[LINK] ArsT: Death of the Sealand Data Haven

[Roger Clarke]

[Here's a chance to channel your pirate instincts.]


Death of a data haven: cypherpunks, WikiLeaks, and the world's smallest nation
By James Grimmelmann
Published 5 days ago [i.e. 27 Mar 2012]
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/sealand-and-havenco.ars

A few weeks ago, Fox News breathlessly reported that the embattled 
WikiLeaks operation was looking to start a new life under on the sea. 
WikiLeaks, the article speculated, might try to escape its legal 
troubles by putting its servers on Sealand, a World War II 
anti-aircraft platform seven miles off the English coast in the North 
Sea, a place that calls itself an independent nation. It sounds 
perfect for WikiLeaks: a friendly, legally unassailable host with an 
anything-goes attitude.

But readers with a memory of the early 2000s might be wondering, 
"Didn't someone already try this? How did that work out?" Good 
questions. From 2000 to 2008, a company called HavenCo did indeed 
offer no-questions-asked colocation on Sealand-and it didn't end well.

HavenCo's failure-and make no mistake about it, HavenCo did 
fail-shows how hard it is to get out from under government's thumb. 
HavenCo built it, but no one came. For a host of reasons, ranging 
from its physical vulnerability to the fact that The Man doesn't care 
where you store your data if he can get his hands on you, Sealand was 
never able to offer the kind of immunity from law that digital rebels 
sought. And, paradoxically, by seeking to avoid government, HavenCo 
made itself exquisitely vulnerable to one government in particular: 
Sealand's. It found that out the hard way in 2003 when Sealand 
"nationalized" the company.

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.

...


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law               University of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University