Sea Control - Sea Control 602: Maritime OSINT with Raae Baker

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Rae Baker is an expert in Maritime Intelligence, focused on hunting vessels and tracking elusive AIS signals in her role as Senior OSINT Analyst in Adversary Intelligence. Rae specializes in Human Targeting and Corporate Reconnaissance, utilizing her skills to chart illicit organizations. These practiced skills serve well in Rae’s volunteer positions with OSINT-oriented non-profits and speaking engagements at Recon Village; DEFCON, Shmoocon, and the Layer 8 conference. Further emphasis on her skills and knowledge can be demonstrated in the certifications and awards she’s achieved, including Associate of ISC2 (CISSP), SANS GOSI, AWS Solutions Architect, and Trace Labs OSINT CTF First Place Black Badge as well as the Most Valuable OSINT badge. J. Overton is a co-host of the Sea Control podcast, editor of “Sea Power By Other Means,” and a member of the Military Writers Guild. Links - Rae’s Web Site DEEP DIVE: Exploring the Real-world Value of Open Source Intelligence Rae’s LinkedIn page

Welcome aboard Sea Control fans. This is Jay. Today, our guest is Ray Baker. We're going to discuss maritime open source intelligence and Ray's work in that field. Before we get going, I want to timestamp this. It is April 3rd, 2026. We're a little over a month into the ongoing a conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and Iran and lots of its neighbors as well. There's lots of what folks are variously describing as cognitive warfare, narrative warfare, lots of disinformation, misinformation going around, really from all sides. It can be tough to get an actual, if you're just looking at speeches or official press releases, for many of the actors here, it can be tough to get an idea of what's going on. And that's why lots of people

are looking at really good open source intelligence work done by folks like Ray. So I thought it'd be really good to have her here right now. So and Ray, like many of our guests, you've got a pretty eclectic background and skill set. So could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So I my name is Ray Baker. I have been in OSINT for a little over six years. Prior to that, I was actually a graphic designer. So entirely different field. Had kids, wanted to do something different, make some more money. Because believe it or not, design does not pay very well. And so I went back to school. As I was going to school for security and risk analysis, I found OSINT through a conference that I went to. I played in a Trace Labs missing person event,

where it's like a capture the flag to find missing people and they're real missing people you find them uh details on them and you submit it and then you get points and then that all goes to law enforcement at the end so it's like osim for good and prior to that i had never heard of osim i'm not from the ic or military anything i knew nothing about it i watched a lot of true crime and and i was like this is very cool and it intersects with like the creativity of graphic design and art and uh cyber security which i was going to school for and risk and also like my need to dig into things and detective stuff and true crime so i i just i was like i need to be my background is marketing i'm going to market myself i want to get into osin how do i do that i start

writing blogs i start giving talks i start doing podcasts and that's how my employer found me they were actually we took second place in that competition and i find out later that they were first place so they started watching my stuff and then they reached out online and they hired me and And I've been doing adversarial intelligence since. Nice. Very cool. That's a great background for folks who are, if you're just listening to this, if you're kind of new to any of these fields, that's pretty good to go from six years ago, not

having heard of it to being at the level you're at right now and having written a book and writing a separate one. Anyway, very cool. And also, you're not the only person that came on with a graphics design degree. We have another person who is a special forces colonel and writes a book on military design And also that was his undergrad. So anyway, very cool. Great to have you on. Reminder that all views presented are our own and not necessarily those of any organization. We may now or have been in the past affiliated.

So it may seem a little bit self-explanatory, but could you describe what open source intelligence is? Sure. It's the collection of public data. So think about like your information that's in marketing databases or stuff that is on websites or your phone numbers that are out there when you're when you go on a date and you do a search for your date and try and find out information about them. You are doing open source intelligence. So that is that's basically open source collection of data. And then when you put it together and you analyze it, it becomes intelligence and then

