"'Ow do you know 'e's a pirate?" "'E LOOKS like one!"

[unixronin]

Since the end of August, Gortney said, there have been 50 instances where coalition ships have disrupted potential pirate attacks, throwing guns overboard and sinking small skiffs.  But in many instances they had to release the people on the ships because of the legal hurdles.

I put it to you that there is a simple solution to this:

"If we find you loitering with apparent intent in the shipping lanes, in a small boat with weapons, we will presumptively assume that you are a pirate.  Game over."

Comments

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

As johnkzin said, your simple solution is, uh, flawed. In pirate-infested waters, we should expect every fishing vessel to carry all the arms it can for self-defense, and every pirate vessel to carry as much fishing gear as it can -- and even do a little fishing, why not? -- as camouflage. If a vessel's in the shipping lanes, maybe it's because that's where the fish are. I see only three ways to make intent "apparent": do a sonar scan and see if they're "fishing" in a place where there are no fish -- and even then you don't have much grounds for arrest, they can always say, "No fish? Gee, thanks for telling us; we'll try somewhere else"; sail a nice fat merchantman past it and see if they chase it (oh, for this one to work you have to make your ship invisible first); magic.

It's simply not that easy to tell a pirate from a fisherman. Hell, a man could go out to fish, see something tempting, become a pirate in the blink of an eye, and go back to being a fisherman as soon as he got rid of the loot. England's coastal villages used to have lots of men who got their living by fishing and/or smuggling, whichever happened to be less risky and more profitable.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

sail a nice fat merchantman past it and see if they chase it (oh, for this one to work you have to make your ship invisible first);

As Jim points out just above, that's where the Q-ships and armed merchantmen come in. Pirates are self-identifying: killing only the ones who attack you has a false-positive rate of essentially zero.