Angry Planet - Welcome to the Angry Ocean

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Ah international waters. A quiet place to do some crimes or have crimes done to you. Welcome to Angry Ocean, a series we’re doing that examines the underreported topic of conflict on the high seas. This is part one - Outlaw Ocean.With us today is Ian Urbina. Urbina is an investigative reporter and the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on reporting about environmental and human rights crimes at sea.https://www.theoutlawocean.com/Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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peaceful freedom is never safe-guided peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Ah, International Waters.

Quiet place to do some crimes or have some crimes done to you. Welcome to Angry Ocean, a series we're doing that examines the underreported topic of conflict on the high seas. This is part one, Outlaw Ocean. With us today is Ian Urbina. Urbina is an investigative reporter and the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on reporting about environmental and human rights crimes at sea.

Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right. Can you tell us about the Outlaw Ocean Project? Why did you start it? So this was a line of reporting. I was on staff at the New York Times for 17 years, and this line of reporting began there in 20,

2014. And its goal was really to take leaders out into this space and expand people's awareness of the diversity of things that are happening out there, much of it not positive. And we ran for two years in New York Times and eight big front page stories. And then I decided to take a break and from that and go write a book. So I went back to see for two more years for the photographer, produced the book. And then I was hooked and I had a tough time putting it down and wanting to go back other topics. So I stepped away from the Times and created a journalism nonprofit so that we could continue producing stories of this sort. What was it about, it was really interesting because our producer, Kevin, brought this topic to me. He had recently moved to Hawaii and had

much to work at Civil Beat there and now has this much wider view of what takes place at the ocean and how important it is. In really reading through your New York Times reporting, I was really struck by just how much is happening out there that we have no idea, just no oversight at all. It really feels lawless. Is that accurate? Yes, for the most part. What I would say is that there are, in fact, fair number of laws that have been written and that apply. The real distinction of the offshore realm is that there's this potentially arguably inevitable, but certainly true lack of enforcement. And as the cliche goes, laws are only as good as their enforcement. And the reason for that is there are many reasons, but one of them is just the sheer sprawling nature of that two-thirds of the

planet that's water, but also having to do with historical and geopolitical factors of the way that governments have in the last three, four decades, begun pulling back on resources in Navy and Coast Guard. But generally speaking, and then just the jurisdictional complexity of the high seas, international waters belonging to everyone to no one. So those are just some of the reasons for it. But There do exist laws, and quite especially if you look at the realm of players out there, 56 million people work at sea, and if you look at where the really acute or chronic bad stuff is happening, it's more often in the distant water fishing realm of the activity out there than it is in the merchant marine, not to say that there aren't bad things happening in the merchant realm,

but really the acute stuff that we reported on largely happens on fishing vessels. When you talk about fishing, this is not small scale. My son is actually going fishing today. He's seven. We're talking about something that is enormous and of incredible economic value, right? Nations get involved in this. Yeah. Yeah, this is not recreational or near shore or artisanal fishing, which consists typically under 20 foot long boats or 30 foot, 40 foot maybe and stay within national waters. We're really focusing on industrial commercials. scale fishing. And these are off. The most intense things are the distant water fishing fleet. And so those vessels are often going around the world to far off places. Some of them stay at sea for two years. And they transship, when they offload their catch, the other carrier vessels, but they continue fishing indefinitely for long periods. And those are the vessels that really have really intense human rights and labor concerns. And there's COVID-19 is an aggravating factor in that currently, right? Because there's people that have been at

see almost this entire time of the pandemic, right? Yeah, I mean, so there is a huge global problem, which is the abandonment of seafarers, generally speaking, pre-COVID. And you guys know this well, but for your listeners, quite often, most often, this problem is in the merchant marine. And quite often it entails a relevant player,

a beneficial owner, a ship owner, a ship captain, an insurer. Some player that's behind the scenes behind that vessel decides to cut their losses and essentially stop returning calls that are being made by the captain. And for those reasons or others, the ship essentially is stuck where it is. It might be anchored a half mile from port or it could be hundreds of miles at sea. But the man on board, and this is a very male dominated professional, and find themselves stuck and they don't have fuel to get home. They don't have orders as to where to go. They don't have immigration papers to get off and fly home.

