When the Japanese long-line fishing boat Wakashiko Maru No.118 went out in the South Pacific, little did its crew know the voyage could be part of a new era of surveillance at sea.

The white boat from the southern Japanese port of Kagoshima spent months fishing for tuna just outside the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone in the Tasman Sea. Japanese longliners are barred from Australian waters, but the intensity of this single vessel's legal pressure on our next door high seas was graphically captured.

Back and forth the fishermen tracked, setting and retrieving lines, while all the time their ship's movements were signalled by its compulsory marine Automatic Identification System (AIS).

Unknown to them these AIS signals, unique to each boat, were being collected as marine conservation advocates, backed by Google, developed a system to capture fishing activity worldwide.

In a steep change for the public's right to know, big commercial fishermen around the globe are set to lose their age-old anonymity. By re-tooling the AIS data, the groups Oceana and SkyTruth say they can show all trackable fishing on the high seas, and make it freely accessible on their Global Fishing Watch system.