Reports and papers

Reports and papers we hand to people when a book is too slow.

Reports and papers we hand to people when a book is too slow. Each has a DOI or a stable address, and most are free to read.

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• Oil and Water
  C4ADS. 2025. Oil and Water. C4ADS. https://c4ads.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/OilWater-C4ADS.pdf. Open access.
  Why read it: An investigation into the largest known dark fleet run by a single network: at least 56 supertankers carrying Iranian, Venezuelan and later Russian crude to China, using dark voyages, ship-to-ship transfers and GNSS spoofing to hide the oil’s origin. A model of how to build a case from AIS, imagery and corporate records. Who it is for: analysts tracking the shadow fleet.
• Safety and Shipping Review 2026
  Allianz Commercial. 2026. Safety and Shipping Review 2026. Allianz Commercial. https://commercial.allianz.com/news-and-insights/reports/shipping-safety.html. Open access.
  Why read it: The annual review of ship losses, casualties and emerging risks from one of the largest marine insurers. It is where the shadow fleet, GNSS interference and port congestion show up as insurance numbers. Who it is for: anyone who needs the annual picture of what goes wrong at sea.
• European Union Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2025: The changing DNA of serious and organised crime
  Europol. 2025. European Union Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2025: The changing DNA of serious and organised crime. Publications Office of the European Union. https://europol.europa.eu/publication-events/main-reports/changing-dna-of-serious-and-organised-crime. Open access.
  Why read it: Europol’s four-yearly assessment of organised crime in the EU: the criminal markets, how networks are organised and what is changing, with a strong section on logistics and ports. The reference point for European threat pictures until the next edition. Who it is for: anyone who needs the European picture of organised crime in one document.
• Global Organized Crime Index 2025
  Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2025. Global Organized Crime Index 2025. Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. https://ocindex.net/. Open access.
  Why read it: Scores for 193 countries on criminal markets, criminal actors and resilience, with the methodology published and the data downloadable. The fastest way to get oriented on a country’s illicit economy before you read the detail. Who it is for: analysts comparing countries or briefing on a new region.
• Maritime Activities Observed Through Open-Access Positioning Data: Moving and Stationary Vessels in the Baltic Sea
  Hütten, Moritz. 2025. Maritime Activities Observed Through Open-Access Positioning Data: Moving and Stationary Vessels in the Baltic Sea. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.23016. Open access.
  Why read it: A study that rebuilt Baltic Sea vessel activity from open AIS data alone and came within about 20 percent of results from proprietary data. It is the best evidence we have for when the free sources are enough. Who it is for: analysts deciding whether free AIS data is good enough for a question.
• Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations: A Practical Guide on the Effective Use of Digital Open Source Information in Investigating Violations of International Criminal, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
  Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law. (2020) 2022. Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations: A Practical Guide on the Effective Use of Digital Open Source Information in Investigating Violations of International Criminal, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2024-01/OHCHR_BerkeleyProtocol.pdf. Open access.
  Why read it: The standard for open source investigations that need to stand up to legal scrutiny: principles, methods, preservation and verification, and the ethics of handling material. If you read one methodology document, read this one. Who it is for: investigators whose findings may end up in a courtroom.
• Unsafe by Design?: A First Look at Security and Privacy Risks in OpenAI’s Custom GPT Ecosystem
  Ogundoyin, Sunday Oyinlola, Muhammad Ikram, Hassan Jameel Asghar, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, and Dali Kaafar. 2025. “Unsafe by Design?: A First Look at Security and Privacy Risks in OpenAI’s Custom GPT Ecosystem.” Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES ’25): 147-161. https://doi.org/10.1145/3733802.3764054. Open access.
  Why read it: An analysis of 14,904 custom GPTs that found most lacked basic protections: system prompts leak, roleplay and phishing attacks succeed, and the marketplace does little about it. Read it before you trust a third-party GPT with case material. The arXiv version is free to read. Who it is for: anyone who uses or builds custom GPTs for analysis.
• RUSI Maritime Sanctions Taskforce: Insurance and Flag States
  Royal United Services Institute, Centre for Finance and Security. 2025. RUSI Maritime Sanctions Taskforce: Insurance and Flag States. RUSI. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/conference-reports/rusi-maritime-sanctions-taskforce-insurance-and-flag-states. Open access.
  Why read it: Findings from the taskforce’s May 2025 meeting of about sixty government and industry members on Russia’s shadow fleet: what insurers can do, how to hold flag states to account, and how to target the enablers. Short, and written for people who have to act on it. Who it is for: policy and compliance readers working on sanctions enforcement.
• AIS Handbook
  UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics, AIS Task Team. 2020. AIS Handbook. United Nations Statistics Division. https://unstats.un.org/wiki/spaces/AIS/overview. Open access.
  Why read it: A method handbook for working with AIS data: what the messages contain, how to clean them, how to derive port calls and voyages, and the pitfalls. Written for statisticians, which is why it is careful about what the data can and cannot show. Who it is for: anyone cleaning or analysing AIS data for the first time.

Last checked 2026-10-13.