The high seas are rife with lawlessness | The Excerpt
On Sunday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Over fifty million people work on our oceans around the world and over 80% of the goods we consume are delivered by vessels navigating them. But when it comes to maintaining law and order on the high seas, is there anyone really in charge? Journalist Ian Urbina has spent over a decade trying to get to the bottom of this and other pressing questions. The result is The Outlaw Ocean Project, a multiplatform reporting effort whose goal is to support and encourage ethically sourced accountability journalism of all that takes place in or atop our vast oceans. Director and Founder Ian Urbina joins The Excerpt to talk about his work trying to bring accountability to the high seas.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, January 12th, 2025.
Over 50 million people work on our oceans and over 80% of the goods we consume is delivered by vessels navigating them. But when it comes to maintaining law and order on the high seas, who's really in charge? The answer is a difficult one to pin down. Geographically, every country with a water border is responsible only for what happens within a marginal distance from its shores. So what about the rest? Who polices fishing vessels to ensure they're operating in compliance with international law, ensures that environmental protections are enforced, or prosecutes crimes like human trafficking and murder?
Journalist, Ian Urbina has spent over a decade trying to get to the bottom of these and other pressing questions. The result is The Outlaw Ocean Project, a multi-platform reporting effort whose goal is to support and encourage ethically sourced accountability journalism of all that takes place in or atop our vast oceans. Director and founder, Ian Urbina now joins us to explain. Thanks for joining us on The Excerpt, Ian.
Ian Urbina:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Ian, the seeds for this wide-ranging reporting project were planted about 10 years ago with a special report you did that resulted from some shocking cell phone video you were given. Tell me about that. How did you come to possess it and where did this reporting lead you?
Ian Urbina:
This was part of a series at The New York Times. The original story that you're referring to was about a mass murder that was captured on a cell phone. This was a shooting of anywhere from 5 to 15 people that day. The shooters were on a fishing vessel that was on the high seas. The cell phone footage came to me originally in an email from a source at INTERPOL who knew I was interested in the topic of crime at sea. This cell phone had been found by law enforcement in Fiji, left in the back of a taxi. And someone had seen the footage that was on it and turned it into the police. And the police ultimately handed the footage over to INTERPOL and INTERPOL handed it to me to see if I might have any ideas on how to figure out who were the victims and the culprits of this crime.
It turns out, after many years of investigating, that we pinned the identity of the ship that had the shooters, and this was a Taiwanese tuna long liner, but it was sort of illustrative of many things in The Outlaw Ocean. One, the prevalence for violence and unaccountability. Number two, the shocking nature of a crime like this occurring even being filmed and culprits or witnesses posing for selfies at the end of the video that I was sent, and yet no one had prosecuted this crime. All these things added up to a perfect journalistic opportunity for us to try to look at a larger issue about the lack of governance at sea.
Dana Taylor:
One of the result of tracking down where this murder footage was shot and who was involved was the realization that when it comes to accountability on the high seas, there is neither a central entity that governs this nor a central repository to source this information. That's until you came along. Tell me where have your efforts here led?
Ian Urbina:
Well, I'd like to take as much credit as you're generously giving us. But your point is correct that especially on the high seas, so in international waters, there is a lack of rules and what rules exist are fairly murky and there is no real police force to enforce what few rules there are. All that adds up to a pretty dodgy situation. What we do now at the nonprofit journalism shop I run is try to bring the bright light of investigative journalism to spotlight these sorts of crimes and concerns, and drive attention toward what causes them, who are the beneficiaries, sometimes you and me, consumers in the West, and what are some of the fixes to try to impose better policing and governance on that space.
Dana Taylor:
One of the biggest concerns regarding lawlessness on the high seas is human trafficking. What have been your findings here and what set you off in that direction?
Ian Urbina:
Yeah, I mean, if you think of the oceans as this sprawling watery realm, two-thirds of the planet is covered by water, and in that space the majority is international waters, high seas. Okay, now in that space, there are more than 50 million people working there, and the vast majority of them are on fishing vessels, distant water fishing vessels.
Now, those vessels often are spending insane amounts of time at sea, sometimes two to three-year tours because of the emergence of something called transshipment. So fishing vessels go hundreds, thousands of miles from their port. It's too expensive to pay the fuel to come back to port and bring the fish each time they fill up their hold, so they stay fishing the whole time and a mothership comes out, picks up the fish, drops off fuel and parts and food, and then takes the fish back to shore and the fishing vessel will stay operating for two to three years at sea.
What that creates is a pretty captive situation where workers, most of them on these vessels, migrant, often undocumented, sometimes illiterate, rarely speaking the language of their officers, very underpaid, workers are captive on these essentially factories that are floating at sea. And all that adds up to a prevalence of violence, a prevalence of debt bondage, of really dark sort of 19th century Dickensian behavior, and also the lack of journalism. It's really hard to get out in this space. NGOs, lawyers, police, journalists, don't tend to go out there and check on these workers. All that means that there's a routine habit of keeping workers and violating their rights.
