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La Californie devient-elle rouge ?
November 23, 2019 - 9:27am

In 2003 science fiction author William Gibson said ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed’. I was reminded of that phrase reading ‘Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai’, my pick for this weekend’s long read from MIT’s Technology Review.

It recounts the discovery of a phenomenon around the port of Shanghai in which the GPS transponders of oceangoing ships have been spoofed, meaning that vessels appear to be in locations where they are not or ‘ghost ships’ appear to be present where in fact no ship exists:

Although the American ship’s GPS signals initially seemed to have just been jammed, both it and its neighbor had also been spoofed—their true position and speed replaced by false coordinates broadcast from the ground. This is serious, as 50% of all casualties at sea are linked to navigational mistakes that cause collisions or groundings.
- Mark Harris, MIT Review

AIS transponders on vessels were introduced in order to increase safety and transparency in shipping. But as tracking technology advances, the means of hacking the system has kept pace, for example to obscure the activities of illegal sand dredgers in the Yangtze estuary:

Under the cover of darkness, AIS can be a useful tool for a sand thief. Ships that are not equipped or licensed for sea travel, for example, have been known to clone the AIS systems of seafaring boats to avoid detection.

Nor are sand thieves the only users of hacked AIS technology. In June this year, an oil tanker with a cloned AIS system rammed an MSA patrol boat in Shanghai while trying to evade capture.

- Mark Harris, MIT Review

The spoofed GPS signals were appearing in a pattern that analysts began to call ‘crop circles’, that centred on the Huangpu river near Shanghai, and that affected not just ships but all GPS signals. Analysts are still unsure as to what is causing it. High-tech hacking to conceal illegal resource extraction or oil shipping? New forms of experimental weaponry?

The article leaves the conclusion open but one thing is clear: the age of big data will bring with it not just the potential for advances in medical research and social innovation (or surveillance) but also for unforeseen new kinds of crime and even warfare.

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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