“You’re kidding!” is the most common reaction to hearing about modern pirates. Pirates share a place alongside Arthurian knights and ninjas in the collective male imagination: they’re the original badasses of old. It would be freakin’ awesome to get on a horse in armor with a big ole sword or dress in black and scale buildings and throw throwing stars, but there isn’t much of that kind of work available nowadays. There are no more ninjas nowadays and the only “knights” of today are pasty British aristocrats. That being said, the job market for pirates in on the up and up.

Pirates are an old problem. At its heart, piracy is simply a kind of armed robbery. It has existed ever since the first Neanderthal realized that, instead of spending the day hunting, he could simply beat up a hunter and take his meat. The Romans had a problem with pirates, in Roman terminology, “the enemies of mankind.” A young Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates. And after promising them unimaginable wealth for his safe return, he dealt with them in the typical Julius Caesar fashion (crucifixion).

The popular image of pirates today lies in the eighteenth century with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Treasure Island. Raphael Sabatini read Treasure Island and wrote Captain Blood. And the film adaptation of Captain Blood was the major influence in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride and the movie that followed.

The pirates in these works are stuck Robin Hoods of the sea. Real life pirates have more in common with Osama bin Laden than Johnny Depp. They don’t wear eye patches and parrots, they wear t-shirts and jeans.

A typical pirate attack involves several speed boats converging on one larger ship, often a tanker or a cruise ship. The pirates, dressed in black and armed with machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank (huh?) missiles board the ship. If it’s an Anglophonic ship – that is, somebody in a wealthy developed country cares about the crew – then the crew will be taken hostage and ransomed for several hundreds of thousands of dollars. If not, everybody is killed and the pirates change the ship’s name, register it in a new country and sell the cargo.

Piracy has been on the rise since the late 1990s and has witnessed an upsurge since 9/11. Last year, the world saw a ten-year high in the number of reported pirate attacks (683), which have been experiencing double-digit growth (between 20-50% a year) in the last half-decade. Post 9/11 security tightening has prompted stricter regulations for offshore financing, with suspicious sources of assets often being frozen. Lacking more traditional sources of income, terrorist groups have turned to piracy for ready cash. A terrorist-pirate can expect to make between $8 and $200 million dollars per vessel (that includes hostage ransom, selling the cargo and the ship). Arab terrorist organizations, such as the Hezbollah and the PLO have the capacity to strike on the sea, and it is expected that Al-Qaeda owns eight or so tankers.

However, the terrorist organization that has taken quickest to the water is the Tamil Tigers. Known officially as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—the marine division is called the Sea Tigers—they are a Marxist group, originally trained by the Indian government, that have been fighting for the independence of the northern, Tamil-speaking region of Sri Lanka since the early 1970s. The Tiger’s “navy” consists of speedboats, which it uses to attack merchant vessels and the Sri Lankan Navy (they have destroyed half of the Sri Lankan Navy’s fleet) and larger freighters which are used to transport the illicit booty. It is estimated that about 2,000 of the LTTE’s 10,000 men and women operate on the sea. The Tamil Tigers, and other terrorist organizations, use their revenues from piracy to fund their other operations, such as suicide attacks.

The terrorist link is not what makes piracy most dangerous. Piracy has the potential to gravely affect world trade. The waters most haunted by pirates, the Arabian and South China Seas, are also the most important water for global trade. The Straight of Malacca, between Singapore and Malaysia, through which half of the world’s petroleum and a quarter of all maritime trade travel, had the second highest number of pirate attacks this year. Some points along Straight are so narrow, that a single crashed freighter would prevent traffic from flowing through. Obviously, the economic fallout resulting from the blockage of such an important route would be disastrous. However, international trade could also be threatened, not by one single massive attack, but by many years of pirate attacks. If ocean transport becomes more dangerous, the costs of global shipping would rise, driving up the costs of goods and adversely affecting many of the advances of globalization in the last twenty years.