Daniel's been watching the Hormuz crisis and noticed something most of us missed. When the shooting started, a whole layer of organizations suddenly became visible that had been working quietly for decades. He wants to know who they are. Who's interested in the big picture of who's at sea and what's moving, what use cases these organizations are actually targeting, and how old the field really is. He mentioned the UK's maritime information organization specifically.
UKMTO. UK Maritime Trade Operations.
That's the one. And before the conflict, you'd have to be in the shipping business to have heard of them. Now they're in the news every other day.
The Strait of Hormuz did something to maritime intelligence that September eleventh did to threat assessment. It took an entire industry that had been operating in the background and put it on the front page. And the thing is, most people still don't know what these organizations actually do, or that half of them aren't government agencies at all.
So let's start with the basics. What is maritime intelligence, and why does it exist?
Maritime intelligence is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about vessels, cargo, routes, and threats at sea. The key part is that most of it comes from open sources. AIS transponder data, satellite imagery, port records, radio traffic. This isn't naval intelligence, which is classified and run by state militaries. This is the commercial and open-source layer. And it's sold or shared with shipping companies, energy analysts, insurers, governments, anyone who needs to know what's moving on the water.
And the scale of what's moving is staggering. Ninety percent of world trade goes by sea. The Strait of Hormuz alone carries about twenty percent of global oil. When a tanker gets seized or a route closes, the ripple effects hit energy prices, insurance markets, and supply chains within hours. So the people who need this information aren't just admirals. They're commodity traders trying to predict whether that crude shipment will arrive on time.
Right. And that's the part most coverage gets wrong. People assume maritime intelligence is a government function, something navies do. But the commercial side is enormous. There are private companies tracking hundreds of thousands of vessels in real time and selling that data to hedge funds. That's a very different animal from a naval intelligence briefing.
So the arc here is the technology that made this possible, the organizations that do it, who pays for it, and what the Hormuz crisis revealed about the whole system.
The technology story starts with AIS. The Automatic Identification System. The International Maritime Organization mandated it in two thousand two under the SOLAS Convention for all large commercial vessels. Every big ship has to broadcast its position, speed, course, and identity over VHF radio. Continuously. In the open.
Which was a safety measure, not an intelligence measure. They wanted ships to avoid colliding with each other.
The original purpose was collision avoidance and port traffic management. But the side effect was enormous. For the first time in history, you had a real-time, global, open-source tracking layer for commercial shipping. Anyone with a receiver could pick it up. You didn't need a satellite or a spy agency. A hobbyist with a radio on the coast could see every ship within range.
And that's how the commercial field got started. MarineTraffic, the big platform everyone uses now, was founded as a hobby project. Some guy in Greece started collecting AIS data from a receiver on his roof and putting it on a website. By the twenty tens, it was tracking hundreds of thousands of vessels globally.
The modern field is roughly twenty years old. But maritime intelligence as a concept goes back much further. Lloyd's List has been publishing shipping news since seventeen thirty four. That's nearly three hundred years of people wanting to know which ships are where and whether they made it to port.
So the misconception is that this is a new field. The technology is new. The work of tracking ships and cargo is older than the United States.
Older than the United States by a good margin, yes. What AIS did was democratize it. Before two thousand two, if you wanted to know where a specific tanker was, you either had a contact in the port, you called the ship on the radio, or you waited for Lloyd's to publish something. Now you can pull it up on your phone.
So the field is old, but the infrastructure is new. And that infrastructure enabled a whole ecosystem of organizations to grow up around it. Let's talk about who these organizations actually are. Daniel specifically asked about the UK one.
UKMTO. The UK Maritime Trade Operations. Established in two thousand one, based in Dubai. It's run by the Royal Navy, but its purpose is not military. It's a liaison between military and commercial shipping in the Gulf region. Commercial vessels report to UKMTO when they're transiting high-risk areas. UKMTO receives those reports, tracks where ships are, and disseminates threat warnings. If a tanker is attacked in the Gulf of Aden or the Strait of Hormuz, UKMTO is usually the first to confirm it.
And they're free. Government-funded. A ship captain can call them on VHF or satellite phone, register their transit, and get updates on threats along the route. It's a public service.
It became the de facto first responder for maritime security incidents in that region. During the twenty nineteen Gulf of Oman tanker attacks, when several tankers were hit by limpet mines, UKMTO was the first to receive the distress calls and confirm what had happened. They issued the warnings that other ships used to decide whether to reroute.
