National Geographic's fake tusks with GPS trackers exposed the ivory smuggling route

Around 30,000 African elephants die each year from poaching, and many of their tusks wind up hundreds or thousands of miles away. The killing grounds were known, but the route, the intermediaries and the destination were not — and the countries the tusks cross are often too lawless and dangerous for investigators to enter.

Investigative journalist Bryan Christy found a way to travel with the smugglers anyway. He commissioned a taxidermist to make two fake ivory tusks, embedded them with specially designed GPS tracking devices, and placed them on the path ivory takes out of Garamba National Park in Congo on its way north toward Sudan. The tusks, he said, operated like additional investigators on the team, almost like a robocop: the team watched on Google Earth as the decoys moved from country to country, avoiding roads, into territory too dangerous for people.

The tracking corroborated what former Lord's Resistance Army soldiers had described in interviews: tusks are hand-carried about 600 miles through dense jungle from Garamba into the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Sudan's Darfur region, into the Kafia Kingi enclave, where they are traded with Sudanese armed forces for arms and medicine. Ultimately much of the ivory reaches China, which Christy described as the biggest consumer of illegal ivory after purchasing 60 tons from Africa a few years earlier.

Christy told the story to NPR's Fresh Air on August 12, 2015, and it became the cover story of National Geographic's September 2015 issue, with a companion documentary on the National Geographic Channel. The NPR interview drew 224 points and 66 comments on Hacker News on August 16, 2015.

Don't follow smugglers: put GPS trackers in fake tusks and let smugglers carry the map themselves

It put investigators where people could not go: the tusks worked as remote team members moving through lawless country that was too dangerous to enter

Tracking the actual cargo beat observing from outside: the smugglers' own transport recorded the route, the pace and the direction

The evidence tied ivory to conflict: the decoys' path north corroborated ex-soldiers' accounts of trading tusks to Sudan's military for arms and medicine

The story carried the evidence to a wide audience — a National Geographic cover, a documentary and NPR's Fresh Air — just as China moved to phase out ivory production and sale

When the cargo itself travels the route you cannot see, put the sensor in the cargo: the adversary's own transport becomes your map.

The project became the cover story of National Geographic's September 2015 issue, was reported in a National Geographic Channel documentary, and reached a wide radio audience through Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview on August 12, 2015. In that interview Christy noted that China had announced it would phase out the production and sale of ivory products; he argued that if China leaves the market, the price of ivory collapses and its role in financing war shrinks. The Hacker News discussion of the NPR piece drew 224 points and 66 comments on August 16, 2015.