HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II antiaircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast. There, they launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo’s founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a “data haven” for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This Article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo—and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet. The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo’s failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, this Article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The “law”


I. INTRODUCTION
Sealand is stranger than fiction. A pair of concrete legs supporting a 120-foot by 50-foot platform, 60 feet above the North Sea, this "smallest country on earth" sits 7 miles off the British coast. Built during World War II for antiaircraft defense, it was occupied in the 1960s by Roy Bates, a former pirate radio operator who declared himself ruler of the new Principality of Sealand. Boosting his claim, a British court acquitted him in 1968 on firearms charges because Sealand stood outside of British territorial waters. He made Sealand into his family's home: This makes HavenCo and Sealand sound like simple pirates, who never met a law they liked. The truth, however, is more complicated. To see why, consider a simple question-why Sealand? Why did HavenCo set up shop there, rather than, say, trying to hide within an existing country? What did Sealand bring to the table? The answer is obvious, so obvious that its implications are easy to overlook. Sealand claimed to be a sovereign state, or at least close enough to play one on TV. Sealand offered HavenCo the protection of its laws.
Thus, the conventional wisdom is wrong-or at least incompleteto see Sealand and HavenCo only in terms of their opposition to national law. HavenCo also relied on Sealand's willingness to enact permissive Internet laws, and both HavenCo and Sealand relied on international law's willingness to recognize Sealand as a sovereign state. They weren't anti-legal, just selectively legal.
The conventional wisdom is also wrong-or at least incomplete-in another, subtler way: it relies on an impoverished view of Sealand's history. 7 Everyone knows the story above, but there's more, much more than this potted version of events. Did you know, for example, that when Sealand caught fire in 2006, a British rescue helicopter and firefighting tug came to the rescue? 8 Or that the dot-com crash did more to cut off Sealand's network links than any national government? 9 Or that, when HavenCo's business faltered, Sealand allegedly nationalized the company? 10 There is something more interesting here than just a tiny nation with a data haven.
This Article aims to fill both of these gaps. Its first major task is to give a more complete account of Sealand and HavenCo's history, from Sealand's construction during World War II to the Red Bull skateboarding special filmed there in 2008. It draws upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, including unsealed files from the United Kingdom's National Archives, 11 contemporary newspapers, HavenCo's corporate documents, the HavenCo founders' postmortem examinations of their experience, and archives of long-lost webpages from Sealand's friends and foes.
The Article's second major task is to use this history to map HavenCo's tortured relationship with law and the rule of law. There are 7. The one notable exception is an article by an English historian, written with access to closed files held by the U. K 8. See infra Part II. D. 9. See infra Part III.C. 10. See infra Part III. C. 11. Throughout this Article, references to documents held by the U. K. National Archives will be indicated with "UK-NA" followed by the National Archives code for the file containing them. Complete copies of all cited files are on file with the author. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 at least three different bodies of law at work: the national law that HavenCo helped its clients evade, the international law under which Sealand claimed statehood, and the permissive Sealand laws that guaranteed HavenCo's freedom of action. HavenCo stood in strikingly different relationships to them, and this Article argues that those relationships reflect different theories of the rule of law: National law: HavenCo's entire purpose was to help individuals circumvent national laws restricting freedom of speech on the Internet. As such, HavenCo's existence depended on denying both the legitimacy and enforceability of such laws. This put HavenCo on a collision course with a vision of the rule of law as self-government: the ability of a political community to choose collectively the rules it will live under. If HavenCo had truly had its way, no nation would have been able to choose for itself to have restrictive intellectual property, privacy, or gambling laws.
International law: If Sealand had been subjected to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, HavenCo would have had to comply with British law. As such, HavenCo's existence also also depended on Sealand's status as a sovereign state under international law. Here, HavenCo represents a vision of the rule of law as formal legality: evenhanded application of general, prospective rules. In court, Sealand allies argued that it was inviolate because it had a "territory," a "population," and a "government," as those terms had been defined under international law.
Sealand law: As a company operating within Sealand and requiring access to computers physically located there, HavenCo was subject to the authority of Sealand's royal family. As such, HavenCo's existence also depended on the permissiveness of Sealand law. Here, HavenCo requires a vision of the rule of law as restraint on government: protection of individuals against arbitrary governmental action. HavenCo needed promises that Sealand's laws would continue to be tolerant of its activities and that its property wouldn't be expropriated.
Juxtaposing these three theories of the rule of law allows us to see that there is something deeply anomalous in HavenCo's simultaneous rejection of national self-government and embrace of formal legality and restraint on government. Having started from the premise that the political systems of existing nations could never be trusted to protect free speech, HavenCo needed a place outside of them to stand while it beamed its bits their way and undermined their national Internet laws. That place needed to be able to stand up to annoyed nations, which led HavenCo to seek Sealand, with its colorable claims to sovereignty. And once HavenCo had chosen a protector with power, it also needed to be protected from the abuse of that power. HavenCo expected internation-al law to protect it from the rest of the world and expected Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself.
As the fuller history shows, however, it's unclear that either international law or Sealand law could bear the weight HavenCo needed to place on them. Externally, Sealand's history doesn't exactly paint a picture of a self-reliant and independent polity: very few people have ever lived aboard, and they have never been self-sufficient. Nor have its attempts to obtain legal recognition in the community of nations borne any significant fruit. Internally, Sealand, with its violent and checkered history and its minuscule population, lacked political and social institutions. Sealand "law" was never much more than a formality or a tacit agreement, and when things on Sealand deteriorated, HavenCo found itself boxed into a corner, precisely because it had rejected national and international authority over what happened on Sealand. In the end, HavenCo failed not from too much law, but too little.
This Article focuses on legal history and the jurisprudence of the rule of law, but these are hardly the only places where Sealand and HavenCo's story may prove instructive. Certainly, their experience holds valuable lessons for others who dream of escaping the existing order of things by setting up their own jurisdictions, including micronations, 12 seasteads, 13 and space colonies. 14 It bears, too, on basic questions about the Internet's interaction with offline law, 15 Internet governance, 16  online political communities. 18 Sealand's experiment with turning itself into a data haven sheds light on some nations' experiments with turning themselves into tax havens-and on other nations' attempts to fight back. 19 The same could be said about offshore banking. 20 Thematically, the issues of territory, political community, and legal institutions have obvious connections with constitutional, administrative, international, and immigration law. In the interests of getting the history and the jurisprudence right, this Article can do little more than gesture at these other important issues and content itself with laying a useful foundation upon which others may build. The Article proceeds in three parts. Parts II and III tell the full history of Sealand and HavenCo, respectively, from Sealand's construction in 1942 through HavenCo's rise and fall six decades later. Part IV then explores their relationship to law using the tripartite framework of national, international, and Sealand law. By bringing out HavenCo's implicit theory of law, it will shed new light on the causes and implications of HavenCo's failure. Finally, the Conclusion emphasizes the basic lesson of Sealand and HavenCo: law is made by people, for human purposes. Even in an Internet age, law cannot be decoupled from the all-toohuman institutions behind it.

II. SEALAND
Before we begin with the history, a note on terminology.  REV. 395 (2000); Ruth Wedgwood, Cyber-Nations, 88 KY. L. J. 957 (1999-2000). 19. See generally Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Fiscal Crisis of the Welfare State, 113 HARV L. REV. 1573REV. (2000; Allison Christians, Sovereignty, Taxation and Social Contract, 18 MINN REV. 11 (1994); Bernhard F. Meyer, Swiss Banking Secrecy and Its Legal Implications in the United States, 14 NEW ENG. L. REV. 18 (1978); Stewart E. Sterk, Asset Protection Trusts: Trust Law's Race to the Bottom?, 85 CORNELL L. REV. 1035REV. (2000 or, more formally, The Principality of Sealand. Since 1978, a group of Germans have claimed to be the rightful government of Sealand; this Article will describe them as the German Sealand. Finally, HavenCo is the Internet colocation company launched in 2000 by a group of Americans whose principal place of business was Sealand. This Article uses "nation" to refer to any political entity that claims independence, "state" to refer to a nation that is sovereign under international law, and "country" to refer to one that fits the layperson's mental model of a nation-state with substantial territory, significant population, stable government, and shared national identity.

A. 1942: Roughs Tower
Roughs Tower, which would become Sealand, was one of four platforms built by Britain in the Second World War at the seaward end of the Thames Estuary, where it opens out into the North Sea: Sunk Head, Knock John, Tongue Sands, and Roughs Tower. 21 The four were collectively known as the Maunsell Sea Forts, after their designer, and they were built to provide antiaircraft defense and radar coverage for the approach to the Thames Estuary. 22 Each of the platforms consisted of a 120-foot by 50-foot deck, resting atop a pair of cylindrical concrete towers, each twenty-four feet in diameter and sixty feet high. 23 The towers, in turn, rest on a concrete pontoon, permanently flooded so that it provides a stable base on the seabed. 24 The deck originally held a two-story superstructure, taking up about one-third of the platform. The upper story housed a small control tower; the lower story had a long hallway with a galley and officers' quarters on one side and bathrooms on the other. 25 Roughs Tower, the furthest out to sea of the four, was built at a wharf in Gravesend. On February 11, 1942, 26 it was towed into position 21. Sources sometimes refer to it as "Rough Tower" or "HMF [His Majesty's Fort] Rough." Rough Tower, OFFSHORE RADIO, http://www.offshore-radio.de/fleet/sealand.htm (last visited . It takes its name from the sandbar on which it stands. See Public Warning of Internet Hoax: "Principality of Sealand," PRINCIPALITY SEALAND, http://sealandgov-london-uk. 0catch Vol. 2012 at 51º 53' 40.8" latitude north, 1º 28' 56.7" longitude east, 27 about seven miles from the nearest coastline, the port of Felixstowe. 28 At 4:30 PM, the pontoon was flooded and within fifteen minutes, Roughs Tower had settled into place on the seabed. 29 During the war, Roughs Tower housed approximately 120 men who lived in cramped quarters in the concrete legs. 30 The British government abandoned the Maunsell Sea Forts in 1948, and they sat vacant for the next decade. 31

