As countries go, Sealand isn’t much.
It’s cold, cramped and utterly devoid of natural resources. In fact, the entire nation state is confined to a 6,000-square-foot steel deck and a pair of hollow concrete towers that anchor it to the floor of the North Sea, six miles off the coast of England. So as you might imagine, it lacks many things like soil, for example that most countries take for granted.
What Sealand does have, however, is the world’s most secure Web server.
It’s got a bunch of them, actually, crammed into those concrete towers and connected to the Net by high-speed satellite and wireless links. They were put there by a company called HavenCo, giving this manmade nation its first gross national product: privacy.
HavenCo was founded by American programmers who wanted to start a “data haven” a place where companies and individuals could serve Web pages, send e-mail and conduct other online business without threat of interference from competitors, government officials or anyone else.
They started out in Antigua, a Caribbean island where many online casinos make their home. But they weren’t satisfied with the infrastructure, so they set out in search of a country where they could find both fast Net connections and a lax government that would allow them to harbor tax cheats, copyright thieves and others who might pay to avoid oversight of their online activities.
Enter Sealand. The odd-looking platform was one of several such structures built by Britain in 1940 as anti-aircraft stations during World War II. This particular fort was abandoned after the war and later occupied by a retired British Army major named Roy Bates. Since the platform was built outside England’s territorial waters, Bates christened it the Principality of Sealand and began treating it like his own private country.
Question of jurisdiction
The British government doesn’t recognize Sealand as a sovereign state, and its law enforcement officials say they expect any business operating there to obey British law. But past efforts to crack down on Bates were scuttled by a local judge who ruled in 1968 that his platform lies outside British jurisdiction. England has since extended its territorial waters to include Sealand, but Bates insists he extended Sealand’s national waters the day before.
This stormy legal sea seemed a perfect fit for HavenCo, which negotiated an agreement with Bates that made his son, Michael, the company’s Chief Logistics Officer. The company took over the entire structure, rounded up between $1 million and $2 million in investment capital and began transforming the 60-year-old military relic into a Fantasy Island for data security freaks.
“It’s not terribly comfortable, but it’s a lot better than it was when we first came here,” said Ryan Lackey, HavenCo’s chief technical officer. The whole place runs on diesel fuel generators, including the space heaters that employees use to ward off temperatures that routinely drop below freezing. It’s cold enough that when workers are finished with a meal, they just leave the leftovers out on the table to chill.
Conditions on Sealand are even less hospitable for anyone who might want access to the data stored there. The “royal family” won’t cooperate with foreign investigators, and HavenCo maintains an armed security staff to repel anyone who might try to take the fort by force. If you’ve got a subpoena for one of HavenCo’s customers, you might as well keep it in your pocket: It won’t do you much good on the open sea.
No spammers, hackers
The company opened for business last summer and has several customers, including an online casino and others that it won’t identify. Lackey said HavenCo won’t tolerate spammers, hackers or child pornography. Outside of that, though, he doesn’t see any problem with helping people evade other countries’ laws.
“Fundamentally what we do is enable free speech,” he said in an online interview. “We believe that even if some specific cases of free speech are negative, the overall advantage of universal free speech more than makes up for the specific negative cases.”
That freedom might be short-lived. If HavenCo ends up sheltering international terrorists or hiding evidence of serious crimes, its security force won’t scare off a military attack. Sealand’s Net connections also are vulnerable, though Lackey insists there’s plenty of redundancy if one or two links are cut off. If things get dicey, HavenCo employees might have to avoid traveling to certain countries for fear of being arrested.
But if the company’s clients confine themselves to online gambling, pornography and other such legally murky areas, HavenCo might be left to fight attorneys instead of attack planes a much more reasonable proposition. If that happens, Sealand might just emerge as the one place on the Internet where information really is free.
To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.
