Charter Boat Captains Don’t Have To Share Their Location Data With the Government, Court Rules

Boat-tracking regulation is a warrantless search, court says. Can the government force charter boat captains to continuously transmit their location information to the authorities? It seems preposterous, but the Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this privacy-infringing protocol in 2020. The rule required charter-boat captains to install—at their own expense—onboard monitoring systems that regularly relayed their boats’ GPS locations to the government.

A group of charter boat captains represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) sued, saying the rule violated rights to due process, privacy, and freedom of movement, among other things.

“The reason we were against this so much is it tracked us precisely where we were going,” Allen Walburn, one of the boat captains who brought the suit, told the Fort Myers Beach Observer and Beach Bulletin.

Another reason: The monitoring systems can be expensive, costing thousands of dollars to install in addition to a monthly service charge.

Now a federal court has sided with the captains.

“The asserted benefits from the GPS-tracking requirement do not bear any reasonable relationship to the undisputed costs,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana held in its recent decision:

The Final Rule found that installation of a [monitoring] device would cost $3,000,
with an additional $40 to $75 per month in service fees. These are significant fees for charter-boat owners, for they primarily operate small businesses, with roughly $26,000 per year in net income. And in addition to the financial cost, of course, the regulation imposes a massive privacy cost; demanding that charter-boat owners transmit their exact location to the Government, every hour of every day forever, regardless of why they are using the vessel.

What benefits does the Government point to in response? Next to nothing.

The court concluded that the GPS requirement “violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is arbitrary and capricious, in turn because the Government failed to address Fourth Amendment issues when considering it and failed to rationally consider the associated costs and benefits.” 

“The requirement that charter boats transmit their GPS location to the Government appears to be a search, and no warrant authorizes that search,” it said.

The regulation—issued pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976—was proposed by NOAA. (The Commerce Department has delegated regulatory authority for the Magnuson-Stevens Act to that agency.) It which would have applied to charter boats in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

The court also ruled against another aspect of the new regulation, which would have required charter boat owners to report “all fish harvested and discarded, and any other information requested,” including “information about the permit holder, vessel, location fished, fishing effort, discards, and socio-economic data.” The court held that this rule violated the Administrative Procedures Act, because it “did not give fair notice that it would require the type of data specified.” 

There was concern that the new regulations would lead to surveillance of all recreational fishermen. “This [decision] stops that right in its tracks,” NCLA attorney John Vecchione told the Beach Observer and