B. 1966-1967: Roy Bates
Enter Paddy Roy Bates. In the words of one of his employees, Roy was a throwback. He should have been born in the time of the first Queen Elizabeth and sailed with Drake. If ever there was a true buccaneer, it was Roy. A tall, burly man, with a ruddy face and the kind of high, hectoring voice which afflicted so many of his generation who had been to private schools. He had been at one time, the youngest Major in the British Army, and he ran his household and his business along more or less, army lines. In addition, as I was to find out later, he was the kind of man who had creditors everywhere, but it never seemed to bother him. 32 A World War II veteran and former major, 33 Roy Bates fought in North Africa and Italy, 34 and was wounded in action several times. 35 On his return, "he made a fortune in factories, a fishing fleet, and other businesses." 36 One of those businesses, though perhaps not the most profit- 27. See id. 28. I have marked the location on a custom Google Map. Sealand, GOOGLE MAPS, http: //maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=104492463267466314825.00048f88f52542054c0b7 (last visited Jan. 23, 2012). Roughs Tower is technically slightly closer to English territory than that distance might suggest because it stands opposite the channel into Felixstowe, where the Orwell and Stour rivers emerge from their estuaries into a wide channel. The tower is between five and six miles seaward of the datum line marking the mouth of that channel. able, was pirate radio. In the mid-1960s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) held a legal monopoly on radio broadcasting; anyone else transmitting radio signals to the public faced prosecution. Since the BBC saw itself as having a civilizing mission, it aired far less rock and popular music than the British public generally was interested in hearing, creating an opportunity for musical arbitrage. 37 Roy Bates and other entrepreneurs figured that by transmitting from ships outside of Britain's threemile territorial waters, they could avoid the reach of the radio laws. The best-known of the pirate stations was Radio Caroline, on whose story the recent movie Pirate Radio is based, albeit rather loosely. 38 Between 1964 and 1967, a kind of mild anarchy ruled the airwaves; 39 even as parts of Her Majesty's government sought ways to shut down the pirate stations, 40 businesses and barons purchased advertising on them. 41 In 1965, Roy Bates founded an offshore station, Radio Essex, on the Knock John platform, the closest in of the Maunsell Sea Forts. 42 He wasn't the first to have the idea; he set up shop on Knock John only by driving off the staff of the competing Radio City. 43 Unfortunately for Roy Bates, Knock John, while offshore, wasn't quite offshore enough. At one and one-half miles from the coast, it was comfortably inside England's three-mile territorial limit. 44 The government had at first stood by 37 , July 29, 1966, at 1 ("Lord Thomson of Fleet, whose wares are advertised on Radio 390, Radio 270 and Radio Scotland."); see also BISHOP, supra note 23, at 26 (listing pirate radio advertising rate cards); id. at 29 (estimating Radio Caroline South revenue at £15,000 per week in 1965); CHAPMAN, supra note 38, at 84-90 (discussing advertising on pirate radio stations); id. at 110 (estimating Radio London's 1966 advertising gross at over £1,000,000); see also Letter from T. Scott, Private Sec'y to the Postmaster Gen., to P.D. Nairne, Private Sec'y to the Sec'y of State for Def., Mar. 17, 1967 (UK-NA: DEFE 13/658) (complaining that members of the armed services had been thanking the pirate stations for running free advertisements for their units). 42. BISHOP, supra note 23, at 56-57. The "shoe-string" Radio Essex took its name because "[g]ood reception was only possible in south-east Essex." CHAPMAN, supra note 38, at 160. Later, Bates changed the name to Britain's Better Music Station, or BBMS. Id. at 161. 43. See BISHOP, supra note 23, at 56 ("Eventually [Bates] 'persuaded' them to leave . . . ."); CHAPMAN, supra note 38, at 168 ("As the fledgling Radio Essex project also had an interest in this site it turned out to be the cue for several months of aggressive raids and counter-raids on the fort."); JOHNS, supra note 37, at 176-77. 44. The case against some of the offshore broadcasters depended on how far they were from land, which in turn depended on whether the relevant baselines were to be drawn at high tide or could include sandbars exposed only at low tide. See R. v. Kent Justices ex parte Lye, [1966] 2 W.L.R. 765 (Q.B.) (holding 2-1 that the Red Sands fort was within the three-mile territorial limit as measured from the "low-tide elevation" as defined by a 1964 Order in Council). One Radio Essex DJ would later write: Naval "experts" were produced to demonstrate that on a full moon, if you killed a chicken while facing east, the moon's influence on the tides would cause mid-sand to dry and therefore extend the UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 as the pirates challenged the BBC's monopoly, but public sentiment shifted in the aftermath of the heavily publicized (indeed, sensationalized 45 ) shooting of one pirate radio entrepreneur by another. 46 Following the shooting, the government stepped up enforcement of the Wireless Telegraphy Act, which forbade unlicensed broadcasts. 47 Roy Bates was served with a summons for breach of the Act on September 28, 1966. 48 According to government files, Radio Essex was causing interference as far away as Hungary. 49 The Magistrate's Court found him in violation of the broadcasting law on November 30 and fined him £100. 50 Bates appealed, but lost in January of 1967. 51 Bates, however, was already gone. On Christmas Day of 1966, he shut down broadcasts from Knock John 52 and moved further out, to Roughs Tower. 53 He evicted the two Radio Caroline staff currently occupying Roughs Tower and claimed it as his own. 54 Bates and his son mainland, and that the square of the hypotenuse, multiplied by Harold Wilson's affairs with his secretary, produced the effect of drawing the fort nearer to shore. SINCLAIR & LE-ROI, supra note 32, at 73. 45. See JOHNS, supra note 37, at 217-18. 46. The killing grew out of the June 1966 struggle for control of Shivering Sands, one of the Maunsell Army Forts. In a 3:00 AM raid on the 20th, a team of seamen sent by Oliver Smedley, the entrepreneur behind Radio Atlanta, boarded and took control of the fort from the Radio City DJs then occupying it. See id. at 189-97. The ostensible reason for the occupation was a dispute over the ownership of a transmitter Smedley had supplied to Radio City, but it was more immediately rooted in the breakdown of negotiations for a Smedley-led group to purchase Radio City. When Reg Calvert, the owner of Radio City, planned to sell instead to a rival group, Smedley swung into action and seized the fort. Id. at 178-89. The next day, Calvert, having threatened to remove the Smedley party with means up to and including nerve gas, went to Smedley's home in Essex. . Calvert became involved in an altercation with Smedley's housekeeper, and Smedley shot Calvert dead. Id Sept. 15, 1969, at 1 (claiming that Bates "persuaded them they wanted to leave"); Lucas, supra note 35 (claiming that the Radio Caroline disc jockeys were celebrating Christmas aboard the platform and left without a struggle); THE SEALAND ADVENTURE (Bob Le-Roi, 2010) (documenting the Forts radio stations in a sixty minute audio "programme"). But see Sealand Radio-Part 1, supra note 24 (claiming that the platform was unoccupied at the time).

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 417
Michael, only fourteen but a "tough young cookie," moved the radio equipment aboard Roughs Tower in the cold of a North Sea winter. 55 This first occupation failed. Bates left four men aboard to guard the Tower, but only three days worth of food for them. After seventeen days, they were rescued by a British lifeboat from nearby Walton-on-the-Naze. 56 Radio Caroline moved back to the now-empty platform in early April of 1967, cutting away the control tower to create a helipad. 57 It appeared that Radio Caroline was setting up a legally safer resupply station for its ships, one that would itself be supplied from Holland. 58 Bates then retook the platform with either remarkable cunning or good improvisation. Having entered into some kind of joint operating partnership with Radio Caroline, 59 Bates brought a boat on April 17 out to relieve one of three Caroline men on the Tower, replacing him with Michael Bates and a Bates employee, David Barron. 60 On April 19, while loading more supplies aboard, one of the two remaining Radio Caroline men received a severe rope burn; he and his partner went ashore, leaving the platform entirely under the control of Bates's crew. 61 On April 20, Barron refused to let a replacement crew from Radio Caroline aboard again. 62 Bates was back in control.
Radio Caroline didn't go down without a fight. It sent a boarding party by boat on April 27; David Barron and Michael Bates repulsed them with an air rifle and flaming bottles of paraffin. 63 Defiant, Bates painted his name on the side of the platform in large white letters. 64 Radio Caroline tried again, more dramatically, on June 27. Bates and company again fought off the attackers with petrol bombs. When they withdrew, one man was left dangling from a ladder for three hours until the Walton-on-the-Naze lifeboat rescued him. 65 There may have been other such battles, but details are sketchy and clouded by Bates's exaggera- 55. See Sealand Radio-Part 1, supra note 24. One source claims that the platform was briefly abandoned. Michael Bates would never return to school. THE SEALAND ADVENTURE, supra note 54. 56 tions. 66 Bates was also linked, somewhat ambiguously, to a plan to seize the Shivering Sands Maunsell Army Fort in the winter of 1967, which may or may not have been a hoax. 67 By the fall of 1967, Bates was in sole possession of Roughs Tower. 68 He brought aboard his family: his wife Joan (a former fashion model) 69 and their children Michael and Penny. 70 He was now ready to tangle with a more formidable opponent: the United Kingdom.