They're really trapped. And this is a really serious problem that COVID made much worse for obvious intuitive reasons that you can imagine. And so a lot of ships have been stuck and those seafarers relatively abandoned. And that means insurers or governments are most often organizations like mission to sea fairs or Caritas or Stellamara. So these nonprofits get involved and try to troubleshoot the situation and get these workers back home. I'm wondering if we can back up just a little bit.

I want to cover some real basic stuff for the audience. When we talk about international waters, what exactly do we mean? When does the, when does say America's specific territory stop? Maybe that's a really terrible example, actually. When does a country's coastal territory stop and international waters begin? 201 miles, right? So there's a little bit of wiggle in this definition because for certain types of activities, the national border stops at 12 miles from shore. And then for other types of activities, that national border stops 200 miles from shore. But if you're talking about 201 miles

from shore, you're pretty safe to say that you're in international, not national waters. The only complication is if you're in a body of water where there are no national waters, because there are countries abutting on either side, like the East Sea off the coast of Korea, where there are countries on all sides and therefore the national waters come all the way up to each other, then anyone who passes that body of water is actually always in someone's water. Often there are major contestation over whose waters those are, South China's leaving an example. But in the oceans, in the larger spans of the oceans, the minute you get 200 miles from shore, you're now in international waters. And that has real consequence because the laws that kick in at that moment are the laws that apply to the flag country of that vessel. So you mean that there's no broader authority. So let's say a ship is flagged from Liberia. I don't know if it's still true, but for a while, that was a real flag of convenience.

It was a cheap way to register your ship is what I understand. Does that mean that the laws, the only laws you're under are the laws of Liberia? Not that their laws are terrible. Yes and no. There are laws. There are international laws. They're international conventions that apply out in that space. And also certain types of activities in that space fall under the jurisdiction of certain bodies.

So if you want to lay an internet cable at mile 203, you have to go to the C.I. bed mining authority or the specific authority within the UN who has ostensible jurisdiction over handling those specific matters. If you want to fish for tuna in a 200 mile 7 in a certain body of water, then there's probably an RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization. These are not countries, they're not NGOs, but they're conventional bodies that attempt to apply governance. if you want to kill someone, if you want to buy arms, if you want to sell opium, those kinds of activities, and you're at Mile 201 from shore and your international waters, the laws that apply then are the laws of the flag nation of the ship. And Liberia, as you said, is still with Panama.

Those are two of the biggest flags of convenience that many countries turn to to flag their ship. So who, I think one of the other things you said earlier at the top is that enforcement is problem, right? I guess two-part question. Can you, you've already said that the ocean covers or water covers two-thirds of the planet, but really, can you drive home like how vast this territory really is? And you're giving me a look. I'm trying to think if I know my statistics while. It's really a look at myself like, uh-oh, two-thirds is as good as I got on square mileage and stuff like that. But yeah, that's fair. But also in how, who is supposed to be enforcing laws in this territory? And,

And how's that going? I'll go with the easiest last question first, which is the book is called the Outlaw Ocean. Yeah, as I think you rhetorically, no, it's not going well, quite especially when it comes to laws that are meant to protect the creatures above and below the waterline. So the people, the fishers who work above the waterline with the merchant marines, or the marine life that is below the waterline, the protective laws that exist for those purposes are not super effective. Who's supposed to be doing the enforcement? Again, it gets murky and complicated fast because it depends on with regard to what.

But in general, what I can say sweepingly is that there is no international police force, this misnomer concept of UN blue helmets out there that are patrolling, which is not even what UN does, but and trying to police this global commons, nor do coast guards or navies even have jurisdiction to enforce laws in international waters. There are rare cases where those players can get involved. If it's a ship, for example, that has been deflagged,

and at that moment when it's on the high seas is not actually flagged to any nation, then legally anyone is allowed to board that, vessel. Again, who's anyone? Does Sea Shepherd and Ocean Conservation Vigilante group have jurisdiction? Not entirely clear. Does the Chinese Navy have jurisdiction? Does the U.S. Navy has jurisdiction? Yes, for a flagless vessel. But again, there's, in theory and there's in practice. And so when it comes to actually boarding a vessel, even if it's a flagless vessel, you do have other players to deal with. insurer, the ship owner, the nation that is previously flagged to, the nation that is the nation

of the owner of that ship will probably get involved, depending on. So it's really dodgy. One thing I will say is the crimes that I most look at, often overfishing and illegal fishing on the one hand, or violent crimes, murder, slavery, on the other hand, those sorts of crimes are often, in theory, supposed to be handled by the flag registry. But as you mentioned before, Liberia is a perfect example of one of the larger, more established flags of convenience, open registries. And it is a business that resides in Virginia. It is a company.

