One of the stories I recall from my time at an NGO in this space is that a tuna boat crew straight up murdered their fisheries observer and chucked his body overboard. When the ship docked, the responsible crew scattered to the wind.

There’s a huge tension in the observer’s position. They’re watching what you’re doing and can see any legal violations. At the same time, they’re dependent on the fishing vessel for food and shelter. High bandwidth communication channels are expensive and hard to come by. And if the captain/crew knows you’re putting their livelihoods at risk in real-time, they might do something about it. So we had to balance observer safety with whatever data we were asking them to collect.