C. 1967: Roy Bates vs. The United Kingdom
The British government had been watching Roy Bates and the other pirate broadcasters carefully, as the 1966 prosecutions showed. While Bates was moving out to Roughs Tower, other pirates were laying plans to broadcast from ships outside the three-mile limit. The government's principal response was the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act (MBOA), which was enacted in July 1967 and entered into force on August 14. 71 It forbade British citizens from participating in broadcasts from the high seas, 72 prevented anyone present in the United Kingdom from assisting in such broadcasts, 73 and prohibited advertising by means of such broadcasts. 74 The MBOA did not eliminate the pirates entirely-Radio Caro- 66. See Lucas, supra note 35; Sea Fort Repels Boarders, TIMES (Eng.), June 30, 1967, at 2 (quoting Roy Bates as claiming one raid involved thirty attackers "in foreign-looking boats, rather like Dutchmen, armed with knives and guns," and that "[s]ome tried to swim with snorkels but they were spotted and given short shrift with a flame thrower"). 67. See JOHNS, supra note 37, at 233-36; see also SINCLAIR & LE-ROI, supra note 32, at 73 ("The Bates team had earnt a fearsome reputation for skulduggery, as 'the hard bastards of the North Sea,' mainly due to their recently developed quaint habit of going out at weekends and stealing equipment from other stations, especially those on the forts who even had their lights taken!"). A year later, in March of 1968, two of Bates's men tried to set up their own state on Shivering Sands but found themselves marooned without sufficient food and in need of rescue. See Two Rescued from Estuary Fort, TIMES (Eng.), Mar. 21, 1968 line would broadcast from ships outside the three-mile limit for another two decades-but it did manage to drive most of them off the air. 75 The three-mile limit, however, was a potential fly in the ointment. The news that a boarding party had taken over Roughs Tower in December 1966 did not escape Whitehall's notice. 76 Attention became alarm in April 1967, as Radio Caroline's activities strongly hinted at unlicensed broadcasting. 77 Broadcasts carried out by non-British citizens, supported and supplied entirely from abroad, would fall outside the MBOA's ambit, and the uneven pace of ratifications of a European broadcasting treaty meant that it would be difficult to act against them. 78 The Postmaster General, whose office had authority over the airwaves, demanded the immediate destruction of Roughs Tower. 79 Bureaucracy ensued. The Prime Minister assented to the plan, as long as all of the affected departments concurred. 80 The Home Secretary quickly agreed, 81 but the Foreign Office began to raise practical concerns. 82 The Ministry of Defense suggested putting the matter to the Official Emergencies Committee, but the Cabinet Office concluded that an "ad hoc meeting of the Departments concerned" would be a more appropriate venue. 83 That meeting took place on May 10, 1967, with the roster having expanded to include also the Treasury, Customs and Excise, the Board of Trade, and the Treasury Solicitor. 84 The Ministry of Defense agreed to "make the fort uninhabitable . . . without at the same time making it into a danger to navigation," but only if the "'civil power' will first remove from the fort anyone who may be occupying it." 85 Unfortunately, given the jurisdictional issues, this last question was thorny, and after some further discussion, the matter was referred to the Law Officers. 86 They concluded that a detailed opinion would be needed "in 75 view of the difficult legal questions which appear to arise." 87 A formal case was submitted for their opinion in late July. 88 By this point, however, Bates was hurling petrol bombs at Radio Caroline raiders, and members of Parliament were asking questions about it in the House of Commons. 89 The matter was considered urgent enough to be discussed at a meeting in the Cabinet Office. 90 The attendees were concerned how to "dislodge" Bates's men, and agreed that since the various Ministers had "not had before them a fully concerned memorandum prepared by officials of all the Departments concerned," another meeting would be held "in order to arrange for the preparation of such a memorandum." 91 The Ministry of Defense took the lead, drawing up a plan called "Occupation Callow," 92 and the Prime Minister signed off on it. 93 The idea was simple: officials would call on Roy Bates, tell him that the fort belonged to the Ministry of Defense, and demand that he leave. 94 If necessary, they would assist him in removing his property and provide an "exgratia payment" of a few thousand pounds. A party of Royal Marines would occupy the fort as soon as Bates and his men departed, so that no one else could move in before the Ministry of Defense destroyed it. 95 Things did not go as intended. Roy Bates, offered five thousand pounds, demanded ninety thousand instead. 96 When approached by boat, "the occupants of the tower made clear-firmly, though politelythat they were unwilling . . . to consider the possibility of giving up possession." 97 The press, meanwhile, discovered that the Royal Marines were on standby and quickly ran stories about the plan to storm the fort, 98 despite the government's best efforts to downplay the matter. 99 For the rest of August, the government cast about for legal options to oust Bates. One official suggested an action against Bates for keeping the fourteen-year-old Michael out of school. 100 Customs thought it might be possible to force Bates to forfeit his boat "for non-compliance with 87. Letter  our requirements." 101 At the end of the month, the Law Officers returned an opinion arguing that while criminal jurisdiction over offenses committed by British citizens would extend to Roughs Tower, a civil action for possession of it "would be likely to fail for lack of jurisdiction." 102 Meanwhile, the Post Office was doggedly trying to collect its costs from Bates's unsuccessful appeal of his prosecution for broadcasting from Knock John. 103 It was at this point of bureaucratic irresolution that Roy Bates struck again.

D. 1967-1968: The Principality of Sealand
On September 2, 1967, Roy Bates declared an independent Principality of Sealand on Roughs Tower, with himself as Prince. 104 The idea came from Joan Bates and several friends, over drinks at a pub. 105 The Ministry of Defense denounced the declaration, stating, "This is ludicrous. Mr. Bates is trespassing and it now looks as if he is being very foolish." 106 Behind the scenes, the search for a way to oust Bates intensified.
Customs tried first. Bates's boat sprang a serious leak while in Harwich harbor on February 14, 1967. 107 Customs then refused to clear him for departure from the harbor, as the boat lacked a "load line" certificate of seaworthiness. 108 Roy and Joan Bates promptly went to the press, claiming that their children had been "marooned" on Sealand. 109 Official statements that "[a]ll Mr. Bates has to do is hire another boat if his own does not conform to the regulations[]" did not stem the tide of ipswichstar.co.uk:80/news/secret_government_sealand_revelations_1_169303. The reason for establishing it as a "principality" rather than a "kingdom" is unclear. See Simon, supra note 23 (suggesting that the choice of a "principality" was at the advice of lawyers). 105 press coverage, 110 and Customs quietly relented. 111 Roy and Joan Bates also alleged that Customs harassed them by opening their tins of food whenever they came ashore to resupply. 112 In a more bizarre turn of events, the same David Barron, alias David Belasco, who had been one of Roy Bates's first men aboard the Tower, approached the Ministry of Defense, offering "to obtain possession of the Fort 'in a non-violent manner[]'" and turn it over to the Ministry. 113 The Ministry considered this "implausible" and told Belasco that it would not encourage any action on his part, but was "prepared to take the Fort over[]" if Belasco did obtain possession. 114 Belasco, however, swore out an affidavit claiming the Ministry had asked him to take over the platform by force, 115 which became the subject of accusations by Bates, a story by the Daily Telegraph, 116 and a question in Parliament. 117 All the while, the Post Office was still trying to get Bates to pay his appeal costs, without substantial success. 118 The next line of attack was the Law Officers' opinion that English criminal jurisdiction against British citizens extended to Roughs Tower. In December 1967, someone on the Tower fired shots at a survey minesweeper, but due to a lack of damage and good evidence, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided it would make a poor test case and the incident was ignored. 119 On May 6, 1968, the Trinity House 120 ship Egeria was working on a buoy northwest of Roughs Tower when Michael Bates opened fire across its bow with a .22 pistol. 121 At the direction of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Bates was summoned to court the next time he went ashore. 122 He and Michael were indicted for violations of the Firearms Act, including possession of a firearm without the proper certificate and possession of a firearm with the intent to endanger life. 123 110. Children "Not Marooned," TIMES (Eng.), Mar. 8, 1968 "It was decided not to take advantage of Mr. Bates' attendance in Court to try and occupy the Fort, as this smacked of sharp practice." 124 To the government's disappointment, however, the court rejected its theory of jurisdiction in October 1968, 125 holding that that Parliament had never extended admiralty jurisdiction far enough to cover the Bateses. 126 The matter was promptly escalated back up to the Cabinet Office. A November 5 meeting came to a pragmatic conclusion: Mr. Bates' continued occupation of the Tower was undesirable, because of the shooting incident and the possibility of further violence, and also because of the small but continuing threat that the Tower could be used for some illegal activity not at present foreseen. Nevertheless, he was doing no actual harm, so far as was known, and the Ministry of Defense had no need of the Fort themselves. There were no pressing reasons for evicting Mr. Bates, certainly none that would justify the use of force or the passage of special legislation. 127 Thus, although the Law Officers held to their prior position about criminal jurisdiction, "it was not proposed to apply to the courts for a declaration that Roughs Tower belonged to the Crown." 128 The Law Officers drew up proposed legislation that would have explicitly given the Crown criminal and civil means to retake possession of offshore structures it had constructed, but in keeping with the decision to ignore Bates unless he caused trouble, it was never enacted. 129 For the next two years, Trinity House vessels passing near Roughs Tower were given armed guards in case of incident, but otherwise Bates was left alone. 130 Similarly, while the Ministry of Defense prepared contingency plans for occupying Roughs Tower if necessary, none were ever put into action. 131 In keeping with this reasoning, the United Kingdom cautiously avoided forcing the question of Sealand's status for the next two decades. Official policy reflected a pair of negatives. On the one hand, Sealand was not part of the United Kingdom, but on the other, the government did not regard it as a state. 132 What it was has never been entirely clear. 124. Letter  Almost immediately after declaring independence, Prince Roy began trying to develop Sealand economically. In January 1968, he told a Post Office Solicitor that he planned to use the "large profits" from selling Sealand stamps to pay off his debt from the Radio Essex case. 134 The first actual stamp set-famous explorers-was issued in 1969, and subsequent stamps have included ships, fish, and a portrait of Joan. 135 Although Bates planned to apply to the Universal Postal Union, 136 Sealand is not a member, so its stamps are not legal postage in other countries. 137 Sealand has issued coins since 1972, in various denominations; 138 the Sealand dollar is nominally pegged to the U.S. dollar at a rate of SX $1 to US $1. 139 Sealand also began seeking foreign partners and potential investors. In 1969, it linked up with a group of Belgians and Frenchmen. They approached the Belgian government in the hopes of establishing diplomatic and commercial ties, and pressed the British government to confirm Sealand's sovereign status. 140 This particular diplomatic offensive seems to have continued into 1971; 141 British officials assured their Belgian counterparts that the Chelmsford firearms decision from 1968 was not an act of recognition, but ignored the direct inquiries from Sealand's representatives. 142 Sealand's growing earnestness is also evident in a promotional brochure that starts appearing in the files at about this date. 143 The with author) (stating that Michael Bates was not required to pay contributions to Britain's social security system for the times during which he was resident on Sealand). 133 Tourism section declares, blandly, "It is planned to build an [sic] Hotel." 144 Sealand then seems to have gradually shifted to dealing with a group of Germans, who started making another push for Sealand's status in 1973. 145 In addition to pressing their case with the British Embassy in Bonn, they began approaching numerous other countries. They sent letters seeking recognition in 1974 to Scotland, Morocco, and the Federal Republic of Germany. 146 In 1976, they asked the Australian Embassy for visas in their Sealand passports, 147 went to the Sri Lankan Embassy with a briefcase containing 100,000 DM to request a visa to set up a five-milliondollar gem exhibition, 148 and approached the Indonesian, Senegalese, Irish, and Nigerian embassies with similar requests. 149 At the end of 1976, they also wrote to the International Frequency Registration Board, apparently seeking to reserve some radio frequencies for Sealand's use. 150 To bolster their case, they obtained a legal opinion from a Dr. Walter Leisner in 1975, claiming that Sealand was a state under international law, and a second opinion from Professor Bela Vitanyi in 1978. 151 They also cast about for banking services for the Principality. 152 Sealand's increasing commercial ambitions from this period are evident in a much extended version of the promotional brochure-now primarily in German-containing diagrams showing plans for a massive expansion of Sealand to include a port, office towers, park with golf course, and airport. 153 A refinery and tanker port would be connected to the British mainland by a pipeline, and Sealand itself would be joined by a bridge to the coast. 154 These plans, typically with a price tag of thirty-six million pounds or more, make regular appearances in the press coverage of Sealand over the subsequent decades: Sealand is always about to start development later in the year. 155 144. Id In 1977, the Germans explored the idea of using Sealand as a tax haven. Even without recognition and a tax treaty with Germany, they hoped to take advantage of the tax treaty between the United Kingdom and Germany. 156 If Germany regarded Sealand as part of the United Kingdom for treaty purposes, but the United Kingdom didn't actually levy taxes for activities taking place there, then German citizens would be able to avoid paying taxes on Sealand income. 157 Inland Revenue was actually concerned about the issue, 158 but the Germans neatly resolved the matter by insisting that the location of Roughs Tower outside of British territorial waters meant that German taxes applied. 159 During these years, a new name starts cropping up in the reports. Professor Alexander Achenbach was a German living in Luxembourg and a "former diamond dealer," 160 but everything else about him is obscure. He was involved in 1975 in what one British diplomat referred to as "the Anglican Free Church affair," 161 which appears to have been an illegal diploma mill. 162 This may explain why Achenbach was living in Luxembourg; it may also call into question his academic title. In any event, he was the drafter of Sealand's 1975 constitution, which drew heavily on the West German one. 163 In 1976, Achenbach was arrested in Luxembourg for fraud in connection with his Sealand activities. 164  157. This argument was not completely frivolous under the treaty in force at the time, which defined the "United Kingdom" to include "any area outside the territorial sea of the United Kingdom" as to which it exercised its continental-shelf rights. Roughs Tower was perhaps such a place; the catch was that the United Kingdom's Continental Shelf Act applied only to activities involving exploitation of mineral resources. See Double Taxation  (unsuccessfully) to file a complaint against Luxembourg. 166 Ultimately, the charges were reduced to much lesser ones of selling (Sealand) stamps and coins without a license, 167 and on July 7, 1978, Achenbach and his two codefendants were found guilty and fined roughly five hundred pounds each. 168 At roughly the same time, Achenbach decided to push the question of Sealand's sovereignty in another forum. 169 He petitioned the city of Aachen to terminate his German citizenship on the grounds that he was now a citizen of Sealand. 170 The city denied his request, so Achenbach appealed the decision. On May 3, 1978, the Administrative Court of Cologne rejected Achenbach's claim, holding that Sealand was not a state. 171 Within months of these legal setbacks, he would try his hand at self-help: a coup d'état. 172

