If charter boat captains would just share this info with the government, we would have never have had the saga of the “Three Hour Cruise”.
My sweetie wanted his ashes to be tossed on the sea. I was amazed to learn the charter boats are required to file a report with where the ashes go in. Ridiculous.
Doesn't OnStar pretty much perform the same function in your car - pinpoint your location every minute? How about your cell phone?
This case goes beyond boats and private fishing spots.
GPS without GPS may be doable with a boat because digital navigation charts are available and more reliable than those for roads.
Rather than GPS use radio detection gear to find bearing to local AM and FM radio stations whose broadcasting towers are all known locations. The computational power in any current computer would be more than enough to crunch the numbers and then show location on digital charts.
As a bonus the system would probably allow fantastic radio reception for entertainment and could also be used to locate and track ships emitting radar signals, giving the boat radar of a sort without being an emitter of radio signals itself.
By the associative law of algebra, this should apply to land vehicles too?
Welp I guess Gilligan’s island story may happen again then!!
There are two sides to this issue. The federal government has a legitimate need to patrol its borders against drug and human trafficking and customs evasion. An alternative? Free reign within the territorial sea (that is, up to 12 miles) but aggressive enforcement within the exclusive economic zone.
Seeing mainstream-media coverage of this, it seems the main issue was not a constitutional claim but rather an assertion of regulatory over-reach: Congress never required such monitoring.
If you have an Android I recommend downloading this app and playing with it, kind interesting the detail given for almost every single boat on the oceans.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrapaging.vff
I have a different take.
As a commercial vehicle it has to comply with lots of regulations a private craft would not be held responsible for.
But on the other hand, as long as the charter boat has working communication gear for emergencies Constant monitoring of it’s location is ridiculous and unnecessary costs burdens on the business.
Here’s the thing. The government might be able to force you to install a GPS tracker on your boat. But can the government stop you from covering that GPS tracker in a tin foil faraday cage so that it can’t transmit anything???
How convenient for politicians who want to hide what they are doing.
So notice: the regulatory agencies went beyond their statutory authority to crack down on fishing, but not on human or drug trafficking. Interesting to see their priorities.
Just imagine how the governments of those tyrants of the past like FDR, Wilson, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin would have lasted if they had today’s serf-monitoring and thought-control systems...
Ronald Reagan hit the nail on the head when he warned us that inaction would get us a thousand years of the darkest tyranny...
Oh well... It’s best to remain optimistic... Only 998 years to go...