USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010604.0823 (On Screen): International waters represent a massive headache for people who try to use law as a means of enforcing morality. Different countries take this to different degrees, of course, and it's long been a problem in some places where something is illegal here but legal about five kilometers over that direction (across the border). We've even had that problem in the US with differing state laws. For example, in Washington State there used to be a short section of highway with a particularly high fatality rate. It was a stretch of I-90 going east from Spokane to the Idaho border. In Spokane there's Washington State University. In Idaho, 19 year olds were permitted to drink alcohol. On I-90, between the two, a lot of drunk college students crashed. (The problem was solved when Idaho raised its drinking age to 21.)

In recent years a new problem has begun to emerge: on a ship in international waters, no-one's law controls. One of the first cases I'm aware of where this concept was used routinely to flaunt a law was a television station in the UK. A group wanted to broadcast commercial television in competition with the BBC but were not legally permitted to. So they put a ship with a transmitter on it in international waters off the coast of the UK, and broadcast from it. I don't know if they're still doing it (the British government may have finally granted them a real license) but they did do it for years.

I took a ferry once from Maine to Nova Scotia, and it had slot machines on it. Gambling was illegal in both Maine and in Nova Scotia, but as soon as the ferry left US territorial waters, they unlocked the room with the slot machines — and it was very popular.

I see something coming. There's a lot of kinds of content which are illegal online. What if someone puts a ship in international waters, with servers on board and a satellite dish for broadband connection. How, exactly, could such a host be stopped from carrying, well, anything at all? (discuss)