F. 1978: Civil War
In early August 1978, Professor Achenbach told Prince Roy he could connect him with a group of investors 173 and invited Roy and Joan Bates to Austria for a meeting, leaving Michael alone on Sealand. 174 On August 10, a group of men led by Gernot Pütz, Achenbach's lawyer from the citizenship lawsuit, arrived at Sealand on a helicopter. 175 They had a forged telegram from Roy Bates 176 and claimed a deal had been struck to transfer Sealand. 177 It was a trick, just as luring Michael's parents to Austria had been. Michael let them land, but when he went inside to get a whiskey for one of them who claimed to be ill, Pütz slammed the door on him and locked him inside. 178 Pütz held Michael for a few days, then put him on a fishing boat headed to the Netherlands. 179 Pütz stayed on the 166 platform, along with two men variously described as Dutch businessmen 180 and Dutch mercenaries. 181 Undeterred, Roy and Michael Bates met up again in Southend. 182 Roy called in favors and launched his own helicopter assault on Sealand with a team of five. 183 Roy's friend John Crewdson, "who had flown helicopter stunts in James Bond films," 184 was the pilot. 185 Attacking at dawn on August 15, 1978, they took Pütz's party by surprise. 186 When Michael accidentally fired his sawn-off shotgun, the junta surrendered, 187 and it was Pütz's turn to be locked up on Sealand. 188 Roy put the prisoners on trial, appointing one of his men to represent the defendants while he presided. 189 The two Dutchmen admitted they had "done wrong" and were released. 190 Pütz, however, held a Sealand passport, leading Roy to consider executing him for treason. 191 In the end, he was fined 75,000 DM and held prisoner until it was paid, 192 and in the interim, made to "wash the loos and make coffee ." 193 It took several weeks for news to trickle out, but once it did, the British government had another unwelcome Sealand-related crisis on its hands. Prompted by Achenbach, the Dutch government inquired on August 24 about Hans Lavoo, one of the two Dutchmen. The Dutch minister asked whether it was "feasible to think of a Dutch patrol vessel 'passing by' the Fort and somehow happening to take appropriate action," to which his British counterpart replied it would be "unlikely to reduce the embarrassment caused to the British Government by the present situation." 194 Lavoo, however, had already been released, resolving that dilemma. 195 180. See

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 429
In the face of Pütz's imprisonment, the German government was more insistent. The Embassy investigated, 196 sending the head of its legal department to Sealand by helicopter, where he confirmed that Pütz was "well and happy." 197 By telephone and by letter, the German Embassy protested the detention of one of its nationals. 198 The British government, however, argued that the imprisonment was taking place "outside British jurisdiction." 199 To this, the Germans shot back in a formal note that it was "in a way an act of piracy, committed on the high sea but still in front of British territory by British citizens." 200 Despite this "somewhat petulant Note," the British government took no further action. 201 The situation was resolved when Pütz was released on September 28, six weeks after the attempted coup. 202 The matter also came back to the floor of Parliament. In December 1978, Lord Kennet asked the Minister of State for the FCO, "My Lords, is it not the case that what this time may be a harmless and colourful escapade could next time, in law, be a moderately dangerous act by an unfriendly foreign Power?" 203 Lord Segal's suggestion of towing the platform inside territorial waters was dismissed as impractical. 204 Even at the time, it was unclear how much of the affair was a putup. The German Embassy eventually concluded that the incident was a publicity stunt, 205 but a journalist who knew Bates well confidentially told the Consulate-General it wasn't a stunt: Bates was "a reasonably honest fool . . . [who] had 'fallen among thieves.'" 206 The most perplexing issue is Pütz's status. One bureaucrat wrote, "[H]is 'imprisonment' is not necessarily entirely involuntary," 207 and another reported that Pütz's fine was "the precise value of some precious stones that are known to be in [Pütz's wife's] possession." 208 Pütz told reporters that he was "lonely and frightened" in early September, 209

G. 1978-1990: Pirate Broadcasting Redux
In the years following the restoration of the monarchy, Sealand flirted with pirate broadcasting again. In early September of 1978, while the hostage drama was ongoing, the Post Office's radio enforcement group began logging transmissions to and from Sealand. 212 These weren't pirate broadcasts; they were point-to-point conversations, discussing such matters as the condition of the prisoners, press coverage, the weather out at sea, engine repairs, and grocery lists. 213 The Post Office staff quickly identified Roy Bates's voice and traced the landward half of the transmissions to his flat and office in Southend. 214 They obtained a search warrant, raided the flat, and confiscated his homebuilt equipment. 215 Although Joan Bates protested to the press that Sealand's radio equipment was "instrumental in rescuing at least ten fishermen or yachtsmen each year," 216 Roy Bates ultimately pleaded guilty to unlicensed broadcasting in June 1979 and paid a £250 fine. 217 In an ironic twist, Bates applied for a wireless license while the prosecution was pending. 218 The Post Office was ready to supply him with a very high frequency (VHF) telephone link, but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) objected out of fear that it might be taken as a form of recognition of some of Sealand's claims. 219 The matter was ultimately resolved in July 1980, when the FCO dropped its objections, 210 reasoning that it was better to have Bates broadcasting under a license than running "an ungoverned radio station." 220 A group of radio hams transmitted from Sealand on its fifteenth anniversary in 1982, 221 and in 1986, Sealand announced that it would be taking bids for three independent radio stations to broadcast from the platform. 222 A pirate station, Radio Galaxy, was interested, but the project never seems to have gotten off the ground. 223 Instead, Sealand announced plans in 1987 for its own TV station, with a lineup of movies and music videos. 224 The venture was serious enough to print up a brochure that promised programming from a studio in Ireland relayed through an improbable one-thousand-foot mast on Sealand, 225 and quoted advertising rates of ten thousand pounds for a thirty-second commercial. 226 Sealand's partner in the plans, an American named Wallace Kemper, was wanted for extradition to the United States on fraud charges and was arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with a three-millionpound fraud: the Sealand TV plan seems to have fallen apart. 227 Also in 1987, Michael Bates and a group of partners bought radio gear with the intention of starting up Sealand broadcasts by retransmitting other stations, but shelved the project in light of Britain's extension of territorial waters. 228 Sealand was also implicated in a pirate radio venture on the other side of the Atlantic. Allan Weiner, an American radio engineer who had been in trouble with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for unlicensed broadcasts as far back as 1971, 229 set up a Honduranflagged fishing ship named the Sarah four and one-half miles off the 220. Letter  This sludge is being dredged from the natural land of this planet Earth, and it is this natural land to which the legal expression "the laws of the land" refers, and the kind of natural land that Michael Bates seems to lack-in addition to logic and a grasp of reality. Because he asked the Evening Star, in a hypothetical manner, about the extension of UK territorial waters from three miles to 12 miles, when he asked: "If Britain imposed itself on us in that way . . . ," as if to say that the UK had not actually performed this undertaking. But of course the UK did extend its territorial waters long ago in 1987, and the actions of Harwich Haven Authority are proof that the UK is maintaining its own territorial waters. The hypothetical world of Michael Bates is what every ordinary person would term reality. It

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 433
Over the years, other self-styled information pirates have cast a longing eye towards Sealand. In 2007, the Pirate Bay, a Swedish website with a devil-may-care attitude about copyright law, 239 announced plans to buy Sealand. 240 It raised over twenty thousand dollars in donations through a website at BuySealand.com, well short of the ten-figure price tag named by the royal family, 241 and negotiations ultimately broke down. 242 Perhaps unknowingly, the Pirate Bay was echoing the 2001 experience of Matthew Goyer, who contemplated setting up an OpenNap 243 server on Sealand. 244 Nothing lasting came of it, or of an "amateur radio day," 245 or of hints in 2007 that Sealand was in negotiations with Russian venture capitalists to launch a communications satellite. 246 In addition to the regular drumbeat of stories about impending construction, Sealand has had its share of other development plans, including a 2004 Royal Bank of Sealand 247 and a 2007 online casino. 248 In 2007, Sealand listed itself for sale through the Spanish firm InmoNaranja. 249 is time for Michael to come out of his dream: his dream which is in reality a nightmare involving violence and illegal guns. Id The price tag was a modest €750,000,000. 250 Roy Bates also sometimes tells reporters about an incident in which he was approached by an innocent-sounding group seeking to do a business deal with Sealand, only to send them packing when he realized they were a front for more sinister doings. So far, Roy has told the story about drug smugglers, 251 mercenaries, 252 Argentina, 253 Libya, 254 and the CIA. 255

H. 1987-2011: Recent Developments
On October 1, 1987, the United Kingdom extended its territorial waters from three to twelve miles, thus bringing Sealand within the zone the United Kingdom claimed. 256 Although it has never forced a confrontation, the United Kingdom has consistently maintained since 1987 that Sealand is within its jurisdiction. 257 This is not to say that the government has been entirely clear on who has administrative or property rights over the place, only that it is regarded as subject to English jurisdiction. 258 For its part, Sealand claims the extension had no effect on it, as it was already a sovereign nation. 259 the company from opening an office in the swank Second Life neighborhood of Tropical Audy.  . . asked if they could install a radio transmitter on Sealand to beam religious broadcasts to Russia. I was quite interested-they were offering a lot of money-until someone told me the Church was a front for the CIA."). 256. Territorial Sea Act of 1987 § 1(a). One website claims that in late 2000, a judge at the Magistrate's Court in Southend held that Roughs Tower was within its jurisdiction. See Baskir, supra note 68. This is plausible in light of the intervening extension of British territorial waters, but I have found no independent confirmation. 257 . 258. See Hibberd, supra note 7. Hibberd argues that the position of the United Kingdom was driven by a game of bureaucratic hot potato. Each ministry tried to describe Roughs Tower in a way that made it someone else's problem. Thus, the Ministry of Defense considered it to be within the Crown Estate's ambit, and vice versa, with the Home Office also disclaiming responsibility on the basis of statutory limits on police powers. Id. at 29-30. The Treasury took the position in 1997 that the Tower was "a portable chattel which happens to be resting on the seabed." Id. at 30. 259. See Lucas, supra note 35.