And they're not the only ones. There's JMIC, the Joint Maritime Information Center, which is a multinational effort. There's EUNAVFOR, the European Union Naval Force, which runs Operation Atalanta off the Horn of Africa. There's the IMB, the International Maritime Bureau, which runs the Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur.
The IMB is interesting because it's not a government body. It's part of the International Chamber of Commerce. A private organization that became the global clearinghouse for piracy reports. When Somali piracy was at its peak in the late two thousands, the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre was the number everyone called. They'd been tracking piracy since the early nineties.
And then you have the commercial platforms. MarineTraffic, Windward, Kpler. These are private companies selling data and analysis. Windward in particular has built a business on using AI to detect suspicious vessel behavior. Kpler is big in energy markets, tracking tanker flows and cargo movements.
So the ecosystem has three layers. The government-funded safety organizations like UKMTO. The international and quasi-private bodies like the IMB and JMIC. And the purely commercial platforms that sell subscriptions to anyone who'll pay.
Let's talk about how the data actually flows, because that's where it gets interesting. A ship's AIS transponder broadcasts its position. That signal gets picked up by coastal receivers and by satellites. The data gets aggregated by platforms like MarineTraffic. Then intelligence firms layer analysis on top of it, looking for patterns, anomalies, suspicious behavior. Then they brief their clients.
And the open-source nature is key. Anyone can set up an AIS receiver. There are hobbyist networks all over the world feeding data into public platforms. That's why the field is so accessible. But it's also why spoofing and jamming are growing problems. If the data is open, it can be manipulated.
This is the dark side. Vessels in sanctioned or conflict zones often turn off their AIS transponders entirely. Or they spoof their location, broadcasting false positions to make it look like they're somewhere else. Sometimes they'll impersonate another ship's identity.
And then there's jamming. Iran has been accused of jamming GPS and AIS signals in the Strait of Hormuz. If you're a tanker captain and your GPS suddenly goes blank, you don't know where you are, and neither does anyone else. That's a serious safety problem, not just an intelligence problem.
So the intelligence firms have to work around it. They use satellite imagery, radar, and pattern analysis to detect what they call dark vessels. Ships that have gone quiet. You can see them in a satellite photo, but their transponder says they're somewhere else or nowhere at all.
This is where the cat-and-mouse game comes in. The ships trying to evade sanctions turn off their transponders. The intelligence firms look for gaps in the data. A ship that disappears from AIS for six hours in the middle of the ocean is suspicious. Especially if it reappears with a different cargo or a different name.
The Hormuz crisis has accelerated this. When the war intensified, suddenly there were a lot of ships going dark in a very small area. The intelligence platforms had to figure out which ones were hiding and which ones were just trying not to get hit.
And that's the thing about Hormuz. It's a chokepoint. A narrow strait, about twenty one miles wide at its narrowest point. Every tanker going in or out of the Gulf has to pass through it. When the shooting started, transits through Bab al-Mandeb and Hormuz plunged. The National reported on the drop in traffic as the war intensified. The data came from maritime intelligence platforms tracking every vessel in real time.
So the crisis did two things at once. It created enormous demand for real-time information about what was moving and what wasn't. And it degraded the quality of the data, because jamming and spoofing went up. The people who needed the picture the most were looking at a fuzzy screen.
That's the paradox at the heart of the field. The open-source data layer is incredibly powerful, but it's also fragile. When it works, you can see everything. When it's jammed or spoofed, you're blind. And the people doing the jamming know exactly how much it hurts.
So that's the technology and the organizations. But who's actually paying for this, and what are they using it for?
The buyers break down into five groups. First, the energy sector. Traders, refiners, and analysts tracking tanker flows to predict supply disruptions and price movements. If a tanker carrying two million barrels of crude gets delayed or seized, that's a market event. The traders who find out first make money.
Second, shipping companies and insurers. They're assessing risk for routes, crews, and cargo. Should this vessel transit the Red Sea or go around the Cape of Good Hope? What's the insurance premium for that route? The answers come from maritime intelligence.
Third, governments and militaries. Monitoring sanctions compliance, detecting illicit trade, protecting sea lanes. This is where it overlaps with national security. If a ship is suspected of carrying Iranian oil to China in violation of sanctions, someone has to track it and document what it's doing.
Fourth, financial markets. Hedge funds and commodity traders using vessel tracking as alternative data. The same way they use satellite photos of parking lots to predict retail sales, they use AIS data to predict oil supply.
And fifth, NGOs and journalists. Investigating illegal fishing, sanctions evasion, environmental crimes. If a fishing vessel is operating in a protected area or using banned gear, the AIS data can prove it. If a tanker is doing a ship-to-ship transfer in the middle of the ocean to hide the origin of its cargo, the satellite imagery can show it.
