The Two-Edged Sword

AIS may still be in its infancy, but its use is becoming more and more widespread following the adoption of international regulations requiring its use, and the adoption of national legislation, such as the Marine Transportation Safety Act of 2002 in the US which requires AIS transponders to be fitted to all foreign flag and most US flag vessels transiting areas regulated by vessel traffic services.

A typical example is Houston, one of the largest ports in the US with one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical and maritime traffic in the world. Here, as at other ports in the Gulf of Mexico, AIS allows the US Coast Guard to electronically track the movement of vessels in its waters and ports. AIS tracking receivers have also been installed on offshore oil platforms thus expanding the range at which vessels can be tracked, extending the maritime ‘Distant Early Warning’ or ‘DEW line’ as it has become known, further out from US shores.

The VTS at Port of Houston displays AIS signals in real-time, significantly reducing the workload of controllers in the VTS centre.

Furthermore, extending the DEW line is a key part of President Bush’s plan to ‘push out’ the borders of the US. Leasing communications towers offshore that are fitted with AIS receivers will enable VTS controllers to monitor all AIS-equipped commercial traffic operating up to 200 miles from the coast in future. Before AIS was introduced at Port of Houston the Coast Guard’s ability to monitor shipping ended at the channel entrance buoys, approximately five miles offshore, but eventually, offshore AIS receivers will extend this new monitoring capability to the entire coast of the US.

From the viewpoint of ports and harbours and port service providers, data collected from AIS transmissions also serves a very useful commercial purpose and, when linked to details of ownership, management, technical specifications and data such as inspection history and port state control detentions, can be used to enhance operations in port at the same time as it is used to enhance safety and security.

DANGERS OF MISUSE AIS information could, however, be misused, a fact that Is not lost on ports and harbours as Lisa Himber, a vice president at the Marine Exchange for the Delaware River & Bay, has noted. The Marine Exchange is a non-profit trade association that also has an operating role, and as Himber, who is also a member of the American Association of Port Authority’s information technology committee told PS , the organisation is currently considering acquisition of two to three AIS receivers to provide coverage of traffic transiting the Delaware River and bay to regional ports. “We think it’s the right thing to do, ” she says, “but we have concerns about who else can have access to AIS data.” As Himber explains, the Exchange is aware of at least one private individual in the area who has built his own system which he uses to receive and to display AIS data. Cases such as this are not rare either, and there is nothing to stop anyone doing the same thing, whatever their motivation.

More worrying still, say organisations that have made submissions to the IMO about the issue, are commercial sites that have been set up to collate and distribute AIS data and the debate about the potential security implications of AIS data being misused – whether for commercial purposes or by pirates in key parts of the world such as the Malacca Straits, or by terrorists. This has prompted one of the best known, AISLive. com, to rethink the range and type of data it makes available on the public version of its website.

As questions about whether AIS data should be publicly available grew, leading shipping organisations and their representatives asked the IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) to take action to limit the availability of AIS data culminating, at the end of last year, in the MSC issuing an advisory condemning the publishing of AIS data on websites, and going as far as to call on countries that were members of the IMO to “discourage” such practices.

Unsurprisingly, commercial organisations that have been set up to use and distribute AIS data tend to take the opposite view, believing that the unrestricted availability of AIS data will result in improved vessel safety, and help facilitate commerce.

AISLive. com, a joint venture between HITT in the Netherlands and Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay in the UK, has, however, recently decided to downgrade the data it provides on its public website in response to security concerns voiced at the IMO. Jan Thiermann, who is responsible for Business Development at HITT confirmed to PS that in May of this year the joint venture had made a number of changes to its public service. “We were more or less forced to do it, ” he confesses.

This being the case, AISLive. com now provides a real-time industry-only subscriber service and a separate, public service. The public service has reduced functionality, the most notable changes to the service being that vessel positions displayed on the public service are delayed by at least an hour; limited vessel information is only available at the most detailed, harbour level; and the images on the public pages do not automatically refresh.

In contrast, the industry service will provide access to near real-time AISLive data, and in order to subscribe companies and organisations will be required to provide details of their activities within the maritime sector together with full contact information. AISLive will also reserve the right to refuse access to the industry service to any party.

As was made plain in a paper submitted to the IMO long before the recent debate about AISLive (the paper was submitted by the International Chamber of Shipping, Intertanko and Intercargo), AIS has the potential to place in the public domain a vast amount of data about ships, cargoes, destinations, positions, and estimated times of arrival; data that will be available at all times to any person or organisation with the right equipment.

“Industry concerns in the area of commercial confidentiality would be somewhat reduced if, following an initial AIS transmission containing all the required information, subsequent AIS responses consisted only of the IMO number of the vessel, ” says the paper.