ABSTRACT
During the late 1970s, a lone pirate broadcasting vessel, Radio Caroline’s MV Mi Amigo, was anchored in an area of the English Channel known as Knock Deep, transmitting radio programmes from international waters into the territories of the UK, France and Holland. Anchored fast in position to ensure stability of the enterprise, radio ships were reliant on supplies from the shore to sustain their activities. The above passage recalls one such supply trip and its surveillance by the Radio Regulatory Department of the Home Office (RRD hereafter). Such supplies were chartered from the adjacent shores of England, Holland and France, yet these ‘drop offs’ of goods necessary to fuel the offshore broadcasting enterprise were illegal following both a pan-European agreement on the eradication of radio piracy (1965) and the UK’s Marine &c. Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967 (provision 41.3) which resulted from the aforementioned treaty. The desire to eliminate radio piracy was predicated on the fact that stations lay beyond state control physically, due to their position at sea, but through the mobility of sound waves, were able to intangibly infiltrate the porous state boundary with broadcasts which were tuned into by millions of listeners on shore (see Humphries 2003, 27). That the stations were outside of national control, meant that they could, in effect, broadcast what they wished, in contravention to moral or legal norms within a particular territory. The influence of such stations was a potential threat to state security of the airwaves as ‘radio signals … crossed international borders indiscriminately’ (Robertson 1982, 73). In order to ensure security against such a potential breach of order, nation states (unable to exercise power in international waters against such an activity) attempted to control the problem via regulating the elements of the enterprise which fell within their legal territorial jurisdiction. This could be achieved by cutting off a vital ship to shore link – tracking the supply boats which provided goods to the radio pirates and intercepting them when they re-entered territorial waters, where, under the jurisdiction of the state they could be seized (see Peters 2011). The above passage illustrates one of the many recordings made by Home Office
officials who surveilled the mobilities of supply boats (otherwise known as ‘tenders’) in an effort to immobilise the broadcasts emanating from international waters. Following this particular interception and ‘search’, evidence was collated to charge those associated with illegal tendering on the St Andre des Flandres. The ring leader, Oonagh Karanjia was fined £500 for orchestrating this particular ‘drop’ (HO 255/ 1220). In this paper, drawing on the case study of broadcasting pirate Radio Caroline and its tender operations in the 1970s, I consider how the Labour government secured British territory in view of territorial and extraterritorial mobilities, which had a bearing on life within the boundaries of the nation state. I explore the ways in which a particular method of security – surveillance – was complex when considering its operation across not only differing legal spaces (national and international; the space of the shore, sea and ship), but differing physical or material spaces (the physical composition of the sea compared to and in relation with the land and air). Indeed, examining the surveillance operations led by the RRD and the Essex Constabulary, I demonstrate how the nature of the sea presented particular problems
relating to the prohibition of tender boat mobilities, travelling from the pirate radio vessel Mi Amigo, to the shore. Accordingly, this paper unpacks the unique challenges relating to state security
when the maritime realm is brought into focus. To date, the study of mobilities and of surveillance has marginalised the sea and ships in investigations. It will be argued, however, that the challenges of surveilling mobilities at sea are different from those on land or air (although these spaces are often connected to the sea through processes of mobility and surveillance) because the sea has a particular legal, fluid and material composition. Whilst this paper focuses on a historical case study of regulation of mobilities at sea to immobilise the aerial vibrations of sound, it is not only past security which may be understood differently through the lens of seas and shipping. In the twenty-first century, territorial security is increasingly played out in the spaces between and beyond national boundaries where there is opportunity to exploit the potential of such zones (see Langewiesche 2004). It is pertinent therefore, to think through the surveillance of shipped mobilities in order to better understand how to govern activities beyond territorial boundaries. In order to work through these arguments, I split the paper into four parts. I begin
by tracing the study of the sea and ships in the social sciences over the past 20 years, accounting for the lack of recognition of this sphere in academic debate. Connected to this, I next consider how scholarship in mobilities studies and surveillance research might be informed through attention to the maritime realm, highlighting recent examples of work that is beginning to fill the watery void in research within these arenas of study. I next introduce radio piracy, the example around which I will explore mobilities and governance of the sea through surveillance practices. Here I outline the numerous (im)mobilities tied up with the enterprise and government strategies of mobilising action and immobilising piracy on the airwaves. I then explore the ways in which the immobilisation of watery pirate radio-related mobilities was a challenge for the British government through three empirically informed sections which draw out the distinctiveness of the sea and ships to the regulatory practices which ensued. Using a variety of data from Home Office records, memos, parliamentary debates and legal documents, I firstly consider mobile legal boundaries at sea, secondly the liquidity of watery spaces, and thirdly the scale and depth of oceans. To finish, I draw conclusions which point towards the broader, contemporary parallels of this discussion that may be reached in order to think seriously about mobility, surveillance and the regulation of shipping in order to secure the sea, and also the land and air.
