Lawsuit Analysis: ICR and Kyodo Senpaku vs. SSCS and Paul Watson – Lessons and Strategic Adaptations by WDA

In the case between the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) and Kyodo Senpaku (KS) versus the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) and Paul Watson, SSCS was found liable for its aggressive, hands-on tactics, including physical confrontations and property damage. The court’s rulings underscored that physical confrontations with whaling vessels — especially those documented on camera and then published — exposed SSCS and Paul Watson to legal vulnerabilities.

In response to these legal precedents, the Whale Defense Agency (WDA) has devised an array of strategic adaptations to harden the agency and anti-whaling movement against attack from whaling terrorism: while still engaging in highly aggressive, if not more aggressive direct-action methods that disrupt whaling, while ensuring WDA implements tactics centered around plausible deniability. This ensures WDA can pursue its mission aggressively but avoids leaving adversaries with the documented evidence necessary for successful legal challenges, or allows us to otherwise complicate this at will, at anytime, to favor WDA operations at sea.

Below is a breakdown of WDA’s modified approach to these direct actions, with answers on how each legal risk associated with SSCS’s actions has been re-engineered to counter whalers without leaving actionable evidence, and allowing the agency to effectively destroy the whalers legal strategies, through engineered engagement platforms for intense, high-threat direct-action engagements on the high-seas.

The whalers will soon find themselves caught in a direct-action, media and legal crossfire, where they can neither generate public outrage nor secure solid legal grounds for their defense, nor prepare or anticipate for engagements. The WDA will continue to advance these anti-whaling measures to erode their current strengths through advanced research and develop of new anti-whaling technologies and platforms that bypass their legal strategies by design.

Q&A Response to Key Legal Issues and WDA’s Strategic Modifications

Q1: How does WDA handle direct physical actions like prop fouling without risking incriminating evidence?

Response: Unlike Sea Shepherd, which relied on manned, high-visibility prop-fouling operations using RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats), WDA has adapted to using Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs). These autonomous devices can carry out prop fouling covertly and remotely, eliminating the need for personnel to engage with whaling vessels directly. By using UUVs, WDA ensures no personnel are on-site to be recorded or apprehended, and there is no visible WDA presence at the scene, erasing any possibility of photographic evidence implicating WDA operatives in real time. This absence of direct documentation severely limits the whalers’ ability to pursue legal action.

Q2: How does WDA address navigational harassment without exposing the organization to similar claims made against Sea Shepherd?

Response: WDA’s vessels are equipped to maintain operations within close quarters if required, as well as to respect any future legal navigational distances (if ever imposed) while deploying autonomous drones and underwater units capable of remotely disturbing whaling vessels in new, and even more disruptive, more covert ways, and transfer the known highly public campaigns into a covert international operation. By positioning support vessels far from the whaling fleet, WDA’s human-operated ships are technically engineered to be consistently beyond any restricted buffer zones if the whalers attempt legal actions, creating an alibi against direct engagement claims.

The unmanned units, meanwhile, operate independently, using GPS, AI and other programming to approach whaling vessels without clear ties to WDA, further bolstering plausible deniability. However not all platforms operate undersea or unmanned, and so WDA has other undisclosed means of disrupting whalers while still being present within very close range.

Q3: How does WDA manage covert funding for high-risk actions?

Response: WDA’s funding channels are intentionally diversified through a variety of nonprofit and for-profit associated, but independent firms, to avoid clear connections where needed for covert actions to any single high-risk operation and to further complicate the whalers legal tactics, while using both for-profit and non-profit legal structures to the benefit of anti-whaling. By setting up discreet, known, and indirect funding streams, WDA separates high-profile, public-facing financial support from some of the high-stakes, clandestine actions.

Unlike SSCS, whose funding was traceable to direct confrontations, as they operated solely as an NGO and not with a comprehensive structure across various entities, WDA’s operations use a shadow funding structure, while still traceable for our NGO side of entities, not so much for our for-profit divisions who do not have the traditional NGO annual reporting requirements that makes tracking monetary flows challenging for the whaling fleet and those defending them, especially as they pertain to actions executed by autonomous devices with no direct WDA personnel involved.

Q4: In what ways does WDA avoid legal classification of its direct actions as piracy?

Response: WDA’s use of autonomous underwater drones in most of our operations rather than crewed vessels means our operations are far less likely to be classified as piracy, which requires direct human actions and intent on a vessel. The UUVs operate under international maritime law governing unmanned devices, which does not easily accommodate charges like piracy intended for manned vessel interactions. Additionally, since WDA personnel do not physically engage with whaling crews in the same ways as traditional anti-whaling organizations’ have in the past, it minimizes claims of “violent acts for private ends” as defined in past piracy rulings.

Q5: How does WDA’s approach to media documentation differ, specifically regarding the lack of incriminating evidence?

Response: Unlike Sea Shepherd’s high-visibility campaigns that often resulted in self-documentation of direct actions, WDA’s strategy relies on documentation still, but non-disclosure and minimizes media exposure of operational details. No direct footage of UUV operations is available for media or legal use, creating a distinct operational shield. For the WDa, documenting whaling activities from a distance and withholding footage of intervention tactics, WDA retains control over what information enters the public domain.

Q6: How does WDA ensure plausible deniability if whaling vessels identify prop fouling or other disruptions?

Response: WDA’s deployment of UUVs allows for disruptions such as prop fouling to occur without leaving any surface-level traces linking the device to WDA. Should whaling vessels experience disruptions, such as prop fouling, they are left with no direct evidence of an external party’s involvement, as UUVs remain submerged and do not display identifying features or lights. This method ensures that if prop fouling occurs, it appears as a mechanical anomaly or marine debris, rather than the result of an activist operation, hindering the whalers’ ability to trace it back to WDA.

Q7: How does WDA prevent contempt of court issues related to repeated direct actions?

Response: By using unmanned technology to operate independently and autonomously, WDA minimizes human involvement, thereby creating an operational shield against accusations of contempt or deliberate court order violations, and spreads command and control, campaign planning and various other aspects of operations across a ngo/ and for-profit structure that aims to complicate or outright remove the whalers ability to respond, and make effective decisions. Any interference detected by the whalers lacks identifiable human operators, making it difficult to assert that WDA intentionally disregarded legal orders.

Unlike SSCS, whose crew was visible and directly involved in documented incidents, WDA’s strategic deployment of UUVs inherently complicates claims of intentional, coordinated human action, reducing legal risk to the agency, while eroding the whalers strategies, while at the same time expanding the capacity of anti-whaling into a phase it has never been before. The agency continues to advance it’s plans, from anti-whaling sea control 2050, to systematic erosion of the whalers current and predicted future strengths.