VERIFIABLE truths may be out of vogue on social media and largely redundant as a concept in political rhetoric right now, but shipping and governments urgently need to sharpen their fact checking capabilities.

Learning to tell the difference between a real ship and a phantom digital doppelganger is now a matter of national security, but governments are struggling.

Today’s wars are being fought in the “grey zone” somewhere between peace and open conflict. And shipping has become a shadow player in the new Great Game — a digitally mutated evolution of the Cold War-era international order.

The recent flurry of undersea cable cutting incidents is just the latest example of so-called grey zone aggression.

Twice in the past two months, commercial ships with Russian links have been accused of damaging Baltic Sea cables by dragging their anchors.

This week the focus has shifted back to Taiwan where another example of cable cutting has temporarily distracted everyone from the regular maritime clashes that have recently seen Chinese ships resorting to lasers, ramming and water cannons.

Taiwan’s bid to pin the blame for damage caused to the key cable that connects it to the US west coast is being thwarted by the fact that the culprit ship has three distinct digital identities.

This is no anomaly — Lloyd’s List is currently tracking multiple examples of increasingly sophisticated spoofing and what appears to be a growing fleet of phantom ships coming back from the dead.

Identification numbers are recycled, cloned and reused to position real and fictional ships in places they have never physically been.

None of this is new, and not all of the ships spoofing locations are directly involved in grey zone operations. Much of this is just good old fashioned sanctions busting behaviour. But then very few government agencies have been actively looking for ships that don’t exist.

Sifting fact from fiction requires context, skill and time, but the rapid progression of digital deceptions is outpacing national agencies ill-equipped and often unaware that the reality on their screens has to be carefully verified.

The current scramble to protect critical underwater infrastructure will no doubt spur many agencies into action and spend their way out of a skills gap. But this is only the latest iteration of a much wider problem yet to be addressed. Until shipping and governments can hand on heart say they have dealt with the rapidly growing flotilla of fraudulent ships, fake flags, shadow operations and spoofed trades, shipping will continue to be dragged ever deeper into the grey zone.

Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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