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 435
In 1990, the Royal Maritime Auxiliary vessel Golden Eye was passing close to Sealand when Sealanders fired rifle shots to warn it away. 260 According to Roy Bates, the shots were a warning that the Golden Eye, which had not responded to radio calls, was passing too close. 261 The Golden Eye's crew, thinking they might be under attack, called the Thames Coastguard. 262 A police investigation 263 and perhaps a court case in Felixstowe 264 followed, but there is no clear report of the outcome. 265 Other alleged threats against Sealand over the years are harder to substantiate. These include Belgian mercenaries, 266 a Dutch plane, 267 being stalked by German and Dutch vessels, 268 and a U.S. helicopter "covered in rockets and heavy machine guns." 269 Roy Bates claims to have "argued a company of royal marines out of staging a helicopter invasion." 270 Michael Bates has said that a military helicopter tried to land marines on the platform, until he opened fire on them. 271 "'Then when I came back to Southend,' [Bates] finished indignantly, 'they put me in prison, the buggers. '" 272 In 1999, Prince Roy's fading health led him to appoint Michael as Prince Regent and Sovereign pro tempore. 273 Roy and Joan Bates have moved off of Sealand. 274 By 2000, they had a "pied-à-terre" in Essex. 275 They looked for a place to live in Florida, 276 but eventually retired to Spain. 277 The Bateses have dual nationality but no longer use their Sealand passports when they travel. 278 Michael Bates, for his part, has a "Hollywood-style bungalow" in Essex, 279 where he runs a business, "Fruits of the Sea," that harvests sea fern and cockles. 280 260. See James Cusick, Shots Fired in Sealand's Defence of a Small Freedom, INDEPENDENT, Feb. 24, 1990, at 6. 261. Id. Whether that was "too close" for its own navigational safety or the comfort of the Sealanders is not specified. 262. Id. 263. Id. 264. See Secret Government Sealand Revelations, supra note 104. 265. The most I have found is in Welcome to Sealand, supra note 2, which says only that "the matter was quickly dropped." Garfinkel, supra note 1. 266. See Deeley, supra note 116 (quoting Joan Bates as saying, "We've heard that a Belgian is going around offering £2,500 a head to mercenaries who will join in an attack to seize Sealand back off us"). 267. Id A serious fire broke out on Sealand on Friday, June 23, 2006. 281 The only person on Sealand at the time, a security guard, 282 tried and failed to put out the fire. 283 Suffering from smoke inhalation, he had to be airlifted out to Ipswitch Hospital on the mainland by a Royal Air Force helicopter. 284 More than twenty firefighters responded, 285 from a mix of private and governmental groups. 286 A tug sprayed Sealand with water as smoke billowed hundreds of feet into the air. 287 Michael Bates, who had been visiting his parents in Spain, moved quickly to reoccupy the platform, boarding it with his sons James and Liam on Sunday, June 25. 288 The damage, however, was extensive, estimated at half a million pounds. 289 That total doesn't include the costs of putting out the fire, for which the rescue services decided not to charge Sealand. 290 Charred debris and rusted metal were everywhere, and large quantities of water from the firefighting operation had pooled in the bottom of one of the legs. 291 Over much of the next year, work crews cleaned out the mess, repaired the living quarters, and made Sealand  Nov. 28 1965, Nov. 9, 1966, and noting that "Walton lifeboat were prepared to take the men off, but stated that they were not a ferry service"); id. at 106 ( Apr. 3, 1973); id. at 122 (Sept. 1, 1974, and including "considerable inconvenience" for the coast guard); see also CONWAY, supra note 38, at 203 ("It took more than forty-eight hours, two huge salvage tugs, and four Harbour Board crews to pull the battered radio ship, which refused to sink, off the Goodwin Sands."). Pirate radio ships sank with disconcerting frequency. See

I. Life on Sealand
Years of work have given the platform sparse but livable accommodations in the legs and a few fairly comfortable rooms with couches on the main deck. 294 The living quarters now have double-glazed glass and electric stoves, 295 and the views are, unsurprisingly, "awesome." 296 Less cheerfully, one caretaker explained, "I like being on my own . . . but one couple spent a few weeks out here and went mad, leaving suicide notes all over the place." 297 A journalist called it a "scrap heap," a "rusting heap of junk," and a "decrepit hulk." 298 Although Sealand sports a helipad, the main way on is by winch from the waves below. 299 Reporters' accounts of the experience are typically hair raising. 300 The nation has never supported much of a population. In 2002, Sealand reported to the Summit of Micronations that it had a population of twenty-seven. 301 The number is almost certainly exaggerated. For months in the late 1960s, Michael Bates and another man, Walter Mierisch, were the only ones aboard. 302 For much of the 1990s, Roy Bates occupied it by himself. 303 After HavenCo's launch, the Sealanders came aboard only for press visits; otherwise, it was occupied by one or two HavenCo employees. 304 When one reporter visited in 2000, the "crew" consisted of two men. 305 When another reporter visited in 2004, "the crew" aboard Sealand consisted of two men, Mike and John, supported by a shore-based "Sealand Guard" of three more: Jez, Wayne, and Sean. 306 292. Id Sealand has a flag, 307 a passport stamp, 308 a national anthem, 309 a coat of arms, 310 and a motto: e mare libertas ("from the sea, freedom"). 311 It also has a Facebook page, 312 a Twitter account, 313 and a YouTube channel. 314 The 1975 constitution drafted by Professor Achenbach has been replaced with a newer one, again a constitutional monarchy. 315 The government gives its address as SEALAND 1001, but then invariably adds, "c/o Sealand Post Bag, IP11 9SZ, UK." 316 For years, Sealanders would present their Sealand passports when traveling, 317 and accumulated stamps from a fair number of nations. 318 Sealand has conferred honorary titles on various celebrities for their support, such as TV presenter Ben Fogle, 319 who devoted a chapter in a book to Sealand, and automotive TV journalist Jeremy Clarkson, a "proper bloke's bloke" whom Prince Regent Michael would like to see be Prime Minister of Sealand. 320 The "Sealand Shopping Mall" sells the opportunity to purchase a title of Sealand nobility, complete with a

J. Other Sealands
Sealand has a doppelganger: following his failed coup attempt, Professor Achenbach established a government-in-exile in Germany. According to its theory of matters, Roy Bates "was declared dethroned on account of his anti-constitutional behaviour and his intentions to sell state-rights to a consortium, thereby robbing the citizens of Sealand of their own chances." 329 In response, Sealand citizens engaged in an "unarmed occupation of their state's territory," but Bates "repossessed the island in an act of 'piracy' which violated all existing laws." 330 At that point, the "still constitutional government of Sealand under Mr. Achenbach" went into exile. 331 The German Sealand accepts that it is in 321 exile and that Bates has actual possession of Sealand. It also hopes "to reinstall Roy of Sealand at an opportune time as its sovereign." 332 Nonetheless, acting on behalf of "people of the Principality of Sealand," it claims authority to make law for the country. 333 Achenbach transferred Roy's powers to a syndic via constitutional amendment, 334 appointing his lawyer, Dr. A.L.C.M. Oomen, as syndic in the fall of 1978. 335 A Constitution Council promulgated a new constitution in 1989. 336 The 1989 constitution is similar to the 1975 constitution, except that it moves from a monarchy in which the Sovereign issues all legislation to a constitutional model in which the Sovereign issues legislation "based on recommendations by the Government and in accordance with the Privy Council," and adds German as a national language. 337 In 1988 and 1989, Achenbach and Oomen established Johannes W.F. Sieger as Prime Minister and Chairman of the Privy Council. 338 Sieger proceeded to refashion "Sealand" as more of a business venture than a nation: The Principality of Sealand is a state with the qualities of a business group, which means the Principality of Sealand knows neither civil servants nor functionaries, it exclusively knows active collaborators!
The Principality of Sealand is represented only by those who contribute to the achievement of its targets and thus to the development of the Principality of Sealand. 339 Some of these activities are strange indeed. One involves a socalled "Vril implosion technology" that would "create symmetrical gravitational waves of any desired frequency" and could therefore "bring energy into atomic or molecular structures of appropriate materials and to store it there." 340 The material on the German Sealand's website is voluminous, and the English translations are not always intelligible, but it adds up to a heady brew of supernatural pseudoscience, 341 lost-treasure 332 conspiracy theory, 342 regular conspiracy theory 343 and repeated conflicts with the German authorities. 344 Sealand itself denounces these "fraudulent representations," disclaims any connection with the German Sealand, and warns the world that some of the German site's operators are "subject to arrest and prosecution for these and other offences against Principality law." 345 A Spanish group has engaged in even shadier dealings using the Sealand name. In the late 1990s, a nightclub and filling station owner under investigation for selling diluted gasoline identified himself as Sealand's "consul" and claimed diplomatic immunity. 346 The police ultimately found three "Sealand" offices and filed charges against some eighty people. 347 Their actual crimes were a mixture of two-bit and brazen: everything from skipping town with unpaid hotel bills to gunrunning. 348 They appeared to be led by a Spaniard named Francisco Trujillo, who fancied himself Sealand's "regent" and a colonel in its armed forces (for which he had uniforms designed) and ran a supposed Sealand Embassy in Madrid. 349 The group had created a website 350 that promoted html (Ger.) (last visited Jan. 23, 2012) (discussing flying saucers). Here is a sample of one of its statements, to give the flavor: The various offices of the Principality of Sealand and its diplomatic and trade missions in Germany have in recent years been searched by police in violation of its diplomatic immunity and in contravention to the Vienna Treaty, trying to find incriminating material. All these measures had to be cancelled as no indications to illegal activities were ever found.
The main reason for these searches was the attempt to get at documents from the Nazi times in possession of Sealand, also at information about the actual storage places of the Amber Room, the Treasure of the Reichspost, of flying disks, huge gold and silver caches and a multitude of cultural treasures of immeasurable value. Of  Sealand to potential investors. 351 Two of the group-the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Transport and Trade-tried to purchase tanks, fighter aircraft, and artillery from the Russian mafia, possibly for shipment to Sudan. 352 There may have been a connection between the Spanish group and the German Sealand; if so, however, its exact nature remains obscure. 353 Sealand itself has unconditionally denounced the Spaniards. 354 The "fake" Sealand passports have turned up in strange places. Some wound up in Eastern Europe, in the hands of pyramid schemers who had used them to travel to Libya, Iraq, and Iran. 355 Others were sold to would-be illegal immigrants to Europe 356 and to fearful residents of Hong Kong in the run-up to the Chinese resumption of sovereignty in 1997. 357 After Andrew Cunanan murdered the fashion designer Gianni Versace, he holed up on a houseboat before killing himself. 358 The houseboat belonged to Torstein Reineck, a businessman who held what purported to be a diplomatic Sealand passport and drove a Mercedes with diplomatic license plates. 359 The investigation led a State Depart- 351. The site claimed Sealand had a population of 160,000. See Gooch, supra note 36. It asked for foreign investment in a range of projects that put Sealand's own ambitions to shame: "A luxury hotel and casino, business center, sports complex, medical center, tuition-free University of Sealand, and Roman Catholic cathedral." Miller & Boudreaux, supra note 33. The site also asked visitors to indicate whether they were interested in citizenship, ID cards, passports, or drivers' licenses, and sold these credentials for between £5,500 and £35,000. Gooch, supra note 36. Id 353. A Dusseldorf businessman named Friedbert Ley-who had employed Trujillo at a roof insulation company-was the one who created the Spanish group's website, which listed Ley as "prime minister" in a hierarchy under Trujillo. Miller & Boudreaux, supra note 33. Presumably, the company was Isopol GMBH, named in Sealand y el Tráfico de Armas, supra note 352. Ley later denied any connection to the German Sealand, and, calling the site a "big joke," also denied any criminal connection. Miller & Boudreaux, supra note 33. Spanish authorities disagreed, saying that the "verdaderos cerebros [true brains]" of the group were in Germany, naming Ley and one Johnanes Weiger. See Sealand y el Tráfico de Armas, supra note 352. "Weiger" might refer to Johannes W.F. Seiger, of the German Sealand. The German Sealand for its part, claims that it was approached by the Spanish group, but that the Spaniards attempted first to defraud them and then offered to split the proceeds of highly sketchy transactions with them. See Press Release of April 20, 2000, supra note 341. At this, the German Sealand says it sent them packing, but since the international authorities were slow to take action, was unable to stop the resulting fraud by the Spanish group. Id Sealand. 361 Even though almost nothing was known about him, and he had never been to Sealand, King Marduk had big plans, saying, "We have a strategy to create a new Sealandcity, wind farms, and an enterprise platform which will be a centre for modern communication technologies and a paradise for enterprise strategies." 362 Nothing more has been heard from him since. Another short-lived claim was made online by the "Republic of Sealand" in early 2011. 363