It is not actually truly part of the Liberian government. And its clients, its customers, are the ship owners and ship insurers. So when a ship is involved in something that, might reflect poorly on those ship owners and ship insurers, let's say your partner, your son, your spouse disappears on a fishing vessel, 201 miles from Bangladesh, and no one knows what happened to them. The first place you're going to go likely with your lawyers to the flag registry and say, hey, you guys have jurisdiction to find out who talked to him last and all these things. And the flag registry is probably going to say, yeah, but our obligation is to protect

the privacy of our clients. It's not to protect the. the workers on board our client's vessels. So we need to ask the shipowner, are they okay with us handing this information over? Ship owner is not okay with that often because they're involved. So this is the really flawed nature of the ostensible enforcement structure that typically exists on the vessels where the bad stuff tends to happen. It sounds like it's a series of entities deferring responsibility, essentially. Maritime Mary go around is this expression that gets used often.

One thing that, an expression that you hear, but I believe it's more than expression, is law of the sea. Can you explain what the law of the sea is? And I think it at one point was in front of the U.S. Congress and didn't go through. Anyway, if you could explain that. Yeah, I mean, the law of the sea is a really amazing thing. And it was really born of a series of pretty high profile stills, one in particular off the course of England. And essentially, the world community and governments in particular, and even the shipping industry quite especially more so than fishing. said, hey, we need to do something about imposing some rules on these vessels that are carrying

all of our cargo for the reasons of worker safety, for the reasons of environmental safety, were the primary initial goals. And so the law of the sea was this convention that was drafted and it has signatories. Countries have signed onto it much like a treaty. And when it was written and it took this along the process, it had to do a ship design. For example, one of its big accomplishments was requiring double-hold ships so that there were two layers of steel so that ships couldn't as easily spill their contents as these big oil spills were. This is before Valdez and such. And other sorts of kind of conventions having to do with working hours and these sorts of things. And it was a really huge step forward. And you're right, the U.S. was not and remains not

a signatory to it. That had to do to a large degree with the 80s outlook that the U.S. U.S., as it said on many of these sorts of treaties, didn't want to tie its hands when it came to certain, it didn't want to be held accountable to it. And so what the U.S. government said then and has said since is that we will comply with it. We won't sign it. And generally speaking, the U.S. does comply with the measures within the law of the sea. They're pretty easy for development, but it remains fervently opposed to signing it because it could be sued and all sorts of consequences. But that's a real blemish, in my view, personal view, on the U.S. in that there's this clamoring about illegality at sea often from the government and often, especially in recent years,

pointing at China, which is a big player and engaged in a lot of nefarious things at sea. And the common rebut is, and China's not signatory either, is that the U.S. is in no position to take some more high-winds since we haven't signed it. But the law of the sea does. doesn't do a whole lot when it comes to the kinds of modern crimes that we're talking about now, partially because it doesn't apply to fishing vessels. It really applies to merchant vessels. And so all the sort of things I'm focused on. And it's also very dated now. It really doesn't talk about management of the private maritime security guards. When they kill someone, who investigates, who prosecute. It doesn't apply to really nitty-gritty things like slavery and

work hours and violence on board. It doesn't apply to. It does things. It does things. like it sets measurable limits. Hey, you're allowed to dispose of this kind of waste at sea because we've looked at it and oil that's diluted in this way isn't a risk, but something beyond that level is a risk. And so this was a big accomplishment because before we were dumping nuclear waste and weapons and oil and anything, we just would dump in the ocean, assuming dilution would take care of it. But the law that sea said, we've got to put some parameters on what can be dumped at sea. So that's what it does. So we live in a world that's super monitored and thinking about if the Pentagon builds out

