Enhancing Maritime Domain Awareness with the Single Integrated Lookout List (SILO)

As a supporting plan of the President’s 2005 National Strategy for Maritime Security (NSMS), the Global Maritime Intelligence Integration (GMII) Plan called for the creation of “a single-integrated lookout (SILO) list of all vessels of domestic and global intelligence interest.”

The National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO) funded the development of the SILO. SILO allows the sharing of Vessel of Interest (VOI) information between Government Departments, our Allies and Coalition Partners. SILO is instrumental in enhancing Maritime Domain Awareness.

SILO provides a multi-national, multi-security domain aggregated list of vessels of interest to Intelligence and/or Operations Centers world-wide.

SILO, as part of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)’s SeaPort multi-domain collection database, allows VOI information to be shared across six secure computer networks (JWICS, SIPR, Stone Ghost, BICES (NATO), CENTRIXCMFC (Combined Maritime Forces, Central Command), and CENTRIX-CMFP (Combined Maritime Forces, Pacific). This cross-network sharing gives 48 Nations access (see figure) to this data while allowing data owners to control what data is shared and with which network.

SILO/SeaPort allows analysts to:

1. Search Ship Characteristics, photography, blueprints, movement history, and other documents on over 240,000 vessels.
2. Search ONI databases for vessel events such as boarding history, Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIO) after action reports (AARs), as well as hails, and inquiries.
3. Create alerts on vessels, view other organizations’ VOI lists, nominate vessels to other lists, and add additional comments to existing alerts. Additionally, SILO provides automated alerts when VOIs enter certain Geographic Areas.

This web-based shared approach to VOI information removes the need to wait until a new VOI message is transmitted. As soon as a vessel is put on a list, and depending on the classification level, the VOI is made available to the community.

SILO/SeaPort is available to everyone with access to one of the host classified networks and is designed to enable research without the need for a login. A login is required to add data to the database or to create/nominate a vessel as a VOI.

SILO addresses one of the key points of the President’s National Strategy for Homeland Security: “Underlying our efforts to achieve domain awareness… is a fully developed and integrated Information Sharing Environment that supports the vertical and horizontal distribution of terrorism-related information among Federal, State, local, Tribal, and foreign governments…”