K. Themes
A few themes appear over and over again in Sealand's history. Most obviously, its physical existence has always been a little precarious, from the near disaster of its unbalanced sinking in 1942 to the fire in 2006. The contrast between the big dreams-the three-mile floating island, the casino, the tanker port-and the reality has always been striking. Commercially, Sealand hasn't been much of a success either: Bates claims to have poured large sums of money into it. 364 It has always been surrounded by a swarm of schemers, scammers, and mystery men: Ronan O'Rahilly, Alexander Achenbach, Wallace Kemper, King Marduk.
Still, there's a reason why even Red Bull and Fall Out Boy have been drawn to this "craziest kind of story ever." 365 Sealand is a powerful symbol: a place outside of the national system, literally offshore. 366  Marduk's modus operandi was otherwise to claim ownership of pieces of land around Lake Constance, at the intersection of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, alleging that they were unmentioned in post-World War II treaties, and thus unowned. Id. United Nations membership would have been a stretch, given that in 1982 a United Nations spokesman said, "The United Nations is an organization of governments, not gun platforms. The secretary-general has a nut file for such applications." See Baker, supra note 254. 362. Geates, supra note 290. 363 symbol, it has resonated with other dreamers. 367 Roy Bates had plenty of big dreams, and so did his German and Spanish rivals. Sealand passports were a lucrative business, one suspects, not just because their bearers expected them to function as get-out-of-jail-free cards, but also because of the romance associated with this most unusual nation. There is a natural line connecting Roy Bates the offshore radio pirate with his modern-day counterparts: HavenCo and the Pirate Bay. 368 For such a small place, Sealand's history is surprisingly and consistently violent. Even among other pirate radio operators, Roy Bates had a reputation for being the sort of man who was willing to seize first and ask questions later. 369 Bates occupied first Knock John and then Roughs Tower by evicting the previous inhabitants. Roy and Michael Bates then defended Roughs Tower from Radio Caroline with petrol bombs and from the government with gunshots. The 1978 assault is the high point, of course, but the Bates family has regularly threatened potential intruders and fired shots across the bow of bewildered mariners.
Roy Bates's outsize personality also casts a long shadow over Sealand. Roy plays reporters like violins, 370 and the archival files make clear that he was running circles around befuddled bureaucrats during the crucial first years of 1967 and 1968. Behind the roguish eccentricity, there's also a remarkable force of will. Almost everyone who has visited Sealand is eager to leave after a short while, but the Bateses have stuck it out for over forty years. And Roy Bates personally led the helicopter assault on Sealand during the 1978 countercoup; he has the outsize personality of other colonial liberators: a Bolivar or a Nkrumah. 371 To quote the 367. The Dutch studio Metahaven, fascinated by Sealand's rich symbolic and metaphoric content, produced an extensive multiyear art project, the Sealand Identity Project, to explore its implications.  Mar. 30, 1969, at 8. 370. As yet another example, Radio Essex convinced a reporter from the Orpington & Kentish Times that it served its staff "exquisitely prepared meals by a master chef purloined from a famous London Hotel." SINCLAIR & LE-ROI, supra note 32, at 22. Typical fare aboard Knock John, however, tended more to "slightly 'off' corned beef, brittle bread with little holes where the fascinating green bits had been carefully chopped out, and mugs of hot, weak tea." Id. at 10.; see also id. at 66-67 (describing how Bates provided Radio Essex staff with a "magnificent feast" to show off to a television crew). 371. Hibberd describes Britain's indecisive Sealand policy as "a small but typical example of Britain's post-imperial malaise." Hibberd, supra note 7, at 2. For a good example of Sealand's intriguing status as a post-colonial nation, consider an editorial cartoon of a man in a rowboat next to a Sealandesque platform. British Keep out Independent, SUN (Eng.), Oct. 28, 1968. The caption reads, "Says his name is Smith-wants to know how we got away with it." Id. At the time, Ian Smith was the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, which had declared independence from Britain in an attempt to preserve white minority rule. No

III. HAVENCO
HavenCo started on the island of Anguilla, at the 1998 Financial Cryptography conference, when Sean Hastings met Ryan Lackey. Hastings was a programmer who had moved to Anguilla to work on online gambling projects. 373 Lackey was an independent-minded MIT dropout. 374 They were worried about preserving personal freedom and concerned about expansive government power; they believed that the free flow of information on the Internet could solve both of those problems by enabling individuals to speak without fear of governmental oppression. 375 To put their libertarian beliefs and technical skills into action, they were both looking to create a data haven.

A. "Data Haven"
As Michael Froomkin explains, a data haven is "the information equivalent to a tax haven-a single nation that offer[s] to warehouse data offshore." 376 An ideal data haven would combine substantial computer infrastructure with highly permissive laws on what can be done with those computers. A combination of fast servers and loose laws means that any data too sensitive to be stored and distributed from home will migrate to the haven.
Although William Gibson is sometimes credited with coining the term "data haven," 377 it has a surprising, and revealing, prehistory. In the 1970s, as countries grappled with the privacy issues raised by large databases of personal information, they tended to conceptualize the problem in territorial terms, enacting laws that imposed privacy standards on databases within their borders. 378  looser laws. 379 Government commissions studying the problem began to be concerned about the possibility of "data haven" jurisdictions deliberately offering lower privacy standards. 380 A British management consultant, Adrian Norman, took the idea and ran with it, writing a spoof of a feasibility study for Project Goldfish, a "thoroughly private and secure system" along the lines of Swiss banking, offering data storage to clients worldwide. 381 Norman predicted that small countries would be "willing to provide data havens analogous to tax havens." 382 Alerted to the issue, many countries eventually placed restrictions not just on the collection and storage of personal data, but also on transferring it to other jurisdictions with weaker privacy laws. 383 The idea of regulatory evasion through offshoring data, however, had escaped into wider consciousness. 384 Science fiction writers knew a compelling concept when they heard one. 385 Parts of William Gibson's "Sprawl trilogy" 386 take place on the Freeside space station, which floats in high-earth orbit. 387 One of its more 379  385. An earlier book, JOHN BRUNNER, THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975), envisions a programmer who successfully hacks the authoritarian government's communications network from a secret undisclosed location, rather than a legal jurisdiction. More recently, the term has fallen into the hands of the authors of potboiler thrillers, who tend to use it to refer to any secure colocation facility, preferably in an exotic locale. See, e.g., KEN MACLEOD, COSMONAUT KEEP 67 (2000) ("Like, this place is a data haven?"); THOMAS F. MONTELEONE, EYES OF THE VIRGIN 100 (2002) ("Kate glowed as she began to tell him about data havens. 'Basically, they're like safe deposit boxes for digital informationbut much bigger.'"). 386 profitable lines of business, Gibson mentions in almost offhand fashion, is serving as a data haven. 388 Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net imagines a future in which Grenada, Singapore, and Cyprus quietly tolerate all sorts of unsafe experimental technology that the larger nations keep heavily regulated, from super sharp ceramic machetes to mutagenic suntan lotion that changes its user's race. 389 They run a sideline in data haven services along the lines of Project Goldfish, storing the personal data that companies want to have but aren't allowed to keep. 390 More recently, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon describes the best-known fictional data haven. 391 The Sultan of Kinakuta, a small oil-rich island in the Sulu Sea, invites the novel's protagonists to build the infrastructure to make the island into a communications hub; for his part, he will supply an absence of copyright and other regulation. 392 The other group to take the data haven idea seriously was the cypherpunks. 393 This loosely associated group of techno-libertarians coalesced in the early 1990s around a sense that individual freedom was under threat from a rising surveillance state, and that the solution lay in the widespread individual use of cryptography to keep both messages and identities secure from prying eyes. 394 For the cypherpunks, security through encryption was a moral imperative, because it would make all forms of government restrictions on speech unenforceable. 395 The Thought Police can't arrest you if they don't know you are a dog. Many of the cypherpunks were programmers; they sought to create the neces- 388. GIBSON 393. The two groups are related. The cypherpunks were frequently inspired by sci-fi visions, and Cryptonomicon is essentially a novel about a group of cypherpunk entrepreneurs. Even the names illustrate the crossover. "Cypherpunk" is a portmanteau of "cipher" and "cyberpunk," the usual name for the subgrenre of sci-fi in which Sterling and Gibson wrote; Cryptonomicon is coincidentally close to the title of Tim May's Cyphernomicon, a 160,000-word FAQ and compendium of cypherpunk information. See Timothy C. May, The Cyphernomicon, CYPHERPUNKS (Sept. 10, 1994), http://www. cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon Cypher-FAQ § 3 (1999), http://web.mac.com/nealstephenson/Neal_Stephensons_Site/cypherFAQ.html (discussing similarity of titles). A critical link was Vernor Vinge's highly influential story, True Names, in Binary Star No. 5, which imagined a networked future in which hackers and dissidents were safe from the government, or "Great Enemy," only as long as their "true names" were unknown-i.e., their offline and online identities couldn't be linked. See 396 as well as fight for the legal right to use them. 397 The cypherpunks used "data haven" in the standard sense of a permissive jurisdiction, but also imagined that a data haven could be "offshore in cyberspace." 398 In 1993, Timothy May released BlackNet, a proof-of-concept system that used encryption to enable a fully anonymous information market 399 in anything governments would like to prohibit, potentially including "medical, religious, [and] chemical" information, and "credit databases, deadbeat renter files, organ bank markets, etc." 400 Critics reacted strongly against the idea-Dorothy Denning complained that it would lead to "tax evasion, money laundering, espionage (with digital dead drops), contract killings, and implementation of data havens for storing and marketing illegal or controversial material[]" 401but to cypherpunks, these consequences were either desirable in themselves or outweighed by the overall increase in freedom. 402 This is where HavenCo's founders enter the picture. American programmer Vince Cate had moved to Anguilla in 1994, renounced his U.S. citizenship, 403 and started a "data haven" Internet company named Offshore Information Services. 404 Sean Hastings followed with his own No There's historical irony here. An idea that began its life as a negative had flipped into a positive. A "data haven" was no longer part of a debate over how to protect individual (privacy) rights by restricting the flow of information; instead, it was a central idea in a debate over how to protect individual (speech) rights by encouraging the flow of information. 408 This irony serves as a reminder that the data haven vision can be pro-or anti-privacy depending on your theory of why privacy matters. 409 More generally, governmental control sounds like a better or worse idea depending on your views about the government in question. 410