it can be used for whatever anybody wants to use it for but the idea behind it is it does not require any classified information it's all public data so it's accessible to anyone both good and bad sure so if i'm gonna riff on this bit so if you're as we're saying it's it's basically anyone can do this it's not it's not access to particular anyone with an internet connection these days i guess it's not access to any particular specialty databases and all it really involves just the skill and the knowledge of the person doing it i guess is that is that correct yes yeah that's correct and then you know you can enrich it with that sort of data if you work in a corporation that has access to databases or you work with a government client or something like that

you might get access to information. But typically, no, it's all public data. Right. Very cool. All right. So your special is Maritime OSINT, of course. Could you tell us a little bit about any particular challenges to using open source intelligence to get insight to marine operations, or perhaps why it's different doing it in the maritime field than in other domains? Maritime is very interesting. I fell into maritime kind of the same way I've fallen into everything really. I, I think all our listeners can say that too. We all, for various reasons ended up here for some reason. Yeah. It's very weird. I, I would try and come up with content for my blog. Um, so I'd pick random things that either I wanted to learn or that somebody was

doing that I thought was interesting. And I would write a blog on it to teach myself how they were investigating it. So I would learn it. And I just randomly did one on, you know, what you can find on a vessel in open source. And I wrote a quick blog and people loved it. I got so much feedback on it. And I started thinking like, this might be a thing. This was a few years ago, maybe around 2022 ish. So like, pretty interesting maritime timeframe for that to happen. So I just, I feel like i fell into it at the right time and uh i learned a whole lot just by you know self-taught i taught myself um and yes there are quite a few um gaps in collecting maritime osint versus other things um i would say i mean disinformation enters kind of all of the areas of osint anymore you know

social media with ai making up content deep fakes things like that it's it's kind of prevalent across everything but i am noticing and this is becoming more mainstream now that adversaries are actively manipulating the data because they know we're watching it for instance like the ais data, positioning of ships, things like that, the names of the vessels, the locations, things like that. So it's not like you can ever take anything at face value. You have to do second and third tier verification of all of the things you find. So that can be very tricky.

And there's a historical contextual level to it. Like, you have to understand the region that you're looking at, kind of baselining the area, seeing what normal activity is versus abnormal activity. Are there any historical things that would change how the vessels move or how things act in that region, which I'm not sure fit into many other aspects of OSINT. um and then I love maritime OSINT because I get to touch so many different parts of OSINT because you have the people the crew on board the people piloting the vessel you have corporate um recon like who owns it who owns them are there shell companies you have financial information um you have like the the actual maritime tracking itself um there's just so many levels and i get to have my hands in all of them at the same time right so i'm guessing since you this was 2022 um you

got into maritime was this uh was it things around the russia ukraine war looking at the black sea shadow fleet that kind of thing it did not start that way no okay all right yeah i i obviously have to have to report on things like that sure sure all right yeah it was that that area in china okay like typically the areas that i've looked at all right gosh i think that was when sort of people to normal people not in our little world started things like shadow fleet tankers flags of vessels and stuff started making regular news which a lot of us were familiar with but other people didn't really didn't really understand that world or yeah ships flagged and owned by different countries and crewed by different countries and based out of them another country

so yeah yeah yeah i don't think the average person ever really thought about that before right now had any concept of how much stuff happens in the ocean right right exactly the navy has been saying that for decades about uh how much travels by sea but oh yeah they still didn't uh yeah i think it's this this has helped it uh helped it sink in a little at least to americans a little more so um i'll do that in the in the last month that we've been going on operation um epic fury uh the iran israel us etc war i think a lot of americans have become at least vaguely familiar with concepts like that like maritime choke points global shipping insurance costs and things we've um regularly talked about on simsec for a long time uh has

has that changed has your just we were talking about people getting more familiar with this sort of thing has your work changed then as it's become perhaps more widely accepted or you're you're being called on on less of a less of a niche basis now um i think right now it's very interesting because everybody's catching up right like we've we've been doing this for a little while and and we knew you know in the maritime field we we knew this stuff was happening but nobody else really did so now everybody's scrambling to understand it how to track vessels and understand flags and stuff and in the past few months i've noticed a massive increase in analysts posting about it online i've seen like tutorial videos i used to be able to like