the runway of a drone base that the CIA is operating out of in North Africa, we have satellite imagery of it like the next day. Are there as many eyes on the sea and on the oceans? Is this open source intelligence kind of boon that's come around in the last 10, 20 years? Is that happening there too? Do we have more of? an idea of what's going on there, or is it still this place that's, it's very easy to get lost and disappear? The latter, all told, the sum outcome is the latter. So the practical reality is that much of that space is dark to the public, to law enforcement, to countries that really need to see. Now, if we go up a little bit more in depth, the satellite capabilities to see every

into the ocean are already up in the sky. And there are firms that already have monetized this infrastructure and for a pretty penny can lay eyes on any coordinates you want. There are huge challenges, one being the cost, the other being the creative satellites that are up there aren't all the time, any time, and five minutes after you order it up. It doesn't work that way, as you guys likely know. But, and the biggest issue is who gets to access that, access that information, who can afford it, etc. There is a push to change that, all of that. One, get more satellites up there, two, make the information more affordable and public. And three, really specialize on looking, like you say, not at Eritrea and the drone base, but

for Djibouti, but rather at the water with an eye towards trying to essentially make it impossible for ships to disappear. 747 takes off from anywhere in the world. post 9-11, most likely it has to say who it's caring, what it's carrying, it's transpotters on the whole time it's en route, here's my ETA and arrival, here's where I'm going to go. A ship leaves, whether it's cargo or fish, there's a norm cultural and legal within that profession that they're under no obligation to stay lit transponding the whole time. And there are even exemptions in the toothless rules that say you should keep those on that say, yeah, but if you're in a dangerous neighborhood and you might get hit by pirates and you want to go dark, it's fine.

And that's not a norm that aeronautics, which also goes through international airspace, has to comply with. But fishing does. But fishing has that freedom. All right, Angry Planet listeners, you are listening to the first part of our Angry Ocean series. We're talking with Ian Urbina. We're going to pause here for a break. All right, welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. We are on with Ian Urbina talking about the Outlaw Ocean Project. Welcome back. Why do you think this culture has persisted? why is it still this way?

I think there's an intellectual history that goes back to this guy in Grotius and a legal philosopher who coined the notion of Marie LaBarron, which was freedom of the seeds. And at its root, it was this legal and philosophical notion that the seas should be first and foremost, free and open. And we as a society, as a global society and our government players, should all agree to a couple things. One, we, all of us, are allowed to pass through their unfettered, unharmed.

And if any players get in the harming business, i.e. pirates of various forts, then we should team up and go after those guys. Because it's in all of our interest to have a safe and free through way that our navies and our merchants and our fishing can travel. And so in the very core of how, from a legal perspective, this space was conceptualized. freedom became a high priority over safety or other values. Secondly, there's just, if you look at the literature of the space, freedom, the ocean is nothing, if not a metaphor for freedom through literature. It's a place where people go to escape things, you know, men to earn their masculinity and to get away from landed life and governments and be their own master. There's just this

whole really thick thread that runs through what the sea is supposed to offer. as opposed to landed life. And I don't want to push this too far, but I really do think it's consequential in how the reality out there has emerged for those who work in the space now. And then just from an almost labor history point of view, because of the vagaries of,

if you think of a ship as a factory, like a Tekensian factory, it happens to be moving. It is a factory of a different sort where historically and legally and from a labor perspective, it's been given a special path because for a long time, fishing was an art more than a science. You had to know where to go and you had your secrets to find the fish. That's radars and sonar and everyone knows where the fish are at all times.

But back then there was an art and the best fleets and shipping captains and prized this specialized knowledge. And so there was this liberty given to them. When you leave shore, you're in command. and furthermore normal labor laws about working a 12-hour day and off on Sunday. It doesn't work when you're at sea because if you come across the school of fish, you're going to work 48 straight hours. You might be off for three days as you're transiting to that fishing grounds, but the standard labor laws that apply in a landed factory don't apply here

because we've got secrets and we've got art and we've got all these weird bakeries and if a storm comes, we need to. And so fishing has long been given this exemption and you see it in labor law as something that we can't really apply those because it's a very different type of work. And that, I think, has had really dying of consequences. And it's why it's still the most dangerous, most deadly profession in the world. And you see slavery even still existing there where you don't as much other realms. There's so much to talk about when you're talking about fishing, because there's a lot of studies that have been done about the fact that fish stocks are depleted in many places

and are being depleted constantly by, as you said, the methods now. Now, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. You can absolutely find them and overfish. Anyway, so you're talking about a dwindling resource, I think is, that's a concern, right? Yeah. No, more than 90% of the world's fish stocks are at or past the point of collapse, which essentially means that they've been so overfished that the rate at which the Fishing is occurring does not allow for replenishment that can grow back to a baseline.