B. Rise
Hastings and Lackey agreed that Anguilla wasn't going to work as a data haven. Hastings had grown dispirited with Anguillan corruption, concluding that the island was "hardly the libertarian mecca" he had expected. 411 Pornography and gambling were both illegal, and a company could be shut down by court order. 412  Strauss's book How to Start Your Own Country, they started thinking about heading for even smaller waters: Pacific islands, or potentially even building their own land on the Cortez Bank, an underwater range about a hundred miles from San Diego. 413 The most promising prospect was Sealand, which features prominently in Strauss's book. 414 Hastings pulled together a web site with a dossier of information on Sealand and its claims to independence. 415 The two of them sought investors and found a group including Avi Freedman and Joichi Ito, successful Internet entrepreneurs. 416 Hastings and his wife Jo made contact with the Bates family and flew to England to check Sealand out. 417 Jo Hastings was unenthused by the prospect of living on Sealand, but not Sean, who wrote: An electronic currency system was the lever.
Here was a place to stand. I could move the world. 418 Hastings and Lackey moved forward, opening negotiations with the royal family. The Bateses were immediately interested: "[t]his [was] the first [proposal] that seemed to be really suited to what we are," Roy would later say. 419 They drew up a business plan, 420 articles of incorporation, 421 and bylaws 422 for a Sealand corporation to be named HavenCo. Its initial board of directors comprised Sean and Jo Hastings, Lackey, Freedman, and Ito. 423 Sameer Parekh, a well-known computer security entrepreneur, became chairman of the board. 424 They predicted that their revenue could potentially reach sixty-five million dollars by the end of the third year of operation, 425 with a total headcount of nineteen em- ployees by the end of the first. 426 The capitalization plan gave the founders a two-thirds stake, with the remaining one-third of the equity to be split between corporate advisors and the royal family. 427 Those stakes would be diluted with two rounds of venture capital and an IPO that would ideally value the company at five hundred million dollars and leave Sean, Jo, and Ryan each sitting on almost fifty million dollars in HavenCo stock. 428 Sealand would offer its customers a combination of first-world infrastructure and third-world regulation. 429 Its website promised adherence to the "Philosophy of Contract Autonomy, as opposed to the Philosophy of Regulation." 430 Echoing famous cyberlibertarian manifestoes, HavenCo declared, "Free comunication [sic] can never be a crime, and by itself can never hurt anyone. Criminal acts should be pursued at the point where the act takes place, not on the common carriers that enable all individuals to do business freely, such as telephone and Internet infrastructure providers[]." 431 On everyone's minds-both at HavenCo and among reporters-was the issue of whether HavenCo could actually offer its customers meaningful security, given that much of its content was likely to be controversial. 432 On the technical level, it planned to offer customers redundant hardware and cryptographic security. 433 Ultimately, it hoped to offer a "secure execution environment," in which customers' data was encrypted at all times, even when being operated on, so that not even HavenCo could tell what they were doing. 434 Physical security was at a premium. To keep out unwanted guests, the machine rooms themselves, in one of the tower's legs, would be flooded with nitrogen and would require scuba gear to enter. 435 Four guards were to be on duty at all times, and those guards would be pack- ing: 436 .50 caliber machine guns are not for the dilettante. 437 Notwithstanding Sealand's arsenal, in case of attack, the endgame was to "power off the machine, optionally destroy it, possibly turn over the smoking wreck to the attacker, and securely and anonymously refund payment to the owner of the server." 438 On the policy side, Sealand wouldn't be a zone of complete lawlessness. An "anonymous and untraceable payment system" or an "oldfashioned, adults-only pornography" would be one thing, 439 "but if you want to run a spamming operation, launder drug money, or send kiddie porn anywhere-forget it." 440 The typical customer, HavenCo expected, would be a company looking for subpoena-proof data storage. 441 Since network links could be cut, particularly by Britain, HavenCo planned redundant links to multiple countries 442 and expected satellite communications to be a workable backup. 443 A physical blockade would be "difficult to maintain" and "solvable through negotiation." 444 And even invasion wouldn't be the end of the world: "legal actions" and "diplomatic arrangements" would be possible. 445 The company expected Sealand to "negotiate as an equal" 446 with other countries and to press any adverse rulings in the courts of the countries making them. 447 From the beginning, HavenCo's founders were clear with their investors that the worst-case fallback plan was to accept British jurisdiction and laws and "operate as a British co-location facility." 448 Given the high prices companies had been willing to pay for colocation during the dotcom boom, this may not have been any more unreasonable an assumption than many other Internet entrepreneurs were making at the time. 449 It also appeared that it might be a necessary fallback: representatives 436 from both the United Kingdom and United States stated to a reporter that their governments did not recognize Sealand. 450 The company itself was incorporated in Anguilla, then later reincorporated in Cyprus, 451 but was also registered to do business in England in 2000. 452 Looking towards Sealand, the business plan concluded that the "only risk" from Sealand and its royal family was breach of contract, which was "unlikely, as once we will have taken occupation of his island, we will control Sealand." 453 And in the long run the goal was to be independent of any one location; the company hoped to replicate the model in other small countries. 454 HavenCo launched in 2000 with a Wired cover story and a great deal of optimism. 455 The combination triggered a media explosion notable for its lack of serious further reporting. 456 But following the initial outpouring of interest, HavenCo dropped quickly off the radar screen. Ryan Lackey appeared at the Defcon conference in 2001 457 and the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in 2002 458 to give status updates: things were going modestly but well, and the future was bright.

