Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

The crew will likely be desperate and / or slaves.

So how about:

Sell the ship, let the crew live in a nice hotel, book them a 1st class flight back home, then bill the country under who's flag the ship was operating. If they can't / refuse to pay, import sanctions.

That way, you're not punishing the crew, yet making such behavior financially uninteresting. That's the only way because the person who decided to send that ship there is probably far away and busy counting profits.

Also, it's a lot easier to capture the boat if that's a positive experience for the crew. They might flee from a trip to prison but few people run from a paid vacation offer.

View on HN

After you sink the boat you can pick the crew up and give them free tickets to Disney Land or throw them in jail it doesn't matter when it comes to dissuading illegal fishing.

The point is to make the expected ROI of trespassing in other nations' territorial waters negative. The crew is cheap and easy to replace relative to the boat. So you have to make the boat go away (sink it or impound it) to make the corporate owner back on land feel the heat.

Imprison them and give them back to their home country ASAP is probably the right way to handle the crew.

And then the pirate, slave or not, plays the "Claim Asylum" card from his deck and the costs are back in your court.

That's why you recoup your money from the flag carrier country.

It would also have the nice side effect of dissuading countries to lend their flag to shady companies all over the world.

There's the large assumption that the flag carrier country will pay.

Realistically, once this becomes a strategem, and a known one, anyone with a boat can enter your waters, hoist the jolly roger, then say "Yeah, take me into asylum." And poof, your immigration procedures evaporate.

You should do some reading up on what is involved in applying for and receiving asylum in the US. Your post indicates an inaccurate understanding of what is involved and required for an asylum seeker to receive legal asylum.

I assume it is like immigration. In one sense, it is a long legal process with a variety of steps to ensure this person is serious. But in a more practical sense, it just involves crossing a border and having the phase "illegal immigrant" removed from the vocabulary.

> That's why you recoup your money from the flag carrier country.

Aren't the vast majority of these actually "flags of convenience" and registered in Panama?

> They might flee from a trip to prison but few people run from a paid vacation offer.

They may still run if accepting the paid vacation offer would be followed by imprisonment at home.

So offer them permanent residency instead. And then prepare for the logistics issue of managing a great fleet of boats racing straight to your ports.

Send them to Taiwan, because then the Chinese government can’t admit that they don’t have jurisdiction there internationally.

How to inflame a delicate situation for 300 please.

So suggest a solution that won't inflame anything?

"Dealing" with China is going to get a lot hotter. Period.

Why should Taiwan accept them?

I appreciate the cleverness, but no: trying to solve too many problems at once ends up with no problem being solved at all.

Want to get rid of the fishing fleet? Make a credible offer of residency and amnesty to all their crews - no strings attached, no continued use as pawns in politics. Simple trade: they bring in and surrender their vessel, you give each a green card, a key to a room, some starting cash, and a "thank you for your service", and forget about them.

A good way to let a lot of spies and sabotagers into your country.

International travel is already so easy these days that spies and saboteurs have no trouble entering any country they want.

But OK, so let's scratch the "and forget about them" part. Have the counterintelligence agency keep their details in their database, and warn them that they won't get security clearance in the next decade or three. This won't discourage anyone who's eager to escape their home country.

I was under the impression that international travel was more difficult. There’s no such thing anymore as forging a passport, right?

Both easy and hard. When I've traveled to Europe I often find the the door for non-EU citizens leads to exactly the same place as the one for EU, and nobody is even watching to check passports. India was a lot more careful about verifying my VISA, which I needed to get in advance. India has more reason to fear than the EU in general.

At least for the US, any spy or saboteur who wants to enter can do so on a student visa, I am sure. Just have to pony up for tuition at any of a number of schools who are desperately looking for students who will pay.

There is more time for a background check that way. There are many ways to work around the difficult US entry requirements if an attacker is determined, but if something like this bypasses the process attackers will go for that: boats are cheap.

It's not clear to me that an ocean-going fishing boat would be cheaper than college tuition. Is it? Would love to see some data. https://horizonship.com/ship-category/commercial-fishing-ves... has prices a good bit about even 4-year tuition for all the things that list actual prices.

Hooray, we can refit some of them and rebuild our own decimated sealift capability, and sell the rest for scrap only.

Or start using a bunch of them to sink for reef seeding.

The nice hotel is called prison and the Chinese Embassy should handle their release. If they work as slaves, they should testify doing so and maybe ask for political asylum. I know it's complicated with Chinese citizens being blackmailed by the PRC with their families at home, but it only takes a few to do so

This costs a lot of money, though. If it costs too much money, it won't be done. So the solution has to be cheap to be put into place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com