And like you said, fishing has moved from hunting to agriculture. You're no longer chasing the target. You're rounding it up because sonar, because sonar is improved, because satellites have improved, because engine efficiency is improved, cold storage is improved, nylon nets, all these things have made this industrial activity go out and get them. Fads, fish operating devices are these floating things often that have transponders on them that essentially are watching the water. And when a large enough school of fish is circling it, it sends a text message to the captain sitting at a bar in Thailand and says, time to go out and scoop them up. Like the chase is gone now to a large degree

and it's agriculture. So you wait for the stuff to grow and you go scoop it up. And that is a large reason why the oceans are running out of fish. So that means, though, that when you're chasing scarce resources and they're becoming more scarce, doesn't that heighten all of the other problems that you've talked about? Everything from slavery to piracy. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly.

You said it better than I would. As this becomes a thinner and thinner margin industry, the ability to cover costs, make money becomes less and less. So, for example, if you're near-stress. shore stocks within 50 miles historically are what you fished. You could go out for a week, come back, go home, sleep with your spouse, prepare for two weeks and head back out again, and do okay. If those near-shore stocks have been overfished and have collapsed, now you're going a thousand miles from store. And the economics change because 40% of your

overhead is fuel and a huge chunk, sorry, 40% is manpower and usually 20% to 30% is fuel. And so if your fuel numbers are through the roof because you're having to travel so far, it doesn't make sense to come back to shore. So now you're engaging in transshipment. You're staying out there. You're fishing. You're offloading your stuff. And also you're trying to figure out other ways to cut corners on costs.

So you're like, wait, I could pay this guy or I could pay this guy wrong and maybe make a little bit of money here and not lose money, let me use traffic migrant labor from Cambodia rather than ties under a contract. And I can pay them one-tenth, if at all. And this is how you see. And then the aggression between the vessels gets more intense because the stakes are higher, et cetera, et cetera. Can we talk about the violence and the aggression a little bit? What is the nature of the conflict out there? How common is it for two ships to have gun battles, like that kind of thing? One thing I always try to be careful about so that I don't undermine my own credibility is that frequency of these things isn't high, right? Because it's a huge strong place and it would be an overstatement to say it's happening all the time.

It's not. Most people are ethical folks and most people don't encounter other folks out there. They stay away from each other. What is noteworthy and distinct and I can say with confidence seven years into reporting this is when bad things do happen, they usually happen. with impunity. And that's what's really unusual. You kill someone, you film it, and there's a way better chance nothing's going to happen to you than if you did the same thing online. And that's for all these reasons we discussed before. Now, that's point one. Point two, when it comes to violence, there are, I in my own head think of two different types that occur. There's violence between players,

between ships, and then there's violence on the ships. Now, the violence on the ships, especially if we're talking about developing nation distant water fleets. Okay, not American fleets and finance, unionized, contract-based American tunorship. Probably not going to see a huge amount of violence there, but a 40-man per signer in the Thai fleet that's entering Cambodian waters and using large, largely loation or Burmese or Cambodian traffic crew, you're going to see some intense violence on that, that's almost likely. It might maybe even murder.

The UN did an investigation of this very concern in the South China fleet Thai operators and interviewed Thai deckhands. I'm sorry, Cambodian deckhands and 49% of them had seen someone murdered another on vessels there. And that doesn't shock me having. So the prevalence of violence on certain types of ships and certain places in the world is acute. Violence between ships typically is in the form of competitor nations clashing. Cambodians running into Laotians, running into Burmese, Taiwanese, running into Chinese, running into anyone. And in hot zones, so near the Falkland Islands or Malvinas Islands,

the Galapagos Islands, a lot of different places where there are a lot of different actors coming into an area and competing with each other. That's when you see serious clashes. And a fair number of these vessels do have armed personnel on them. And the 2008 was the height of the Somali piracy crisis. It slowed down to 2010, 2011, but it's always been simmering. Actually, the other side of Africa is now pretty hot near Nigeria. But that gave rise to the norm of having armed guys on board.