you know you google yourself i used to be able to google myself and i was always like the only one talking about vessel tracking and yeah and now there's people putting up videos and training and stuff. So it's becoming really important. I don't know if it will remain that way. But right now, everybody, it seems is scrambling to understand. And then there might be tons more maritime analysts in the future. I don't know. We're glad we're the OG. So we're glad we got you on for this. I hope so. Don't forget I exist. No, never should. Could you, because I've seen some of you i've read your blog seen some of your tutorials could you um either you could use an actual case you've done or just make up something sort of what's the what's a walk us through i

guess a little basic process of i want to figure out what this ship is where it's going what it's doing how do you sort of how does that even begin or or in an area of the world what the shipping looks like so um i think if i was looking at an area of the world um because that's one ask like can you tell us what activity is happening at this port let's scope it down a little bit okay all right so i would have to do like a baseline investigation of that port what does the vessel traffic in that port look like over a period of time 30 days is probably quite a bit of traffic for some of these big ports sure so i'd look at all the activity over that time period and then how are you finding out that how are you looking at that activity uh i would look at free sources

like marine traffic vessel right okay sure okay maybe the port depending on the port sometimes they have that stuff available through their website you can google like port information and you can look at the the vessels coming in uh departing some of some of them show the cargo but you can use marine traffic if you're looking at non-historical data for free because that they will charge you for but if you're looking right now if you're just doing like a look at what is happening right now you can do that for free on marine traffic um and then it also allows you to dig into who owns the vessel who's who is it flagged by has that flag changed recently um has the the identification numbers changed like the mimsy or the imo are they um i learned

a while back when i first started to look at um uneconomic behavior meaning like a ship goes from point a to point b to make money or to do a job and if it goes back and forth constantly as its job and then suddenly it goes to point c why you know why is it doing that behavior that is not going to make it money or it's going to cost it more so i look for those like anomaly like anomalous situations and then you're saying that there's there is disinformation even in that sort of coming out which i think we're all hearing about like iran and russia having shadow fleets could you just could you explain a little bit about that that's the that's the term now on regular people news what is that for those of us in in the sims tech world the ones who don't know

perhaps are tuning yeah so when they're talking about the shadow fleet uh they're talking about older vessels that they've pulled back to life and are utilizing to deliver oil and skirt sanctions for russia um they they often change their identities or they turn off their um transponders their ais they spoof their location meaning they pretend they're in another area while they're doing their illicit activities so there's lots of of kind of tells that people are picking up on now that indicate illicit activity with these vessels um frankly i don't think they care too much i mean they they've been doing this for years and just now we're we're starting to take them down but i'm still seeing them as soon as they're no longer seized and they're just back to the same

activity but it's not just shadow tankers that they're not the only ones turning their systems off and trying to hide their identities you have chinese fishing vessels or you know uh other vessels that are trying to cut cables under the sea and sure warships do it it's it's like a very common illegal practice in the ocean because they're supposed to keep the ships they're supposed to keep essentially the transponder so people other ships people know where they're at correct so that's like a basic so yes hey i'm right here i'm i want to say it's over 500 gross tons they have to have it on all right so if you see while you may not be able to track that ship if it sort of disappears like in the middle of the mat you've you've got an idea they did something

nefarious i suppose i mean yeah yeah i mean not always because it could just be a problem with their system but um typically if you know what vessel it is and they are already sanctioned you can right right it's probably it okay that's the tricky thing that everybody's dealing with is how do you track these vessels when they're not broadcasting they just go dark and you can't see where they're at so you have to have access to satellite imagery or on the ground imagery to verify you know what they could be doing in that period of time because sometimes it's days sometimes it's months that they're dark or they're changing their identities with another vessel and you have to try and unravel this mystery of like what is going on right that's that's fascinating

um you aside from that giving us all a really good little little breakdown idea you published a book in 2003 called deep dive exploring the real world value of open source intelligence um could you and we're gonna have a link to that in the show notes of course but could you talk about i mean that's only three years ago but have things what what all changed in that time from oscent or just you know what you're doing i think the biggest change from when i wrote that is and it was starting then is that that oscent is becoming more mainstream i mean you have even when i wrote that there were so many people who were coming into oscent from high school like they they were just seeing a netflix movie they used oscent and now suddenly

