This libertarian leaning publication fails to emphasize the reason behind the tracking, fisheries management, since that might shine enough light on the situation that some of their more 'reason'able readers may end up understanding and offering some support to this data collection.
The federal agencies involved have, as part of their responsibility, the task of managing the health of our nation's fisheries which, believe it or not, requires them to have the data about where the fish are being harvested in order to understand how healthy the population of sport and food species actually are in our federal waters.
Maybe it would make more sense to subsidize the equipment that would be necessary to gather the data.
We subsidize some land crops, charter boats could become like marine combines.
The devices could be tracked without needing to know who owns the boat since the important information is the location where all the fish hang out and how many there are. Catch size and species distribution is already a reportable metric I believe.
Any fisherman worth his salt probably wants to be able to live the fishing lifestyle forever. If their activities contribute to the collapse of local fisheries because they were reluctant to accurately report which species are in their area of operations, how often they are taken, where they are taken, etc then they have no one to blame but themselves when their livelihoods are destroyed.
No one cares who takes the fish. They want to know which fish was taken, where it was taken, how many were taken there, how large they are, etc. This allows people to understand how best to manage fisheries.
These are public waters and they are taking a public resource. They have no privacy expectations and shouldn't get a pass with a bullshit excuse about their secret fishing spots being leaked to the competition since that will happen anyway as their hired help jumps from boat to boat trying to make a decent living on what looks on paper to be shit wages for the work they perform.
It's good to ponder how something like this can become a slippery slope but you have to avoid sliding down the existing slippery slope that where we don't have actionable information to use to prevent problems (in the fisheries) before they occur.
The entire article was about using location and other information gleaned from those who are regularly in the best position to know and who have a vested interest in the information being accurate to enable them to continue in their chosen profession. The publisher made a conscious editorial decision to tilt the tone of the article towards this being a huge invasion of privacy rights for people who by the nature of their profession should not be not entitled to those protections during the conduct of their operations since their activities occur entirely in public.