And also the norm of saying, oh, we shot those guys because they were pirates. No one's going to know whether that's true or that. And you can always say it because the guys are dead enough to sea floor if anyone even finds out that you open fire on anyone. Those are the sort of scenarios where you do see serious violence. You'd mention that you could kill somebody and film it. That harkens back to a specific story that you've reported on. But I think that one is pretty indicative of what's going on here. Can you tell us that story?

Yeah, this was a situation that came to me by way of an Interpol source. It began journalistically for me in the form of footage that had been captured on a cell phone camera. that cell phone camera was left inadvertently in the back of a taxi in Fiji. Someone found it, handed over the police, police handed an interval. The footage is 10 minutes and 26 seconds long and it shows a sort of slow motion slaughter. What you can tell from the footage is it's at sea. There are large industrial tuna, if you know what you're looking at, tuna vessels that are circling these guys in the water. The guys in the water are clinging to wreckage, wooden wreckage of some sort.

And over the course of the 10 minutes and hear the men behind whoever's filming or somewhere off camera, using semi-automatic weapons to pick these guys off in the water with headshots. And they succeed in killing four on camera. And there's speculation there could have been as many as 10 to 15. That's all we could tell at the time when I got the footage. We investigated, ran a story in the Times. We moved the ball down field a little bit, figured out who the big vessels were. These were tiny ones, two and the longliners.

We ID one or two of the main companies that owned them, went to the companies, tried to get them to open up to us. We got the name of the captain of what we think was the shooter vessel. And that's as far as I got after a year of investigating it. What was really striking about this among many things is you had footage of the slaughter. The guys in the water were unarmed. So whatever happened before doesn't much matter, frankly, even if these guys were the aggressors. By the time the camera's rolling, these guys are no longer a threat. So this is clear murder.

And at the end of the video, witnesses, if not culprits, some guys, beckhans, on board, the filming vessel, celebrate for selfies and cheer and show their faces. And what really galled me and still to this day does is that we had pictures of guys, we had names of the ships, all this stuff. And yet for years, only until literally three months ago, so six years after the investigation started, we really couldn't get much action from the relevant players, in this case, the Taiwanese government. Or the Pakistani government, who the company that provided the maritime security, the guys holding the guns, taking orders from the captain who was Chinese, were Pakistani. We couldn't get Fijian, Taiwanese, Pakistani, any help figuring out who the guys are shooting are, why they're shooting, who the guys in the water are, what happened here. Long story short, finally that again, three years more of investigating, including some amazing work by an investigator named. And the Taiwanese put an arrest warrant out on the captain nine years, nine months or a year later, they arrested him. And then about a month

and a half ago, they convicted him to a 26 year sentence. It took a long time, but there's some sort of justice at the end of it, right? Yeah, grudging, but yes. Where do the grudging is a good way to put it. Where does, where do the weapons come from, which is another way for me to ask, what is a floating armory? Yeah, again, 2008 Somali piracy kicks up. The world shutters because stuff isn't getting where it's supposed to get, oil products, etc. Violence of this sort had been happening even worse and lots of corners with the people getting killed and the stuff getting delayed didn't affect deep pockets and interested parties, lawyers and laudius. But when Somali policy happened, the industry stood up, took notice, realized that the shipping industry

merits these big companies, that they really, well, governments realized they couldn't solve it. They didn't have the Navy assets. They didn't have the jurisdiction that go invade Somalia, et cetera. So they essentially turned to the industry and said, you guys should arm up, bring on private security and normalize that because that's the best way to slow us down. A huge industry emerged in the course of 24 months. multi-billion dollar industry. A lot of ex-Iraq, Afghanistan, theater soldiers, British, American, South African, Pakistani, Indian took work in this industry.

