SEALAND - STRANGER THAN FICTION ?
I recently caught the tail end of a news clip on one of the
cable channels about a “country” named Sealand that caught my interest. With probably too much time on my hands and
my weird and eclectic curiosity, I decided to do a websearch to find out a bit more. After about an hour of browsing various
sites, I decided this is worth sharing.
Apparently the place is still “up and running” and may be the “newest
thing” to hit the Internet.
Sealand is located about six miles off the coast of England,
on a manmade structure in the North Sea.
The structure, called Roughs Tower, was built in the 1940’s as an
anti-aircraft defense location - part of the Maunsell Sea Forts. More about the Forts can be found here.
This is a photo of the structure which I obtained from another site
which has a lot of other good photos. Click the photo to jump to the site.
In September 1967, British Army Major Paddy Roy Bates
occupied the structure and declared it the sovereign nation of SeaLand. He moved onto the structure with his family
and declared himself “Prince Roy of Sealand” and his wife, fashion model as
“Princess Joan”. Last summer, ABC News
reported that
“A year after he declared himself Prince
Roy and his wife Princess Joan, the Royal Navy attempted to evict Bates. He
responded by firing gunshots and molotov cocktails in a retaliatory move he
called “The Battle of Roughs Tower.”
Despite court challenges related to this incident,
British authorities found that because Sealand was outside of the then-3-mile
limit of territorial waters recognized by international law, the land was
outside English jurisdiction. This decision helped establish the legal basis
for Sealand’s independence.
Over the years, Bates has poured millions of his own
money into Sealand and has written a constitution, composed a national anthem,
created stamps, minted coins, and issued passports.
Since then, England has ignored Sealand, leaving the
sovereignty to its own covert undertakings, which include pirate radio and
alleged criminal activity.”
During the summer of 2000, Sean Hastings, Ryan Lackey,
Prince Roy’s son, Michael of Sealand, and others started HavenCo, Inc., a high
tech company which “is fully operational, offering the world's most secure
managed servers in the world's only true free market environment, the
Principality of Sealand.
They state that they are
“building a secure managed colocation business with the added advantage that
the customers' data will also be physically secure against any legal action.
The company -------- is in a position to provide a completely new niche in the
secure colocation industry from that status in conjunction with a first-world
location. Sealand is located less than 3 milliseconds, by fiber optics, from
London, which is home to leaders in both global finance and international
telecommunications. Other than San Jose, California, London is perhaps the
world's premier Internet exchange point.”
Sealand has been the
subject of numerous incidents since Prince Roy founded it in 1967. Has it found a new life by providing a
“secure” data storage facility or server farm and web hosting location outside
of any recognized legal jurisdiction ?
Will this be the next “newest thing” in the continuing saga of the
Internet? Stay tuned, I suspect we
haven’t heard the last about Sealand.
For more information, see the following sites.
Official SeaLand Site
HavenCo Site
History and Photos
http://www.principality-sealand.net/en00.htm
http://www.pjpromotions.freeuk.com/herne_bay/cfort.html
http://www.fruitsofthesea.demon.co.uk/sealand/index.html
Other Stories
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_778000/778267.stm
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cti162.htm
Watch an ABC video on this
site
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/sealand000606.html