In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the high seas towards Australia, a fishing vessel changes direction slightly while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing zone. Nothing seems out of the ordinary on the table. The nets remain in the water. The engines maintain a steady speed. For sailors, it’s just a normal day at sea.
Yet hundreds of kilometers up, the satellite continuously records the ship’s position. At Indonesia’s Marine Resources and Fisheries Monitoring Station in Cilacap, where I work, a monitoring platform receives the signal and automatically compares it to fishing permits, designated fishing areas, vessel characteristics, and historical movement patterns. In a few minutes, the system detects serious violations. Before any patrol vessel has left port, before any inspector has boarded the vessel, and before any warning has been issued, it has begun to operate.
This change indicates a major change in sea governance. The ocean has historically been invisible to regulators. Countries can only apply laws where patrol vessels are present. Today, however, integrated systems that integrate data from Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), satellite remote sensing, geospatial analytics, and advanced data processing tools make maritime operations visible on an unprecedented scale. Global Fishing Watch tracks hundreds of thousands of vessels around the world, producing a real-time picture of fishing activity in the oceans.¹
Indonesia has emerged as one of the most ambitious examples of this change. As the world’s largest archipelago, with more than six million square kilometers of maritime space, Indonesia faces a challenge common to many coastal countries: it never has enough patrol ships. Digital surveillance is a practical necessity that drives my work, as it creates new challenges.
Maritime Law Meets Digital Reality
The international legal framework governing the oceans was designed in an era when the enforcement of maritime laws depended almost entirely on physical presence. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982, assumes that states exercise jurisdiction through surveillance, inspection, boarding, and direct observation.²
In countries with extensive coastlines and limited enforcement resources, this model has always faced practical problems. Indonesia’s Fisheries Management Areas (WPP-NRI) include waters from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and from the Malacca Strait to the adjacent maritime borders with Australia and Papua New Guinea. Monitoring such a large domain only with surveillance functions is expensive and practically impossible.
Since the late 2010s, Indonesia has accelerated the integration of satellite-based monitoring in fishing enforcement. Vessel Monitoring Systems have been the cornerstone of this strategy. By the beginning of 2026, a total of 9,394 Indonesian fishing vessels were operating with the National Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), representing an increase of 2,880 vessels during the period 2021–2025.³ As part of Indonesia’s comprehensive maritime surveillance structure, VMS monitoring tools to help identify via satellite to help integrate satellite data suspicious activities involving vessels operating without transponders operating on or off the national VMS network.
Indonesian fisheries officials plan fisheries patrols using data from tracking devices, satellites, and their understanding of illegal fishing patterns.Indonesian Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries
The results go beyond tracking the ship. Continuous digital monitoring enables authorities to reconstruct vessel movements, identify suspicious behaviors, detect illegal fishing activities, and ensure compliance with licensing conditions. Rather than waiting to discover violations during surveillance activities, regulators can prioritize inspections based on data-driven risk assessments.
Maritime governance is moving from active deployment to predictive monitoring.
The Surprising Geography of Digital Coercion
The expansion of surveillance infrastructure has already produced measurable enforcement results.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries has imposed 2,550 administrative sanctions by 2025, most of which involve violations found through the Vessel Monitoring System, including fishing outside authorized fishing areas and the deliberate omission of monitoring transmitters.⁴
This figure is important because many of these violations would have been very difficult to detect under standard surveillance legislation. A vessel temporarily crossing a prohibited fishing zone may never encounter an enforcement vessel. Similarly, a captain who temporarily disables a transmitter may escape detection if surveillance relies solely on physical examination.
Digital monitoring fundamentally changes this equation. Every movement of the ship creates a data trail. Authorities can reconstruct routes, identify anomalous behavior, and compare activities with permit conditions long after the event itself has occurred.
The first quarter of 2026 shows the magnitude of this surveillance capability. In just three months, Indonesia’s fisheries monitoring system tracked 14,571 fishing vessels, 182 fishing facilities, and 208 registered domestic ports while identifying 491 suspected violations across the country’s fisheries management areas. irregularities, and indications of poaching.