Two-four-man team, two-to-four-man teams typically on vessels. And it worked to a large degree. Like, it really, that was the biggest factor in slowing piracy down because guys were going to fire back and probably hit. But the downside was there was no real, infrastructure for policing these guys with guns and making sure that this is a legitimate use of force and just imposing laws on them. But there were other logistical problems. On the one hand, let's say you're the captain of a huge merchant vessel. We've got 100 containers of cargo and you're

trying to bring it into a port into Mumbai, India. While the Indians are real sensitive about foreigners with guns entering the national waters, considering that Mumbai was a place where terrorists have entered by water. And so they said absolutely not. No one should enter Indian waters. So now you've got guys with guns on board, but you need to offload your cargo. How do you do that? You've got to get the guys with guns off board so that you can get into national waters

to drop off your stuff and come back out. So thus emerge these floating armories, which sit at the 201 mark right on the edge of national and international waters. And they're essentially like one part bunkhouse hotel, one part arms depot. and at any given moment you might have a big army would have maybe 50, 100 guys. They store all the weaponry, heavy, heavy weaponry on board, and the guys stay there and wait for either that ship that went into Mbai when it comes back out, picks them back up, or not.

It's done with them. It went through the rough neighbor. It doesn't need them anymore. So it goes on its way and those guys wait there to get a call for their next deployment. And so these armories are these strange places. that emerged and they're, no, I haven't looked recently at the numbers, but when I was on one of them and on a couple of them reporting, there were two dozen around the world. And they're usually situated in tough neighborhoods, if you will, near the Red Sea and Middle East and East and West

Africa and these places. You mentioned Sea Shepherd earlier. Can you talk a little bit more about who the vigilante groups are, what they believe, and what their tactics are? So Sea Shepherd is this environmental ocean conservation group. It was started and spearhead for many years by this Canadian advocate named Paul Watts. Watson, Sep was a Greenpeace high up staffer, one of the founders, but had grown frustrated with the tactics of Greenpeace and Paul wanted more direct action, more aggressive engagement of what he and fellow travelers viewed as nefarious players on the ocean, be they oil and gas drillers or overfishers or whalers or the like. So thus was born Seas Shepherd. Sea Shepherd grew and now has a fleet, I think of 10, 15, maybe not that many,

somewhere. They're a good size number of very large kind of Navy class vessels. They engage in campaigns around the world and have diversified their mission. They're best known for whale wars show where they were going up against Japanese whaling fleet, which is the one final fleet that was still whaling on the high seas. Other countries still whaling in national waters. And from Sea Shepherd's point of view and others as well, that behavior, that whaling from Japanese was illegal under international wall. And no one was really enforcing that prohibition. So Sea Shepherd decided they would, and they did so in pretty aggressive ways, including ramming missiles. Sea Shepherd, yeah, has diversified. It's a younger set of actors with a different outlook.

in my view, a more nuanced outlook on tactics, whereas historically Seas Shepherd never worked with law enforcement, didn't work with governments, and didn't work with fishing companies. They're pretty, mostly Sheppard folks are pretty hardcore vegan. The younger folks, especially this guy, Peter Hammerstead, their Swedish guy, who really is running things now, who are running things now. Work with law enforcement, work with governments in countries where often they don't have navies and they partner with them to try to patrol waters and go after foreign illegal fishing players in those waters.

have worked with fishing companies in certain enforcement actions, such as one I wrote about. So they have a sort of different outlook on tactics, but in general, they still do very much believe in direct action and policing this void that governments have largely left unpoliced. One thing I know a little bit about, unlike so much of the rest of this, is human trafficking slash slavery, because actually I covered that for Thompson Reuters briefly. And can we just talk a little bit about how one becomes a slave in the modern day, especially if we can just talk about on fishing vessels, what exactly happens to get you into that position? You don't get kidnapped. I think people, I think of slavery as you're going out there, you get kidnapped and you wake up on a ship.

I would say it's a kind of kidnapping. So what I would say, for starters, is you're both right, not to be Pollyanna, but there's a spectrum of reality. So let's talk about Thailand and the South Tennessee. There's this slavery is a charge word. I use it. I try to use it carefully. I consider the trafficking spectrum and the slavery problem to exist whereby there are two poles at either extreme in terms of scenarios. So in one scenario, you have what you might call softer version of it.

