“For the last two years, I’ve researched the history of Sealand and HavenCo. I used the Wayback Machine to reconstruct long-since-vanished webpages. I dug through microfilm of newspapers back to the 1960s. I pored over thousands of pages of documents, only recently unsealed, from the United Kingdom’s National Archives.
“My findings have just been published in a new 80-page article in the University of Illinois Law Review, one called “Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law” (PDF). It tells the full—and very weird—story of how this micronation happened to be in the right place (the North Sea) at the right time (the late 1990s) to provide some cypherpunk entrepreneurs with the most impractical data center ever built. Here, I’ll give the condensed version of the tale, hitting the important points in HavenCo’s history and explaining what went wrong.
“Cryptographers in paradise
“The story starts on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, at the 1998 Financial Cryptography conference. The conference, dedicated to building secure online payment systems, drew hackers who believed in better living through crypto. One of them was an expatriate American, Sean Hastings, a cynical but cheerful libertarian with a healthy suspicion of any and all forms of authority. (His website sports the chipper slogan “Keep Calm and Carry” and features his PDF book God Wants You Dead.) The freedom-minded Hastings had moved to Anguilla to work on online gambling projects and explore the idea of starting a data haven.
A Sealand/HavenCo timeline
1942: Roughs Tower constructed off the coast of East Anglia.
1948: Roughs Tower abandoned by English government following World War II.
1966: Pirate radio entrepreneur Roy Bates occupies Roughs Tower.
1967: Bates declares an independent Principality of Sealand.
1968: Bates acquitted of British firearms charges, causing Britain to adopt policy of leaving him alone.
1978: German-led coup takes control of Sealand on August 10; Roy Bates retakes Sealand in dawn helicopter raid on August 15.
1987: Britain extends territorial waters to 12 miles, encompassing Sealand. Sealand claims its own 12-mile territorial waters.
1999: Sean Hastings and Ryan Lackey conceive of idea for HavenCo.
2000: HavenCo launches to massive press hoopla.
2002: HavenCo taken over by Sealand after commercial failure and mounting tensions.
2006: Sealand badly damaged in generator fire.
2008: HavenCo website goes offline.
2009: Sealand launches Twitter account….
“A data haven is “the information equivalent to a tax haven,” a country that helps you evade other countries’ rules on what you can and can’t do with your bits….”
(Source http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/03/death-of-a-data-haven/)
