Thank you for raising that because that's an important point. I was talking about our ability to detect signals and what that might mean for somebody who was transmitting and stopped transmitting.
The intention of the Canadian government is actually to fuse this information set with other space-based information using radar systems. MacDonald Dettwiler, which some of us will remember from the ATK episode from a year or so ago, are in the process of designing and developing a space-based radar system. But all the radar system can do is show that there's a target there, there's a ship there. The trouble is, it doesn't know who it is. So it's a real problem, if you're a coast guard or a fisheries or a security agency, to know who they are.
The combination of AIS-space-based data and radar data is incredibly powerful, because you see all the people who are there with their radar blips and you can say, “Who's identified themselves?” Then you can say, “Who hasn't?” So who's there and not identifying themselves? That makes for not only a tremendous amount of useful information, but it makes for tremendous efficiency.
The traditional way of dealing with something that's more than 20 miles offshore is to have an airplane going up and down and up and down and a boat going up and down trying to figure out who's over the horizon, whereas with this system you can actually direct people to the place you want to go to and recognize that that's the target of interest, there's a blip but he's not signalling, and we want to see why he's not signalling.