And that's a sort of debt bondage leverage. A fraud, what are the three terms, fraud, force, and coercion. either three legal terms that make up the trafficking definition. But on the softer end, you have a situation in which someone has made a decision, has willfully decided to go along with this transaction, this contract, verbal or otherwise, but it is a contract in which they are trapped, either through debt or intimidation or trickery. And that is one version of trafficking in the sea slavery space, but also in the sex work space,

which is connected and I've worked a lot on as well. And in the Thai situation, what that, so that's one spectrum. So we'll call it the soft end of the trafficking spectrum and it's debt bondage. The hard end of the trafficking spectrum, which exists and is real is a kidnap. And that does actually occur. And typically in the tie space, it follows a set scenario where, you know, a guy and he put him on camera, but there are many, they are carousing at a, usually a karaoke bar, which is a brothel. And the next thing, they drink too much. They get. Roofied, it's unclear, but the next thing they know, they wake up on their own of us. And this happens.

I've interviewed in my career a good eight or nine guys with credible stories vetted by the government where they could have ended up on the vessel, Lombehold. And the person we put on the front page in New York Times was not only, he was not Shanghai, he was not kidnapped, he was debt bonded in traffic, but he was bamboozled in that he was told he was going for a construction job, ended up on a fishing vessel. And then when he tried to escape, he was shackled by the next for the next year whenever he wasn't working. And this was, again, a very vetted case. And the Thai government has since prosecuted the culprits.

So there's a spectrum of scenarios. But you're quite right, Jason, that the vast majority of the scenarios, the huge overwhelming majority, are on the debt bondage end of things. The kidnapping scenario, these movies are not really. And in Thailand, what it looks like is this. And I'll use Langong, our shackled guy, as like the textbooks. scenario. If you're a female and you live in Laos, Cambodia, you know, Myanmar, Burma, what have you, and you're out, Langlong's case, small villager, dirt poor, a lot of mouths to feed, not many options, a pretty violent, divided country, meets a guy who says, hey, do you want a job in construction

in Thailand, middle class country, decent paying jobs, under 2% unemployment? I can line you up. Langlong says, I don't have sent to my name. I don't have papers to get into Thailand. Don't worry about it. I can make it happen. I know a guy. I know a method. We'll work out the economics later. Meet me on Saturday. Meet me on Saturday. It gets in the truck. It gets across the border, paying off the guard of the border folks and along the way. And along the way, there are other Cambodians, naive, usually. The Cambodians are getting picked up. And soon they realize, wait a minute, we're not heading to a construction job or heading to the ports. And that's not what I signed on to. But it's a little late now. You're Cambodian, you don't speak Thai. Those guys are intimidating. They got guns. They're telling, what to go to do and you're doing it. And you're getting closer and closer. You get to the port, you get marching onto the boat, a group of you, you get on the boat, off you go. Okay. Now, the transaction that occurs at the port is the trafficker meets the captain and the trafficker says, hey, I got the 10 guys you said you needed because you were short. That's going to cost you X dollars ahead. That's what I incurred paying off the bribes on the way here. That debt is going

to you. You're going to pay me so I can go back and pick up the next load. And that debt that the captain is paying now means, for all in terms and purposes, he owns those 10 guys, right? That's debt bondage. Those 10 guys are out 300 bucks that's owed to the captain. And from the captain's perspective, like, that is a legit transaction where he's paid up front for their labor and off they go. Now, when you're at shore, there's no bookkeeping. Hey, you earn 20 bucks today.

You're doing good. That's ridiculous. You're offshore. You stay on that boat as long as the captain wants you on there. And in Langlong's case, it was hell on earth. He tried to escape. At one point at sea, jump overboard, swam. They caught him, brought him back, shackled him by the neck from then on when he wasn't working.

And then he was sold boat to boat and was at sea for over two years until he was rescued. This is not an unusual story on the South China Sea. Tens of thousands of folks fit within that general primary. And the female, just the version of that is same demographic. But the only tweak is, again, Cambodian, you know, loud, hey, do you. you want a job as a domestic, meaning a live-in maid or whatever, you're not headed for that job. You're headed for sex work in the karaoke bars. But it's the same game that's essentially played on these sort of unwitting migrant democracy.

Wow, that's fun. Yeah, we like to end on sour notes. I feel like that's a really good, angry planet style ending. I've found my species, some curmudgeonly dark dudes just like myself. Ian, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking. us through this. Yeah, my pleasure. Nice meeting you guys. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners.

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