My idea for when I became an evil criminal mastermind was always to use a kind of computer controller drogue which would attach to the bottom of cargo ships:
- construct a buoyancy-controllable drogue which would magnetically attach to a cargo ship, then hang behind and below it during transit
- load up the pseudoephedrine, or whatever, in (say) shanghai or during a stop somewhere near a supplier
- wait until the ship came near the US, then release the drogue offshore and pick it up with a boat
Seems almost foolproof, although I'd imagine marine capable technology is harder than my web developer's brain is envisaging, and you'd be betting lots of money that your little parasite didn't fall off.
I'm probably overthinking this, however, and you'd just pay someone onboard to keep some suitcases in their cabin, or something.
You are missing the fuel -- it takes a lot of fuel to drag that parasite across the ocean and it would almost certainly be noticed by the crew of the ship as shipping is a low margin, high volume business and costs are closely watched.
If that parasite is designed slightly aerodynamic (with a total volume of lets say 5-10 tons) and you have a vessel with 100k+ GT, i dont think that the difference in fuel costs will be noticable - the difference due to tide/winds etc. will be much bigger.
There's a novel I read years ago that had a similar idea. It was a Clive Cussler book: The Mediterranean Caper. The smuggling plot had a modified submarine containing the narcotics attached to cargo vessels & it would detach from the cargo vessel at inspection times. It wasn't a great book and it felt kind of James Bond villain-esque but the concept is sound.
Probably not a bad idea, although you might be even more successful if your attachment unit just spot welded itself to the ship. (of course that leaves traces but it requires no energy to keep attached).
The sea gliders are interesting (see Liquid Robotics) but they have limited cargo capacity. 15,000 lbs would be like 5,000 sea gliders, that is a big foot print.
The game will of course really change when the human operators step out. Most drug cartels seem unwilling to risk their load to robotic pilots but at some point that will change. In a submersible you could gain a tremendous advantage if you didn't care how 'deep' you went relative to the Coast Guard.
Once we get electro-stimulus drugs this will become moot of course but in the mean time it makes for some interesting engineering challenges.
You miss the point. The poor SOB ship won't even know it. It would be a submarine that attaches itself in Japan to a ship known to head to the US. Or mid-rout. And that's that. In the US, we have a small ship waiting for the cargo sending a signal to wake it up and detach.
The beauty of current AI is that the compartment can be set to notice divers nearby and "walk" to the other side of the hull. Since sonar can't pick up small attached objects, boom you got yourself the equivalent of a smuggling bed bug. The crew can be all detained while this happens because they are not in on it.
The only issue would be noise made if you have listener crews. That one would be tough to solve. That's why you attach yourself to large boats, not to small smuggle ships.
Powering an electromagnetic for that kind of voyage on an amateur drug-smuggler's budget is one possible pain point I can think of. It would have to be a pretty strong magnet, as well.
It wouldn't be an electromagnet. It would be some strong permanent magnets with an attachment/detachment mechanism, like an inflatable interstitial bladder or spacer jacks. The key would be to let the magnet connect and disconnect slowly, controllably and quietly. It's quite doable, AFAIK (not a magnetic limpet engineer!).
As for power, why not a turbine powered generator? The host ship won't miss the few tens of watts extra drag.
>More troubling for American officials is their belief that these vessels could be used by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons, though they emphasize that no use of submersibles by militants has been detected.
by fighting the war on drugs these traitors are advancing terrorism! by countering terrorsim these scoundrels divert precious resources from the the nation's war on drugs!
whats needed is another agency to resolve this conflict.
Before going to med school I was a Navy officer and my first deployment was counter-drug ops. We got a tour of the Columbian collection of recovered smuggling vehicles. This is definitely more advanced than anything I saw or heard about. I'm not sure our VBSS teams (1) would even be able to board such a vessel, assuming ROTHR (2, 3) ever found it, which I can't imagine it would.
I also did some in-class papers on subs in college. This strikes me as more advanced in many ways than John Holland's original designs.(4)
More troubling for American officials is their belief that these vessels could be used by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons
One more reason to legalize and regulate drugs. The independent contractors making these subs would fold without their primary clients: the drug cartels. No more money for R&D.
I doubt anyone intends to transport attackers or weapons in this manner. The 9/11 hijackers had valid visas and Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh were Americans. They didn't need a submarine to bring bombs or terrorists to the US. They are already here.
The line in the article is just a way to spread fear, justifying the outlay of millions of dollars to patrol for drug boats. Nobody is scared of drugs anymore, so I imagine funding is harder to come by. Terrorism, though, is still scary apparently. (Look at the TSA. The thought of what incompetent government agency will be created after the next attack is frightening.)
I agree with you. My point still stands, though. If we are concerned about terrorists having access to this, shut off its R&D money and gain other societal benefits (I say as a non-drug user).