The use cases map onto those buyers. Sanctions enforcement is the big one right now. Tracking vessels suspected of evading oil sanctions. Iranian oil, Venezuelan oil. The ships that turn off their transponders and do transfers in the dark.
Risk assessment is another. Advising ships on whether to transit high-risk areas. UKMTO does this directly. A ship captain calls up, says I'm planning to transit the Strait of Hormuz, what should I expect? UKMTO tells them about recent incidents, current threats, recommended precautions.
Supply chain monitoring. Predicting delays and disruptions. If a container ship is stuck in the Suez Canal, that's a supply chain problem. During the Ever Given blockage in twenty twenty one, maritime intelligence platforms became the primary source of real-time information for global media. Everyone was watching that one ship on MarineTraffic.
Geopolitical early warning. Detecting naval buildups or unusual vessel movements. If a country is moving amphibious assault ships toward a disputed area, that's a signal. The open-source analysts pick it up before the classified briefings come out.
And insurance underwriting. Pricing risk for maritime routes. The war risk premium for transiting the Red Sea went up massively during the Houthi attacks. Insurers used maritime intelligence to figure out which ships were still transiting and what the actual risk was.
The Hormuz crisis is a perfect case study. Let's look at what actually happened on the water.
In twenty twenty six, as the war intensified, transits through Bab al-Mandeb and Hormuz plunged. The data showed it in real time. Ships were rerouting, avoiding the chokepoints entirely. Some were going dark to avoid being targeted. Insurers were hiking premiums. Energy analysts were modeling price impacts.
UKMTO was issuing warnings. Commercial platforms were tracking the drop in traffic. Energy analysts were using the data to model what the supply disruption would do to oil prices. And all of this was happening in public, on platforms anyone could access.
That's the thing that's new. Twenty years ago, if a war broke out in the Gulf, the shipping data would have been fragmented. Some of it in Lloyd's reports, some of it in classified briefings, most of it simply unknown. Now it's on a website you can pull up on your phone.
The knock-on effect are what interest me. The crisis exposed how dependent global trade is on a handful of chokepoints. Hormuz, Bab al-Mandeb, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca. If one of them closes, the whole system feels it. And it highlighted the fragility of the open-source data layer. When AIS is jammed, the picture goes dark. Exactly when you need it most.
That's spurred investment in alternative tracking methods. Satellite radar, which can see ships even when their transponders are off. AI pattern detection, which can flag suspicious behavior automatically. And it's raised questions about who controls the data. If the open platforms are vulnerable to manipulation, do we need more closed systems?
Which brings us to the business model, and the two-tier system it creates. UKMTO is free. Government-funded, available to any ship that calls in. But the commercial platforms like Windward or Kpler charge six figures annually for full access. That's not a subscription for hobbyists.
So you get a two-tier system. Well-resourced players, the big energy companies, the hedge funds, the major insurers, they get the real-time data with the sophisticated analysis. Smaller operators, the independent ship owners, the small trading firms, they rely on free or delayed data. They're getting a blurrier picture.
And in a crisis, the gap matters. The players with the best intelligence can move faster. They can reroute their ships before the premiums spike. They can buy or sell before the market reacts. The information asymmetry translates directly into money.
That's the part that bothers me. The open-source ideal was that everyone would have access to the same picture. But the analysis layer is where the value is, and that's proprietary. The raw AIS data is open. The insight about what it means is not.
The future is uncertain. As geopolitical tensions rise, maritime intelligence is becoming less obscure. The field is growing. But so are the challenges. Spoofing, jamming, the politicization of open-source data. If a government can jam AIS in a chokepoint, it can blind the whole system. If a commercial platform can be pressured to withhold data, the picture gets murkier.
The Hormuz crisis may be remembered as the moment maritime intelligence went mainstream. Before, it was a niche field for shipping nerds and energy analysts. Now it's on the front page. The obscure organizations of yesterday are becoming the essential infrastructure of tomorrow.
And that's the arc. The technology made it possible. The organizations grew up around it. The crisis made it visible. And now we're in the phase where everyone's trying to figure out what to do with it.
What I keep thinking about is the fragility. We built this incredible open-source tracking system, and now we're discovering that it can be spoofed, jammed, and manipulated. The very openness that made it powerful is also what makes it vulnerable.
There's a parallel to the early internet. The protocols were designed for openness and trust. Nobody anticipated that people would use them for deception and attack. AIS is the same. It was designed for safety, not security. The security layer has to be bolted on after the fact.
