All the top countries have spy satellites in orbit. There are also commercial satellites, who share their info with ????. Each nation has a national security interest in keeping their sea asset positions and patterns secret. They have an inverted relationship with other countries- they want their assets hidden, but their enemies' assets public.

So any one of these countries or corporations could come forward and say "we're making public on a time delay, all satellite imagery we've collected of the open ocean (or blur all structures under a certain size, to preserve the privacy of tiny boat owners). Then the public could follow all cargo and military ships from all countries in basically real-time.

It would be like having an open-source Satellite Sentinel Project, that could focus on things other than just the narratives promoted by the satellite owners (e.g. extracting natural resources from Africa under the pretext of stopping civil war in Sudan).

FYI: Everyone has access to real-time marine traffic info.

It occurred to me recently that surveillance satellites have a visual record of the path of every ship around the world, as they pass from port to port. Organizations with machine learning capability like the NSA or Google already have the ability and the motive to discern patterns in this ship traffic. Google for data mining purposes, NSA for intelligence purposes.

Such an organization could see, for instance, ships that regularly anchor outside of ports and ferry passengers surreptitiously.

Such an organization could also see exactly how many yachts of a certain size exist in the world, and where they frequent.

This is a huge piece of the puzzle that we know most major intelligence agencies have, that has not been acted on decisively. The question is, why not?

Is there a way that we can apply crowd-sourced intelligence analysis to these satellite imagery resources?