The World's Most Notorious Micronation Has the Secret to Protecting Your Data From the NSA

A few months ago, internet entrepreneur Avi Freedman received an unexpected email from a prince. A decade earlier, Freedman had been part of an effort to create a data haven—a safe place where information could be stashed far from the reach of prying eyes and nosy governments—on the world's smallest and most notorious micronation, Sealand, a 120-by-50-foot anti-aircraft platform seven miles off the British coast and 60 feet above the waters of the cold North Sea. Now Freedman's ex-partners, the self-proclaimed royal family of Sealand, wanted to try again.

Freedman said yes. HavenCo, the Sealand-based data haven that failed spectacularly a decade ago, relaunched this weekend. And this time, Freedman thinks it's going to work. HavenCo is offering customers total control over how secure their data is—and if used correctly, its technology could help internet users who want to avoid the National Security Agency's sweeping data dragnet.

To understand what HavenCo is trying now, it helps to understand how this all started. HavenCo's first iteration was intended as a kind of techno-utopia where the revolutionary potential of the internet could be protected. It was supposed to be a self-contained, hypersecure data fortress, with servers located on site in the middle of the North Sea. The company promised it would destroy its servers rather than ever reveal its clients' data. But like many dot-com-era schemes, its founders' fantastical vision overshot what the market, and their own capabilities, could bear.

The Principality of Sealand, where HavenCo was once based, was founded in 1967 by a waggish former British Army Major named Roy Bates. Bates, who had launched Radio Essex, an unlicensed "pirate" radio station, after leaving the Army, took over the rusting World War II-era anti-aircraft platform that became Sealand after the British government had shut down his previous base, another anti-aircraft platform closer to the British shore. On Christmas Day 1966, Bates evicted the staff of a rival pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, from the platform. When the Radio Caroline broadcasters tried to retake it, Bates defended his prize with an air rifle, homemade bombs, and a good bit of skullduggery. But it wasn't until the summer of 1967 that his wife, Joan, made a crack about wanting "a flag with some palm trees" to go with her "island" that the couple found a "dereliction of sovereignty" loophole in international law that they believe allowed them to take over what Britain had neglected and proclaim Sealand its own sovereign nation.

The Bateses furnished their tiny kingdom with all the trappings of nationhood—minting currency, sewing a flag, issuing stamps and passports (at one point suffering a scandal when forgeries popped up in an international smuggling ring), and topping it off with a national anthem and elaborate titles for them and their friends. There was even a coup by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Achenbach, who had Prince Michael Bates, Roy's son, taken hostage. The Bates retook their country in a dawn helicopter raid with the help of a James Bond stunt pilot. Achenbach later set up a Sealand government-in-exile (complete with a website), which, according to Ars Technica, "dabbles in perpetual motion machines, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and revisionist history." The Brits also considered ousting the Bates, but Roy played the press expertly, offering them madcap stories. Headlines of Marines being readied to storm Sealand and the Ministry of Defense falling for Roy's double agent proved that it was better to leave the Bates alone than continue looking foolish