Maritime security technologies and coastal neo-fortification

Data technologies promise new ways of tackling maritime security challenges - from trafficking and smuggling, to environmental crime and terrorism. This is particularly the case at coastlines, where global security threats manifest as local maritime issues, and where general maritime traffic conceals small vessel landings, drug drops and clandestine movements. Coastlines are increasingly sites of technological neo-fortification, the prime aim of which is the detection and tracking of seaborne movement. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork with volunteers monitoring the British coast and research on global maritime security technologies. It gains critical traction on new technologies by placing them within a history of littoral fortification, which I show has always been concerned with discerning movement at sea. I make two contributions. First, I show that the machine learning technologies govern maritime movement through movement, weaponising the ocean’s materiality in the pursuit of so-called dark targets. Second, I argue that the techno neo-fortification of coastlines is underpinned by algorithmic spatialities and differentiations that seek to render wider ocean movement controllable. Bordering and security practice - from launching life-saving search and rescue missions, to targeting “small boats”, countering illegal fishing and disrupting smuggling - is re-ordered via these spatialities and differentiations. Contemporary maritime security technologies do not enhance existing practice: rather, they are reorganising sea borders, reconfiguring the relationship between territorial and global waters, and altering how life is governed at sea.