From an Australian news outlet:

It has been described as the world's largest rubbish dump, or the Pacific plastic soup, and it is starting to alarm scientists.

It is a vast area of plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents.

From Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality.

From the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness:

Maritime domain awareness is the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the United States’ security, safety, economy, or environment.

Maritime domain awareness will be achieved by improving our ability to collect, fuse, analyze, display, and disseminate actionable information and intelligence to operational commanders and decision makers.

These capabilities must be fused in a common operating picture that is available to maritime operational commanders and accessible as appropriate throughout the US government. This dynamic, scalable, common operating picture will provide the appropriate types and level of information to the various agencies in a near-real time, customizable, network-centric virtual information grid.