel in the

fishing grounds, they would bolt. They'd say, what the heck are these American flagged dudes doing here? This can't be good. I'm getting the heck out of here. And so they bolt. And I don't blame them. It is pretty weird. No one should or is out there typically. So they run. If they run, we put the skiff in the water, we chase them. If they do that, then we get as close as we can, and then I throw the bottle onto the back deck. Sometimes I can't make the throw. It's hard to get the distance. Other times I get lucky. And oftentimes, the crew are either Chinese or Indonesian. They're curious. They see what you just tossed because they're gawking at you. The captain's facing forward because he's commanding the ship. He doesn't see you. You're behind them.

The crew are all staring at you, wondering why the heck you're chasing them in this boat and they open the thing and they write, you know, amazingly enough, sometimes they write, here's my phone number, here's some answers to your questions, they scribble it in there, put the top back on, they throw it back over. That's the ridiculous, comical low tech that actually did reap returns from a reporting perspective. I can move to the high tech end of the spectrum if you want. Yeah, let's move to the, just to contrast that with this low tech thing. High tech tended to be, you know, a skill tech that a skill set that several on staff have. I don't.

These are OSI, open source intelligence. They're really good at not just figuring out where might there be already existing footage, often cell phone footage of an average guy at his factory or on a train saying, hey, mom, I'm heading to take this job in Chandong province and I'll see you in six months, hopefully, etc. It's just average banal stuff like that, of which there's massive quantities on the internet, including in China. And if you know how to navigate your way through the social media sphere in China, and then you also know how to mine it using coding and algorithms and AI, then you can find

footage. Sometimes it's newsletters that the company puts out. Sometimes it's photos. sometimes it's videos, but it's open source. And then it tells you things. Wait, this guy is identifying as a Uyghur from Xinjiang, and he's now in the other side of the country in Shandong province, not in Xinjiang province. And he's filming himself talking about working in a factory.

And behind him is a box or a stack of boxes with the company name X that we know is shipped from this factory to Walmart. And why is that important? Well, there's a federal law on the U.S. that says no products touched by U.Gers are allowed to come into the U.S. because U.S. are considered state-sponsored forced labor. And therefore, we've got evidence that this company and this product and this guy are breaking that law. Okay, now multiply that over the course of a year and thousands upon thousands of videos,

and you've got an investigative reveal. It was kind of fascinating. I mean, I guess I understand it. To learn that there are, because there are people that are charged with kind of investigating these factories and going in and making sure that there's no laws are being broken. But, you know, and if anyone's worked retail and had the district manager come in, they know exactly what happens. It's a dog and pony show when the inspectors show up. whatever's going on during that inspection is not how the factory actually runs. They leave and then things resume, oftentimes the next day.

But these inspectors are often not looking at social media or not kind of. They have access to the same stuff that you do, but they're not doing it. Why is there the disconnect there, do you think? Well, I mean, okay, so let's take a step back, though. the inspectors in this scenario are from private entities, certification companies. The companies are paid by the certification entities. So aquaculture stewardship council and best aquaculture practices and Marin Trust, these are the names of these kinds of entities.

They then send inspectors to the plant. Now, in China, what that means is you're not only allowed to do unannounced spot checks. So your district manager doesn't just show up and everyone scrambles. Someone calls the plant manager in China and says next Wednesday and auditor is coming by. Okay. So he has a full week, two weeks to clean up shop. Point one. Point two. Who's paying the auditor? The company. So the, you know, the foxes are watching the henhouse here in the financial conflict of interest relationship. That's point two. Point three. Bigger. point is if you, even if you were doing unannounced spot checks, and even if you weren't getting

paid by the guy you're policing, you're in China. And everyone knows from the New York Times who got kicked out to everyone else that if you touch certain topics, you're gone. They're not going to kill you. They're just going to kick you out of the country. And the auditors know that and the seafood companies know that and the newspapers know that. Everyone knows that. So, and what are examples of things you cannot say, Uyghur, North Korean, human rights, you're gone. So the auditors know full well. First of all, their mandate isn't even to look for those things. When we brought all this evidence to the seafood industry and even talk to auditors,

they didn't know what Uyghurs were. They didn't know what the Uyghur forced labor protection act was. Generally, I talked to the lawyer who represents their industry, and she said she's having to do a massive scramble to educate folks on the relevant laws. that were saying they've broken. Katsa is the law that says no products in the U.S. touched by North Koreans. They had never heard of it.

Lo and behold, they've got hundreds of North Koreans in factories that they're relying on in China. Why? Because they're not really looking for it until someone's going to spank them and force them to look at it. And that's what the investigation did.