And the bolting-on is happening in real time. The intelligence firms are building counter-spoofing capabilities. The navies are patrolling the chokepoints. The insurers are pricing in the risk. It's an arms race, and the stakes are the global supply chain.
Hilbert: You said MarineTraffic was founded in two thousand seven. It was two thousand six.
Was it? I thought it was oh seven.
Hilbert: The website went public in oh six. I remember because I was still doing night shifts for the insurance broker, and one of the younger guys showed it to me. I thought it was a toy. A map with little ship icons on it. I'd been doing the same job with a radio and a logbook for years.
What was the job?
Hilbert: Night-shift radio operator for a maritime insurance broker. Late nineties. Before AIS, before satellite tracking was cheap. My job was to call ships on HF radio and confirm their position. Then I'd relay it to the underwriters. They wanted to know where their risks were. If a ship was in a bad area, the premium went up.
So you were doing maritime intelligence manually.
Hilbert: I was doing what the computers do now. Slowly. One ship at a time. You'd sit there with the radio, calling out on the marine bands. Sometimes you'd get the captain, sometimes the radio officer. You'd ask for their position, their course, their ETA. Write it down in the logbook.
That logbook still exists.
Hilbert: It's in a box somewhere. I should throw it out, but I don't. There are entries in there for ships that later sank. I still think about some of them. You talk to a man on the radio at two in the morning, and a month later his ship is at the bottom of the ocean. It stays with you.
That's the part the technology can't replace. The human connection. You were talking to people, not tracking blips on a screen.
Hilbert: The blips are better. You can see everything now. I couldn't see anything. I had a radio and a chart and a pencil. If a ship went quiet, you just didn't know. You'd call and call and nobody would answer. Maybe they were fine. Maybe they weren't.
When you think about the field now, with the satellites and the AI and the real-time tracking, does it feel like the same job?
Hilbert: It's the same job. Knowing where ships are and what they're carrying. That's centuries old. Lloyd's of London was doing it with pen and paper. The coffee house in the seventeen hundreds. The technology changes, but the question doesn't. Where is my ship, and is it safe?
That's the misconception Daniel's question pokes at. People think maritime intelligence is new. It's not. The work is old. The tools are new.
Hilbert: I talked to a ship once that was later attacked by pirates. Off the coast of Somalia. This would have been ninety eight, ninety nine. Nice man on the radio. Very professional. Gave me his position, his course, his ETA. Everything by the book. A week later the ship was taken. They held the crew for months.
Do you remember the name?
Hilbert: I do. But I won't say it. The families went through enough without me bringing it up on a podcast.
That's fair.
Hilbert: The point is, the field has exploded. All these companies, all these platforms. But the work is the same work I was doing with a radio and a logbook. The only difference is, now everyone can see the map. Back then, the map was in my head and in the underwriters' files.
In your logbook, which is in a box somewhere.
Hilbert: Somewhere. I keep meaning to digitize it. But then I think, what for? The ships are gone. The data is useless. It's just a record of conversations with men who are mostly dead now.
That's not useless. That's history.
Hilbert: It's a box of paper. The new systems are better. They don't lose ships the way we lost them. You can see the gap in the AIS feed and you know something's wrong. We just had silence on the radio and a feeling in the stomach.
The feeling in the stomach is still there, I think. The data just arrives faster now.
Hilbert: It does. And the people watching the screens now, they've never called a ship on the radio. They've never heard a captain's voice. They see a dot disappear and they write a report. It's cleaner. More efficient. But I wonder if they feel it the same way.
That's the trade-off. The scale is enormous now. You can track a hundred thousand ships at once. But the individual connection is gone. You're not talking to a person. You're watching a data point.
Hilbert: The data point used to be a man named Ahmed who had a wife and two kids and was worried about the weather off the Maldives. I'd write down his position and wish him a safe voyage. You can't wish a data point a safe voyage.
No. But you can build a system that tells you when the data point is in danger. That's worth something.
Hilbert: It's worth a lot. I'm not saying the old way was better. It wasn't. It was slow and blind and we missed things. But the new way has its own blindness. It sees everything except the people.
When the jamming starts, when the AIS goes dark, the new way is as blind as the old way. You're back to calling on the radio and hoping someone answers.
Hilbert: That's the irony. They spent billions on satellites and AI, and when the shooting starts, it's still a man with a radio trying to find out if the ship is still floating.
The open-source layer is fragile. We've been saying it all episode. But hearing you describe the old way, it was fragile too. Just in a different way.
