A friend of mine forwarded me info about Google’s “Location History Browser”, how it tracks your movements all the time; or rather, tracks the movements of your personal device, whether it be laptop, iPad, or smart phone. He thought it was scary that his location was so available in a database somewhere. I just laughed!
I’ve known that since 1974, way before computers. When I was 22, and had my 37-foot sailboat in Half Moon Bay, California, I was approached by a fellow who wanted me to sail a cardboard box up from Central America in my boat. Box man was going to pay me $25,000 for this, which was two year’s wages at the time.
Because I knew what he was talking about, and I’m a law-abiding guy, I wasn’t tempted, even for a moment. I knew that guns and violence went along with that little cardboard box, and that people got killed for less. I had my little boat paid for, and was getting ready to retire and sail around the world, then have a career and a family.
And fortunately, I’d gone to the bar before I talked to Box Man.
That would be the bar in Mountain View, California, just down the street from the Moffett Naval Air Station. While I had my beer, I’d sat next to a guy who was a crewman on a P3 Orion Sub-chaser aircraft, based at Moffett Field, just across the highway from the bar. We got to talking, he found I had a sailboat, and he started talking about where they flew and the detection and tracking capabilities of the aircraft. I love planes, and was very interested in anything involving boats, ships, or the ocean, so of course I was a good listener.
(Below) Drug smugglers burning their cocaine, and their boat.
The gear they had on the P3 aircraft was capable of detecting two whales 500 feet under the surface of the ocean; he said they could tell which one was the mother and which one was the baby. He described how they routinely tracked drug trafficker’s boats up from Mexico; for a boat on the surface was easy for these aircraft to keep track of, compared to the submarines they were designed to hunt.
When the drug supplier in Mexico sells the drugs to the smuggler with the boat, the next thing he sells is the information about the boat and the guy to the Mexican and American authorities. Thus, they know what kind of boat it is, its range and speed capabilities, and its name, where it departed from on the Mexican coast, and when it departed.
This information goes to the Vandenburg Air Force Base dispatcher (a US military airbase in Southern California), who passes it to the crew of the P3 aircraft based there, which patrols a roughly 750-mile radius circle of ocean centered on Vandenburg.
That P3 picks the boat up about 500 miles out, right around the tip of Baja California, then tracks it up the coast. Somewhere around Santa Barbara, the Vandenburg P3’s territory overlaps with the Moffett P3’s territory, and they hand off to the P3 crew based at Moffett Field. Those guys track the boat the rest of the way up the coast, keeping the Coast Guard in the loop in case the boat makes a run for the coast, then hand off to the Coast Guard at the appropriate time.
Most of the time, the drug smuggler is just cruising along, thinking he’s gotten away with it….. two miles inside the 12-mile line…. four miles inside….. Whoa! A 90-foot Coast Guard cutter just appeared out of nowhere, and is coming at them from the ocean side; and the cutter has a loaded .50-Cal pointed right at the smuggler’s boat; plus several crewmen in bulletproof vests with AR-15’s. You can guess the rest.
The moral of the story? Figure they’re always watching, and just be a good person. That’s the easy way out, and that’s what I teach my kids. It makes sleeping easier too.