68 Science & technology The Economist April 16th 2022
sanctions on Russia will shape up. But
Ioannis Papadimitriou, a Vortexa freight
analyst, reckons illicit shiptoship trans
fers will be concentrated in the Baltic Sea
and eastern Mediterranean. He also ex
pects ships to meet in those areas and swap
transponders, a trick sometimes done near
Malaysia to deliver Iranian oil to China.
But aishas its shortcomings. Satellites
struggle to distinguish signals from
crowded ports and littoral waters. To im
prove resolution, aisreceivers are being
built along some coasts, but more are
needed. A company based in Athens called
Marine Traffic is posting aisantennae to
seaside building owners around the world,
who volunteer to install the kit on roof
tops. Marine Traffic’s network of roughly
3,600 antennae collects data that it fuses
with information from other terrestrial
networks and satellites. The resulting ana
lytics are sold to trading firms, financial
outfits and government bodies. Spokes
man Georgios Hatzimanolis notes rising
demand for information on vessels linked
to Russia, be they tankers or superyachts.
Rubs remain. One is that a vessel’s ais
transponder can be switched off. Ami Dan
iel, the boss of Windward, a shippingana
lytics firm based in Tel Aviv, sees “a huge
spike” in the number of ships that have re
cently cut aistransmissions. Many are in
waters near Russia, including the Black
Sea. Some have no doubt “gone dark” to re
duce their visibility to Russian warships,
which have fired upon merchant vessels.
Even so, Mr Daniel, a former officer in Isra
el’s navy, reckons that the drop in trans
missions heralds an increase in “deceptive
shipping practices”.Eyes in the sky
But there are other ways to keep tabs on
ships. These include satellites with cam
eras and syntheticaperture radar, which
sees objects at night and through clouds. A
more recently developed approach uses
satellites in low orbits to hoover up signals
from shipborne radars. These are used for
navigation and to avoid collisions, so mari
ners are disinclined to switch them off.
Fancy software for signal processing geo
locates the signals’ sources, at times with
in just several hundred metres.
A handful of firms track ships in this
way. Their clients include coast guards, na
vies and America’s National Geo
spatialIntelligence Agency. This autumn a
British firm, Horizon Technologies, aims
to begin providing radiofrequency intelli
gence to Britain’s Royal Navy and govern
ments in Greece, Italy and Singapore. It
will also compile, in partnership with the
International Maritime Organisation, a li
brary of radarpulse “fingerprints” of ships
worldwide, made possible by minute idio
syncrasies in componentry in radar units
of even the same make and model.It adds up to a heap ofdata.Making
sense of it, however, can bequitetricky.For
one thing, a growing number of ships
“spoof” aisby transmittingbogusdatathat
changes the vessel’s apparentidentityor
location. TankerTrackers, afirmwithan
alysts in London and Stockholm,monitors
more than 40 vessels, somewithlinksto
Russia, that visit Iranian andVenezuelan
ports. Nearly half, the company says,
transmit counterfeit aisdata.Suchspoof
ing used to require hardwon expertise
with fiddly software. These days, one
manufacturer in Istanbul advertises a
model smaller than a shoeboxthattrans
mits bogus data for up to tenvessels—“po
sition offset, false identity,faketype,fake
echo”, and so forth.
Beyond that, ships themselvesareonly
one part of the game. Analystsmustalso
figure out who is behindshipsandtheir
cargo. This is hard, for the shippingindus
try is a notorious mess of shellcompanies,
flags of convenience and opaqueaccount
ing. To complicate mattersfurther,many
outfits are attempting to disassociatefrom
Russia. Recent weeks, Windwardreports,
have seen an unprecedented number of
vessels “flag out” of Russiaandregister
with other countries.
Which comes back to theroleofnet
workanalysis software. Like Ukraine’s
rttg, Kharon, a Los Angelesfirm,feedsits
software with corporate records,shipping
documents, court filings, news articles,
police reports and regulatorypaperwork.
The software, says Benjamin Schmidt,
head of product, even sucksupobscureda
tabases “hosted by some randomcountry
where we’re able to identifyonethreadof
information”—an address, perhaps, that
connects a shady entity toa certainbusi
nessman. Social media helps.If a snapshot
of that businessman at atrade showre
veals another logo in the background,Kha
ron’s analysts begin poking aroundthat
company, too.
Kpler, for its part, is eyeinga different
type of software upgrade. MrI’Ansonsees
future iterations of Kpler’ssoftwaretaking
into account the political developments
likely to shape appetites forbustingsanc
tions, whether on Russiaorothercoun
tries. He notes that when JoeBidenbecame
president, China, presumablyexpecting“a
little more leeway”, begantosmugglein
greater amounts of discountedIranianoil.
For technologists and technocrats,all
this is heady stuff. But not allrecentdevel
opments have worked in their favour.
Western sanctions on Russiahaveshutoff
access to Russian registriesofcorporate
filings. Jessica Abell of Sayari,anAmerican
businessintelligence firmthatmakesex
tensive use of such data, saysthat will
make it much harder to workoutwhois
doing what on the high seas.Thereisplen
ty, in other words, to play for. nParticlephysicsA hint of
excitement?
T
he standard model of particle phys
ics—completed in 1973—is the jewel in
the crown of modern physics. It predicts
the properties of elementary particles and
forces with mindboggling accuracy. Take
the magnetic moment of the electron, for
example, a measure of how strongly a par
ticle wobbles in a magnetic field. The Stan
dard Model gives the correct answer to 14
decimal places, the most accurate predic
tion in science.
But the Standard Model is not perfect. It
cannot explain gravity, dark matter (myste
rious stuff detectable only by its gravita
tional pull), or where all the antimatter in
the early universe went. Physicists have
spent much time, effort and money per
forming evermore elaborate experiments
in an effort to see where the Standard Mod
el fails, in the hopes of finding a clue to the
theory that will replace it. But the Standard
Model has fought back, stubbornly pre
dicting the results of every experiment
physicists have thrown its way.
But that may perhaps be changing. In a
paper published last week in Science, a
team of researchers from the Fermi Na
tional Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in
America announced that the mass of an el
ementary particle called the wboson ap
pears to be greater than the Standard Mod
el predicts. The difference is small—only a
hundredth of a percent—but the measure
ment’s precision exceeds that of all previ
ous experiments combined. It places the
odds that the result is spurious at only oneData contradicting the Standard Model
are piling upAbig machine to hunt a tiny quarry