Hilbert: Everything's fragile. The sea doesn't care about your technology. It'll sink a ship whether you can see it on a screen or not.
Where does that leave us? If the open-source data becomes unreliable, who fills the gap? Do we end up with a fragmented system, some proprietary, some classified, some open?
I think that's already happening. The commercial platforms are building proprietary layers on top of the open data. The navies have their own classified systems. The open-source ideal is eroding, and the crisis is accelerating it.
Hilbert: The open data was never going to stay open forever. Too much money in it. Once the hedge funds figured out they could trade on AIS data, the game changed. Now everyone's trying to get an edge. The open layer is the baseline. The edge is in the analysis.
The analysis is where the two-tier system lives. The rich players get the good analysis. Everyone else gets the free map.
Which is still better than what Hilbert had. A radio and a logbook and a feeling in the stomach.
Hilbert: The free map is a miracle. I would have killed for that map in ninety eight. You young people don't know how good you have it.
I'm older than you.
Hilbert: You're a sloth. You've been napping through most of it.
Fair point.
The open question for the future is whether the open layer survives. If jamming and spoofing become the norm, the free map becomes unreliable. Then the proprietary and classified systems become the only trustworthy ones. And the two-tier system becomes a three-tier system, with the top tier completely opaque.
That's the tension. The open-source ideal versus the reality of data warfare. The Hormuz crisis showed us both. The open data was incredibly valuable, and it was also under attack. The future is going to be about which side wins.
The cost. As chokepoints like Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb become flashpoints, maritime intelligence will only grow in importance, and in cost. The obscure organizations of yesterday are becoming the essential infrastructure of tomorrow. But essential infrastructure is expensive, and someone has to pay for it.
The question is whether it stays open enough to be useful to everyone, or becomes a luxury good for the few who can afford the good data.
Hilbert: It'll be both. The free map for the public, the good data for the paying customers, and the classified stuff for the navies. Three tiers. Same as it ever was, just with better screens.
I think that's right. The technology changed, but the structure didn't. There were always people who knew more than others. The coffee house in Lloyd's had the best information in seventeen fifty. The hedge funds have it now. The only difference is the speed.
The stakes. When Lloyd's was doing it with pen and paper, a lost ship was a tragedy for the owners and the families. Now a lost chokepoint is a global economic event. The scale has changed, even if the structure hasn't.
Hilbert: The sea doesn't care about scale. It'll sink a supertanker the same way it sank a tea clipper. The only thing that's changed is how many people are watching.
How fast they can react. That's the real advance. In seventeen fifty, a ship could sink and nobody would know for weeks. Now the AIS gap shows up in seconds. The response time is the revolution.
Which is why the jamming is so dangerous. It takes away the response time. It puts us back in the dark, even with all the technology.
Hilbert: That's what they want. The people doing the jamming. They want you blind. They want that gap between what's happening and what you know. That gap is where they operate.
Closing that gap is what the whole field is about. Whether it's a radio operator in the nineties or an AI platform in twenty twenty six, the goal is the same. Shrink the gap between the event and the knowledge of the event.
The tools change. The goal doesn't. That's the through-line.
Hilbert: The through-line is a man on a radio at two in the morning, writing down a position in a logbook, hoping the ship makes it to port. Everything else is just faster.
And more expensive.
Hilbert: Everything's more expensive. That's not news.
Where does that leave us? The field is old, the technology is new, the crisis made it visible, and the future is uncertain. The open-source layer is under attack, the commercial layer is consolidating, and the classified layer is as opaque as ever.
The one thing I'm confident about is that demand is only going up. As long as ninety percent of world trade moves by sea, and as long as the chokepoints are contested, someone has to watch the water. The only question is who, and with what tools, and at what price.
Whether the picture stays open enough for the rest of us to see. That's the thing I'll be watching. If the free map goes dark, we'll know the jammers won.
Hilbert: The free map won't go dark. Too many people need it. The hobbyists with receivers on their roofs, the small shipping companies, the journalists. Someone will always be listening. That's the thing about radio. It's hard to kill completely.
That's actually a hopeful note to end on. The open layer is fragile, but it's also resilient. It's distributed. A thousand hobbyists with receivers can't all be jammed at once.
If they can be, we've got bigger problems than shipping data.
Hilbert: We've always got bigger problems than shipping data. That's the job. Solve the small problem, move on to the next one.
That's as good a place to stop as any. This has been My Weird Prompts, with thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the whole thing running.
If you found this useful, share it with someone who's ever wondered how we know where ships are. And if you have a weird prompt, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