Such numbers reveal a fundamental change. Law enforcement is no longer limited by the number of patrol vessels available at sea. Instead, the power of monitoring is increasingly based on the ability to collect, process, and interpret large data.
Illegal Fishing Learns Again
However, greater visibility does not eliminate illegal fishing. But it is changing the way poachers operate.
Indonesia’s growing digital monitoring network, and the 2023 requirement that even small vessels use VMS when 12 nautical miles offshore, appears to have improved compliance among licensed fishing vessels. However, as law enforcement powers become more sophisticated, other illegal fishing actors have also become more adept at exploiting technical and operational gaps.
Deliberately disabling VMS transmitters remains one of the most common law enforcement problems. Although temporary signal loss, whether intentional or caused by a technical failure—can make it difficult to reconstruct a vessel’s movements, it does not prevent authorities from detecting potentially illegal activity. Indonesia is increasingly combining VMS with satellite-based observations, other maritime surveillance systems, intelligence-led analyses, and reports from community-based monitoring groups (Pokmaswas) to reinforce suspicious behavior and direct surveillance resources where they are most needed. This multi-layered approach—combining digital technology with local knowledge from coastal communities—helps reduce opportunities for illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing even when one monitoring system is compromised.
A compromised surveillance network may interfere with effective law enforcement as a vessel evades surveillance detection.
As digital surveillance increases, one lesson from Indonesia’s experience is that strict surveillance does not eliminate illegal fishing—it changes the way illegal operators behave. Improved compliance among all fishing vessels has coincided with continued efforts by a small group of criminals to avoid detection. This reflects the broader reality of technology-enabled enforcement: as the power of surveillance evolves, so do the strategies used to circumvent it.
The result is a technological arms race. Every development in surveillance capabilities encourages new methods of evasion, whether by disabling tracking devices, exploiting the identity of vessels, or exploiting gaps between different surveillance systems. Law enforcement agencies must therefore continue to improve their analytical methods, integrate multiple sources of maritime information, and adapt their operational strategies to keep up with the changing behavior at sea. Successful digital fisheries governance is not defined by technology alone, but by the ability to combine data, human intelligence, and operational intelligence into a robust and flexible assurance system.
The next battle may be over data integrity
The future of fisheries enforcement may ultimately depend less on securing vessels and more on ensuring confidence in digital systems that generate enforcement decisions.
As surveillance networks become increasingly integrated, questions about cybersecurity, algorithmic accountability, and data integrity become more important. What happens if tracking data is used fraudulently? How should authorities ensure automated risk assessment? What safeguards are in place when enforcement actions are increasingly based on algorithmic analysis rather than direct human observation?
These questions are no longer theoretical.
The governance of the modern fishing industry is increasingly dependent on interconnected satellite networks, communication systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, and analytics platforms. While this technology greatly improves visibility, it also creates new risks. A compromised surveillance network may interfere with effective law enforcement as a vessel evades surveillance detection.
In Indonesia, this means that investments in digital surveillance must be accompanied by investments in digital empowerment. The effectiveness of the monitoring system ultimately depends not only on the volume of data collected but also on the reliability, safety, and reliability of the information generated.
Managing the Oceans Using Data
What is happening in Indonesia reflects a broader global shift in maritime governance. The sea becomes more transparent to the controllers. Activities that once occurred beyond the reach of law enforcement agencies can now be observed, analyzed, and investigated through connected digital systems.
The benefits are huge. The increased adoption of VMS, improved surveillance, and thousands of administrative enforcement actions show that digital surveillance can significantly improve fisheries governance. But change also presents new challenges involving data quality, cybersecurity, algorithmic accountability, and evolving criminal behavior.
A key question facing maritime regulators is how governments can ensure that the growing surveillance systems remain transparent, secure, and accountable while maintaining public trust and legal legitimacy. The most important lesson may be that digital surveillance does not replace traditional use. It changes where the enforcement begins. For generations, maritime law enforcement began when a patrol vessel encountered a suspected lawbreaker. Today, it usually starts when the algorithm finds a pattern.
That change may prove to be as important to maritime governance as the invention of radar was to maritime navigation.
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