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LOUISIANA RECORD

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Gulf boat operators allege high-tech fisheries monitoring violates their constitutional rights

Federal Court
John vecchione

Attorney John J. Vecchione says the new NOAA rule amounts to administrative overreach. | New Civil Liberties Alliance

Charter vessel operators in the Gulf of Mexico are suing federal regulators for allegedly violating their constitutional rights through a fisheries-monitoring program that mandates 24-hour electronic surveillance of the boats.

The nonprofit New Civil Liberties Alliance helped to file the class action lawsuit in the Eastern District of Louisiana against officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and related agencies. The plaintiffs are businesses that take customers fishing and sightseeing.

Under a federal rule adopted last year, the vessel owners have to submit electronic fishing reports and submit to intrusive monitoring that is akin to wearing an “ankle bracelet,” according to the complaint. The new requirements represent “an unlawful and unconstitutional, industry-funded, warrantless 24-hour Global Positioning System (GPS) surveillance of location and movement of each vessel via the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), targeting a select group of federally permitted charter boats and headboats in the Gulf of Mexico,” the lawsuit says.

NOAA declined to comment on specific allegations in the lawsuit.

“We take all litigation seriously and are reviewing the complaint carefully,” NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman Kate Goggin said in an email to the Louisiana Record.

John J. Vecchione, senior litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said the plaintiffs are not challenging the need for NOAA to require fish counts from boat Gulf-for-hire companies in order to better manage fisheries. 

“We don’t have any problem with the fish-counting aspect of this, which is at the heart of managing a fishery,” Vecchione told the Record. 

But the surveillance protocols require vessel owners to notify NOAA even for personal boat trips, such as taking a spouse to dinner across a bay, according to Vecchione.

“They’ve got to call the government and say, ‘Mother, may I?’” he said, adding that the use of a newly developed app or written logbooks works well to monitor fisheries.

No evidence has been presented that the plaintiffs were causing any environmental damage, according to Vecchione, so there’s no basis for 24-hour surveillance.

“The thing with this 24-hour surveillance is that NOAA and other agencies have not said Gulf-for-hire fishermen are violating any regulations about where they go,” he said.

In addition, the vessel operators are forced to turn over proprietary information under the NOAA rule, including the locations of prime fishing spots that business owners have spent lifetimes investigating, according to the complaint.

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