Of course, why choose a method that would reduce the police state and its associated costs when we can choose one that will increase them. :(
What makes you believe that legalizing drugs would automatically cause the cartels to stop doing what they do? Instead of being smugglers they'll be tax evaders; they won't stop overnight, if at all. In general, in poorer countries there will always be an incentive to get rich by illegal means, simply because there's not much else.
Also, you could hypothesize that, conversely, the subs builders would re-purpose them for more nefarious ends if the drug smuggling incentive is taken away.
..the subs builders would re-purpose them for more nefarious ends if the drug smuggling incentive is taken away.
I suppose the subs could be sold "on the cheap" if the cartel business went away. There is probably some danger there, but probably not as much danger as 1) a lot more of these getting built and 2) the US strengthening its police state to protect us from these subs.
The second is my real concern. Our rights have already been ludicrously eroded anywhere near a border. I really don't want added to that "anywhere near a waterway that can be reached by ocean." I guess that those of us in northern Utah and Nevada would be OK, since our water goes into the Great Salt Lake.
I'll tolerate some risk of a terror attack that I'm less likely to be involved in a terror attack than I am to drown in my bathtub[1] rather than the degradation of my civil liberties that the police state engenders.
The thought is that legal suppliers of drugs should be able to undercut illegal suppliers. The illegal suppliers are in a high-risk / high-reward business. The prices are high because the risk is high.
Yes, that was my sense, as well: firstly, the terrorist fear tactics are ridiculous, but secondly, if terrorists ever were to use these things to smuggle weapons into the US, our drug policy would be at least partly to blame: drug producers and distributors are the best-funded organizations in global organized crime, they're probably the only ones well-enough-funded to develop this kind of technology, and they owe their wealth to demand induced by America's idiotic war on drugs. Now, though, it's too late -- the technology is out there for anyone to buy.
Well, not really too late, since the technology has been around for ages. Legalizing drugs and dismantling the cartels would go a long way toward removing the infrastructure that's been built up to support this kind of project.
I wonder if an enterprising naval architect somehow obtained the plans for a US or German WWI or WWII sub. The diesel/battery technology is the same, and without weapons systems, using today's technology for nav, etc. the task is really only one of hull fabrication.
Well, you could choose to work on the other side of it: discovery (detection) to allow interdiction. It's probably not an easy challenge, but it'd be legal and have quite a budget behind it, if you did find a viable (economical) solution.
Its only unethical if your country happens to be on the "war on drugs" bandwagon. People smuggle bibles into North Korea with great ingenuity. It's only unethical if you happen to be North Korean. Otherwise it's missionary work.
> What's the ethical breach in using technology to route around bad laws?
The fact that individuals decide on their own which are "bad laws", but without going to the trouble to defeat them in court. If a law is defeated in court, this remains a country of laws, not people. But if people decide on their own which laws to obey, it becomes thinly disguised anarchy.
Yeah, that sounds pretty horrible to me. Personally, I like people a lot more than I like laws.
it becomes thinly disguised anarchy.
Works for me. But, I believe in the sovereignty of the individual, and attribute no particular special status to "government" and "laws", so maybe I'm coming at this from a different angle.
> Yeah, that sounds pretty horrible to me. Personally, I like people a lot more than I like laws.
You really missed the point of that aphorism -- it's meant to elevate shared values over individual values when dealing with other people. Imagine a community with ten members, nine of whom believe that stealing is wrong, one who believes stealing is right. Either the community becomes hostage to the one thief, or it makes a rule against stealing that everyone must obey. Obviously the second approach is best, and at that point the community becomes one ruled by laws, not people.
>> it becomes thinly disguised anarchy.
> Works for me. But, I believe in the sovereignty of the individual, and attribute no particular special status to "government" and "laws" ...
Yes. You're an anarchist. For me, the existence of governments and laws is the lesser of two evils. The alternative is no governments and laws, but the same number of people, i.e. the fascism of unchecked individuality.
I wasn't thinking about these particular laws, I was responding to the parent's comment about ethics being less interesting than hard problems.
I just think that "oh, this looks fun!" shouldn't always trump "is this the right thing to do?", that's all. You'll get no argument on the drug war from me.
- construct a buoyancy-controllable drogue which would magnetically attach to a cargo ship, then hang behind and below it during transit
- load up the pseudoephedrine, or whatever, in (say) shanghai or during a stop somewhere near a supplier
- wait until the ship came near the US, then release the drogue offshore and pick it up with a boat
Seems almost foolproof, although I'd imagine marine capable technology is harder than my web developer's brain is envisaging, and you'd be betting lots of money that your little parasite didn't fall off.
I'm probably overthinking this, however, and you'd just pay someone onboard to keep some suitcases in their cabin, or something.