One, I want to talk about the North Koreans a bit because I think that that's, there's a lot of fascinating stuff in like the second and third episodes of the China portion. One thing I really thought was interesting was kind of using this open source intelligence to look at the social media output of the Uyghurs and the North Koreans that are working in these seafood factories and to kind of build a picture of the culture of the people that are working in these places.

Can you tell me kind of what you learn about these workers from watching what they post? Yeah, okay. So in the case, so two different categories and two different written stories, right? So there's one deep investigation of thousands of Uyghurs being transported from Xinjiang, which is the most landlock piece of Earth on planet Earth, right? It's really far from any water. So you wouldn't expect any seafood story. And yet, post-COVID, the government heard from the Chinese government heard from seafood industry, hey, we need workers bad. We got a problem. Everything's locked down. So, oh, I got to say, oh, I got a solution. We're going to start shipping thousands of these guys from over here to Shandong province on the coast. One story. Separate story, different place. Not Shandong province, but Dandong, city right on the North Korean border, also a hub of seafood processing. So he thought, okay, another form of clear state-sponsored for cyber. You don't need to know, but was the worker unhappy? Were they the right age? Were they allowed to leave? Do they have a contract? You need to ask those questions. If they're North Koreans and they're in China, they're already a category.

Okay. So we looked hard. We found lots of North Koreans. We then looked at who were they and what was the contract. Almost all them are women. The jobs are extremely sought after by North Koreans because there's no way to make any kind of wage in North Korea. So anything they might earn landing one of these gigs is great, which means in North Korea,

same sort of debt bonded situation. They are borrowing money from loan sharks and from their customers. and from their cousin and their uncle and their parents to pay off the right North Korean officials to get them on a short list of vetted possibilities. And the short list is supposed to be, are you trustworthy vis-a-vis the North Korean government? In other words, are you going to embarrass us and try to escape and defect? Or are you going to be a good worker and good North Korean and do what you're supposed to do? If you have any record of dissidents or any relatives who ever have left the country or whatever,

you're not going to make the cut. So these women, almost all women, pay their way, borrow money, get on the shortlist, then they get the job. They get sent into China. Then COVID happens. Now they're locked down and seafood is stopped, right? So their income is, they're locked in these walled fortresses in Dandong. They're not allowed to leave.

And if they do, they have a minder with them. They go out into the city in groups of 12, 20, with two guys who are watching their move. Okay. They can, all right. So then they stay in these. dorms, they work when there's work to be had. If there's not work to be had, as was the case post-COVID, then things get even darker because the loan sharks back in North Korea are knocking on the door of their parents saying, where's my money? And they're saying, if you don't get us our money,

you're going to have real big problems. The parents are telling the young women, hey, I know you can't work because the factory is not exporting anything because the world is shut down due to COVID, but we need the money or we're going to lose the house. So then the managers of the factories in China are basically forcing these women into sex trafficking for themselves. So what we were shocked to find out was not just the prevalence of forced labor in the form of North Koreans processing seafood that gets sent to the U.S. Congress and the cafeterias at public schools and prisons, shocking already, but also the extent of sexual abuse of the women. We interviewed about 22 women, half of them back in North Korea and half them still in China,

and 17 of them had been sexually assaulted, raped by their manager, coerced into, so that blew us away. We didn't see that coming. But this is what life is like in that niche of hell. That is what life is like in that niche of hell, I think, is a decent subtitle for much of the season. Right? It's kind of this big view of this giant lane through which people, people and food and goods are moved. And what happens to the people that fall through the cracks of that or shoot up by the systems, right?

Yeah. Unfortunately, it is the same story over and over again. I would plead that it's interesting nonetheless because... Oh, no, it's fascinating. Yeah. But no, this is what happens on Angry Planet specifically is I get to the point where we have depressed the audience by the end of every single episode. That's like, you and I are clearly the same species of...

I'm a journalist. Yeah, well, you can't look. I don't, like, I'm firmly in the camp that you cannot, looking away from this kind of stuff and not reckoning with it is definitely how we have gotten to the place that we're in. I agree. Period. Right. And like, it, like, if you, if all you can do is, like, pay attention and, like, absorb what's going on,

then that's, that's a starting point. Yeah. No, I think being uninformed, maybe even blissly so, is way worse for what's, going to happen to us. Yeah. If we, because it will come back to us at some point. Yeah.

Actions have consequences. Empire always comes home. That's right. And on that cheerful note, where can people find the second season of Outlaw Ocean? The Outlawocean.com. Thank you, Ian. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Thanks for having me.

That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, go to angry planetpod.com to sign up for commercial-free versions of all the mainline episodes, early access to all of those episodes, and the written work as it comes out. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.