Maritime Security - the waiting-game

The Maritime Security Status Conference on which I participated as "notary" yesterday was quite interesting. One finding was that it is a pressing matter to be able to track vessels and containers - but also that such tracking might be a double-edged sword. This is illustrated very well on the page AISlive.com where the present AIS system that track ships can be accessed over the internet. This service has alledgedly been used by pirates in the Malacca Strait to track ships.

Furtermore a very rushed presentation from the Danish Security Intelligence Service hinted that the cooperation between private and public players might be the future - a thing nicely illustrated by the conference itself.

Lastly I got hold of a copy of Michael Richardson's (who spoke on the conference) book "A Time Bomb for Global Trade. Maritime-related Terrorism in an Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction" - it really looks interesting and is written with a lot of examples (a wise choice of writing-strategy concerning the general audience).