they're trying to get into it and i think that that is changing the field along with ai of course there was like i don't even think i mean of course ai existed but it wasn't it wasn't public when i started that like available right okay nice um and again that the books the book's still out there so very cool look i'm and i understand it has a huge it has a huge chapter on maritime and transportation because i i initially wanted to write a maritime book and they were like oh it seems really niche i don't know and i was like okay i'll write a general ocean book but i'll shove in this big fantastic that's what the simpsec readers want to listeners want to hear then. So that's good. You got to focus on that. Very good. Excellent. Cool. And then as I see

from your blog, you're working on another book right now. So that's still the case. I am a buzzword AI. It's an AI slash OSINT book. I've been working with AI at my job for a while doing OSINT. And I've found that there's a disconnect with some people on how to implement AI how to use it for their day-to-day OSINT stuff and then some who are just resistant to AI or don't understand it so I've I've taken like a very basic start here's what AI is here's how it can help you here are the ways it can help you like I try and break it down but it's also relevant for people who've been doing it for a while intermediate use but I wanted to I wanted to show how it can help you versus hurt you because i think a lot of people think it's gonna

you know take your job it's gonna do the work for you um you'll type into chat gpt or whatever whatever you are allowed to use for your work and it will just give you all the analysis and you won't have to do anything um but that is not the case nice nice i look forward to seeing that when it comes out there well like so we'll have links to your blog and all that on the show notes and then lastly just any again we're a month into this this war which is heavily maritime um in many ways are you i guess are you are things based on the work you've done are things surprising you about the sort of maritime aspect of this um epic fury um the way like we've talked about of people in the u.s are learning more about maritime are there things which

are surprising you are there things which you're like yeah this was somewhat foreseeable this is what you know naval and maritime actors do in situations like this that any i'm pretty open into there on on what any any takes you have yeah i think what surprised what surprises me most is how much they're suddenly caring about these vessels that are doing this because i've been tracking vessels um and not i wasn't doing it in 2017 but i've been tracking vessels that were doing the same activity from 2017 that are still doing it so it's it's interesting that they're now taking action on on them seizing them and then it will be interesting in the coming months years to see if that even shifts any of their behaviors are they going to start coming up with

new ways to hide their identities because i don't anticipate that it will stop i think they'll just find new ways to hide what they're doing and that's it's kind of fun because i want to i want to see them shift and i want to be able to find that activity um so i'm kind of looking for i'm watching for how the patterns change nice all right this is uh yeah unfortunately probably good job security for you there i hope so yeah yeah there's there's a lot going on in this space But I'm also finding it hard to get, you know, like the broader client base to care. Like if you work in consulting, people who don't directly work with maritime don't always understand how maritime stuff will impact them. Right.

So there's like a bit of a learning curve with like, yes, you work over here, but, you know, this maritime thing will affect you. And so it's a bit of a learning curve and training people why maritime touches absolutely everything in the world. yeah something good i think that the u.s navy at least has been trying to do for several decades there but it only when things like the uh ever given get stuck in the suez yes things like this then they then they or piracy you have a captain phillips and then it then it hits home but how quickly we forgot about the how quickly we forgot exactly or even a backup at the ports of long beach and all that people remember the toilet paper exactly we're like yes learning these things. So your work then is really fascinating. And I look forward to following you and let us know whenever you want it. You want to come back and talk about anything else

because this is a fascinating field. Yeah, absolutely. I love talking maritime and only so many people care to hear it. That's one thing if you're a listener to the Center for National Maritime Security and Sea Control, that's what you do. So we're all interested. So come back anytime. And again, anything else, we're going to have a few links to your blog, your LinkedIn site, which you put a lot of good stuff up on there your upcoming books um and anyway i just encourage folks to look on there and keep following you and learn a lot about about you and your good work so thanks again for joining us yeah thank you for having me all right we will turn it over to kimbersman now

Thank you. Put it in the alley, help me, mama. Put it in the alley, put it out in Shemora.