Dana Taylor:
Arms trafficking is another big issue you and your team tackled. How has this evolved over time, and is it something that's starting to be a bit more under control?
Ian Urbina:
I don't honestly have a global sense on arms trafficking. We haven't gone far enough on it. There are interesting things in the arms trafficking realm. There are some corridors in the world seas that are heavily trafficked. So for example, between Puntland, Somalia, which is the horn of the Horn of Africa and Yemen, there's a highway essentially that runs across the sea and massive amounts of arms are constantly flowing in both directions. That's an example of a place where you would find a lot of arms trafficking.
The other category and different kind of category of arms trafficking, so not militia, insurgent-type trafficking of arms, but more companies that are handling and moving arms is the private maritime security industry. And that's an industry that really grew after the Somali piracy became a big problem and governments realized they weren't going to be able to put a lid on that. And so they turned to the private sector to begin putting three and four man teams on big merchant vessels. So Maris container ships, for example, like you saw, Captain Phillips, that movie where the vessels that are traveling through rough neighborhoods, if you will, will often have these armed teams. These are mostly ex-British, South African, American, Indian soldiers who have aged out of their army and now they're in the private sector and they're doing these tours.
And they're carrying huge amounts of arms and in a fairly unregulated fashion. And if they open fire on someone on the high seas, there's not really much of a reporting mechanism or an accountability mechanism. Was that a legitimate kill? Were you acting defensively or was that offensively? Were those even pirates or maybe they were just fishermen? What really happened there? This is another place where violence and arms mix on the high seas in a pretty lethal way.
Dana Taylor:
Ian, your reporting also pulled back the curtain on a problem rarely discussed, and that's the practice of corrupt ship captains using a so-called magic pipe to dispose of oil underneath the water line where they hope to avoid detection. Carnival's Caribbean Princess cruise ship was one such case. Tell me about that story.
Ian Urbina:
Ships use a very dirty type of fuel and in large quantities, especially the big ships. Cruise ships, merchant vessels have to have a lot of fuel on board. And when they use the fuel, they often have a waste product. It's sludge that results and it's this thick, muddy, really toxic stuff. What they're supposed to do is store that stuff, and when they get to a port that has proper disposal facilities, then they pay a fee and unload it. But every three years on average, ships intentionally dump more oil and sludge than the Exxon Valdez and the BP spills combined. So just let that sink in. And this is really shocking because think of the amount of press coverage there was of the BP spill and the Valdez spills, and yet the actual threat is intentional dumping.
Normally the dumping happens through a magic pipe, and that just means it can be something as basic as a garden hose, six foot tube that is routing sludge from the engine room out under the ship in this sort of flushing fashion that when you're out in the middle of the ocean, no one notices because it's coming out from your ship underneath your ship, and then it's sifting up. But no one's really watching it except for a couple of NGOs that watch this by satellite. And you can get away with it and save hundreds of thousands of dollars by just disposing in the ocean. It adds up in a pretty toxic way, and fish consume the waters and other marine life that have this toxin in it, and then we end up eating that fish. So it's a pretty bad practice.
Dana Taylor:
Of course, we can't talk about crime on the high seas without talking about maintaining the health of our oceans by respecting international fishing rules that govern what kinds of vessels a country can use, where and how much fish they can harvest. How did this vein of reporting start for your project and where did it lead you?
Ian Urbina:
If you think, helicoptering down into this space conceptually, there are two types of vessels out there, largely. There are research vessels and yachts and these sorts of things, but largely there are merchant vessels carrying stuff and there are fishing vessels pulling things out of the water. The overwhelming majority are the fishing vessels and the bleakest conditions are on those vessels. It's a century behind in terms of rights and laws and compliance.
It's also just I would say, legally and culturally, fishing is this gruff, leave me alone kind of industry. It has always been that way. People go into fishing and go out to sea to escape other people and laws and government and spouses. There is a true phenomena there when it comes to fishing as culturally one that aggressively protects its privacy, and that has been codified in law.
And so fishing vessels historically have not had to say, routinely answering questions to port captains or journalists, what are you carrying? Where are you going? I want to see you the whole way in route. But a fishing vessel can go dark and not answer many questions about what it's doing, what it's carrying, where it's going, and it won't get in trouble. And that has given rise to a lot of really illicit, unsustainable practices on the ocean, and it's one of the reasons that the world's oceans are in a pretty dire state.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, Ian, if there's one big takeaway about reporting on the high seas that you'd like to leave our listeners with, what would that be?
Ian Urbina:
We need more of it, that it's a really expensive and slow and difficult type of reporting. But there are amazing stories that matter, urgent issues that should be covered. And the more that journalists can delve into this space, the more it'll pay dividends.
Dana Taylor:
Happy New Year, and thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Ian Urbina:
Thank you.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.