C. Fall
Then in 2003, Lackey, no longer with HavenCo, appeared at Defcon again and dropped a bombshell: HavenCo was all but defunct. 459 Some of the problems were purely operational: disorganization and the time spent dealing with press caused the company to lose track of client inquiries. Meanwhile, Sean and Jo Hastings left the company "for personal reasons" by the end of the summer of 2000. 460 The company operated in a 450. See Garfinkel, supra note 1, at 239 (British consulate in New York: "Although Mr. Bates styles the platform as the Principality of Sealand, the UK government does not regard Sealand as a state." U.S. State Department: "There are no independent principalities in the North Sea. As far as we are concerned, they are just Crown dependencies of Britain."). 451 In 10 years, we'll be investing profits in turning Sealand into a larger island . . . . It's unclear right now whether it will be a hotel/casino space or purely a larger secure colocation facility. We hope to be in operation everywhere by then . . . . By then I hope any free country in the world will have a HavenCo secure facility in major cities of commerce . . . . No doubt we'll also have servers on ships, on the moon, and on orbiting satellites. Assuming computers continue to get smaller, a single box on the moon could serve a huge bunch of customers!"). 456 kind of corporate informality, never issuing stock to its investors and employees, even as the years rolled on. 461 Its facilities never came close to the image it created among the public. The south tower was never full of servers, 462 and the nitrogen was a myth, too, as HavenCo had admitted in 2002. 463 The real reason visitors weren't allowed down the south tower wasn't because they might see or damage something they shouldn't, but rather because there was nothing to see. The "ultra-high bandwidth IP communications directly into the Internet backbone[]" 464 also turned out to be have been oversold. The fiber-optic cable to England wasn't ready on time, and later, the company providing service through it went bankrupt in the dot-com crash, leading to a two-month outage. 465 The satellite link HavenCo relied on in its place had only 128Kbps of bandwidth-roughly the speed of a good personal home Internet connection at the time. 466 When the company was hit with denial-of-service attacks, the outages sometimes lasted for days. 467 HavenCo had about ten customers; 468 most were online gambling sites. 469 In 2002, HavenCo told a reporter that it had been profitable since 2001. 470 In reality, though, as Lackey revealed in 2003, it was breaking even on its "cash costs"-so it was profitable only if one neglected liabilities that would come due down the road. 471 One of those liabilities would prove its undoing.
Part of the original agreement, premised as it was on large profits within just a few years, was a schedule of large cash sums to be paid to Sealand. 472 A "gentleman's agreement" with Prince Regent Michael held 461. Id 469. See Gilmour, supra note 298 (fifty-percent gambling); Lackey, supra note 232, audio at 43:05 ("There is an organ option site that has transacted exactly zero organs, there is a casino, an online stock market that only trades that casino . . . ."); Stranger Than Paradise: Transcript, ON MEDIA (May 20, 2005), http://www.onthemedia.org/2005/may/20/stranger-than-paradise/transcript/ ("all" gambling). The one nongambling business I have been able to specifically identify was a company selling unauthorized "Fast400" accelerators for IBM minicomputers. One of its owners explained that they had been "happy customers" of HavenCo. E-mail from Leif Svalgaard (Feb. 23, 2011) (on file with author). 470 through the fall of 2001, 473 but then an advisor to the royal family entered the picture. 474 According to Lackey, the advisor interfered with technical decisions, such as recommending expensive and unreliable changes to its network connectivity. 475 The advisor also demanded that customer inquiries be handled by his girlfriend in the United Kingdom: Lackey objected for security reasons, but the royal family backed the advisor. 476 Worse, the advisor was concerned that HavenCo was bad for Sealand's image and quest for sovereignty. 477 Lackey took to adding new services, such as an anonymizing remailer, on the sly. 478 Things came to a head in May 2002, when Malaysian entrepreneur Alex Tan approached Sealand with a plan to serve streaming video. 479 Tan's previous site, film88.com, had offered users video on demand, utterly without permission, and was quickly shut down by the movie industry. 480 Tan's new idea was to stream videos from legally purchased DVDs, restricting the viewing of any given movie to one customer at a time. 481 A Sealand advisor told the royal family that it risked bad publicity, and they balked at the deal. 482 The fear was that the United States would pressure Britain to put pressure on Sealand if it turned into a streaming-movie source, 483 and the Bateses were determined to protect Sealand's standing as a responsible member of the world community. 484 The decision was the straw that broke the camel's back for Lackey, 485 who decided to make a gradual exit from the "stagnating" compa-UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 ny. 486 Meanwhile, Prince Michael, worried by Lackey's increasingly secretive ways, had lost trust in him. 487 In November of 2002, Sealand offered to take over HavenCo, and worked out a "mutually beneficial agreement" to restructure (and start paying) HavenCo's debts, issue shares, and continue its operations. 488 Lackey would continue as a reseller of HavenCo services. 489 He turned over administrative access to the servers. 490 According to the account Lackey gave at Defcon, Prince Regent Michael and his advisors broke the agreement within days, 491 freezing Lackey out completely and seizing personal computers left behind. 492 The corporate aspects of the deal-issuing shares, repaying debts to people like Lackey, who had poured much of his own money and $40,000 of credit into the company, and so on-were ignored. 493 Since Sealand now had both physical and virtual control of the servers, HavenCo had been "effectively 'nationalized.'" 494 In response, HavenCo, now for all practical purposes an arm of the Sealand government, made it clear that he was no longer welcome: "Mr. Lackey is no longer an employee of HavenCo . . . . He does not at this time have a valid visa for return." 495 Lackey went, of all places, to Iraq, where he founded an ISP, Blue Iraq, providing Internet connectivity for the military and contractors. 496 The new HavenCo also took a rather different attitude toward offshore hosting. A spokesman said that its acceptable use policy "forbids any act . . . which is against international law . . . or contrary to international custom and practice." 497 Sean Hastings of HavenCo suggested that Sealand's turn away from an anything-goes attitude was sparked by the 486 491. Lackey, supra note 232, audio at 25:45 ("Within five days, they violated this agreement. . . . They tried to enforce a non-compete agreement with me, which, interestingly enough, never existed, because they never had one."). 492. Id. audio at 25:56; see also Lackey, supra note 245, slides at 25. 493. Lackey, supra note 232, audio at 25:26; see also id. audio at 15:15 ("[M]aking capital improvements to a place we didn't really own."); id. audio at 26:09 ("They also owe me $220,000."). Michael Bates, however, disputes this account, arguing that he also put large amounts of time and effort into HavenCo and received almost nothing for it. See E-mail from Michael Bates to Nate Anderson, supra note 484. 494 In Bates's words, "We wouldn't do anything which was anti-British or unethical or whatever, you know." 499 Bates explained that he had passed up many business opportunities because they were "a little bit on the wrong side, you know." 500 Simon called Bates "a loyal British subject who sees Sealand as a British invention." 501 The new HavenCo claimed to have numerous customers and a growing installation. 502 In 2004, the locals were still denying reporters permission to see most of the south leg of the tower. 503 In early 2007, the HavenCo website was redesigned to remove most of the detailed technical promises; they were replaced with a simple statement about HavenCo and Sealand and a pointer to "authorized resellers." 504 The new terms of service were much more restrictive: "No pornography that would be considered illegal within the EU," "No infringement of copyright," and "No material that is obscene, threatening, abusive, libelous, or encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offence." 505 This is a fairly permissive policy by the standards of many modern online service providers, but quite conservative compared with the original promise of HavenCo. The final indignity came in 2008, when the HavenCo website went offline and the domain was redirected to point at a server outside of the network actually hosted from Sealand. 506 Today, even the HavenCo website is gone.

IV. THE RULE OF LAW
We are now in a position to ask what Sealand and HavenCo can tell us about law in an Internet age. There are three ways of approaching the issue, corresponding to the three bodies of law with which HavenCo concerned itself: the national laws of other countries, the international law of Sealand's sovereignty, and Sealand's internal laws regulating HavenCo's 498 operations. Intertwined with this question will be another: why did HavenCo fail? This Part argues that the two questions have a common answer: the rule of law. The rule of law is a complex, contested concept; even people who agree that the rule of law a good thing can disagree quite forcefully on just what it is. 507 HavenCo's relationships to different bodies of law resonate with different flavors of the rule of law. When it came to national Internet law, HavenCo rejected national claims to self-government through law. When it came to international law, HavenCo relied on the formal rules of state sovereignty. And when it came to Sealand law, HavenCo put its trust in law as a protection against arbitrary governmental action. We will see that these different conceptions of the rule of law are incompatible. Without national self-government, HavenCo had no plausible theory of where the other laws it relied on would come from.
Before we begin, it will help to survey briefly the previous scholarship on Sealand and HavenCo. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu give HavenCo four pages in their book Who Controls the Internet? 508 It appears twice, bookending their chapter on governmental power. At the start, HavenCo is defiant, challenging all governmental authority. At the end it has been humbled, brought low by national power over intermediaries, especially banks. This story isn't wrong, just incomplete. "Law" here is just something imposed by governments on people: national law, in our framework. Although Goldsmith and Wu perceptively note both Sealand's desire to be recognized as an "actual country" and HavenCo's ultimate "nationalization," they never follow up on the international-law and Sealand-law angles these crucial facts suggest. Ironically, their emphasis on national law understates their case, since it tends to make law look like government fiat. As we will see, widening our view to include HavenCo's other legal challenges will help us appreciate more fully the rule-of-law factors that can make national law legitimate.
Jonathan Zittrain gives Sealand a page in an essay, Be Careful What You Ask For: Reconciling a Global Internet and Local Law, and concludes: "[T]he existence of Sealand doesn't much change the nature of the jurisdiction and governance debates." 509 Like Goldsmith and Wu, Zittrain observes that national governments had indirect power over HavenCo through the intermediaries it relied on, although his intermediary of choice is the Internet service provider. He also adds that HavenCo's clients are still subject to jurisdiction where they reside. Again, this is a discussion only of national law. Sealand's sovereignty and legal system are never even considered. Zittrain also devotes a sev- 507 en-page section to HavenCo and Sealand in a casebook, although only one of those pages is original. 510 Four out of five of the "notes and questions" deal exclusively with national law and enforcement authority, and even the one that begins, "It is important to stress that Sealand maintains its own laws with respect to use of the Internet," ultimately has to do with indirect governmental control via intermediaries. 511 Like Goldsmith and Wu, Zittrain doesn't follow up on the implications of his trenchant but brief observations. A trio of student articles have asked whether Sealand is truly independent under international law. 512 Despite some good factual research, however, they are mostly interested in the abstract question of whether Sealand is formally sovereign and the practical question of whether national governments can enforce their laws against HavenCo. That is, although they discuss international-law questions, they don't do so in a way that sheds light on the national law ones. They ask only what the law is, not what it means.
This survey exhausts the scholarship on HavenCo. A few more authors have written about Sealand, but only with respect to the international law issues its claims to independence raise. 513 They don't connect their analysis to HavenCo's struggles with national governments, or to Sealand's own legal system. Let us do so.

A. National Law
HavenCo's raison d'être was to allow its customers to avoid national laws. 514 Move your data to HavenCo, went the theory, and it would be beyond the reach of governmental censors, snoops, and prudes. Online, freedom and liberty would flourish. The Internet had touched off a regulatory race to the bottom, and HavenCo intended to win. 510. ZITTRAIN, supra note 3, at 40-46. The remaining pages consist of excerpts from Simson Garfinkel's and Zittrain's articles. See generally Garfinkel, supra note 1; Zittrain, supra note 3. A photograph of Sealand also graces the cover of the book. 511. ZITTRAIN, supra note 3, at 46. 512. See Arenas, supra note 6, at 1173, 1181; Dennis, supra note 3, at 296; Note, Sealand-The Next New Haven?, 27 SUFFOLK TRASNAT'L L. REV. 127, 146 (2003). A fourth student article, which is mostly about peer-to-peer networking and copyright reform, is deeply confused. For example, at one point it argues that Sealand renders copyright law unenforceable for a surprising reason: "Because Sealand is not a sovereign nation, it cannot join the international copyright regime . . To be sure, HavenCo had its limits-no spam, no hacking, no child pornography, no drug-money laundering-which reflected a mix of pragmatic self-defense and policy preferences. 515 Had HavenCo succeeded, though, these rules would have been rendered equally irrelevant, as other, more permissive data havens sprang up to evade Sealand's policies. Indeed, had the cypherpunk agenda of strong cryptography, anonymous transactions, and untraceable distribution embraced by Ryan Lackey come to fruition, it wouldn't even have taken competitors to undermine HavenCo's policies: its customers could have exchanged child pornography to their depraved hearts' content, and HavenCo would have been powerless even to know that it was going on.
Thus, the conventional wisdom is quite correct when it claims that the idea of a data haven stands in direct opposition to essentially all national law touching on speech or the Internet. 516 And, as the Internet has expanded its reach into all aspects of life, the opposition has likewise expanded to touch on almost every area of law. HavenCo was selling the end of law. "Third-world regulation" was a euphemism for minimal regulation-or none at all. In its search for the lowest common denominator, HavenCo was willing to divide by zero.

HavenCo and National Law
In that light, it's worth asking why the expected demand for legal evasion never materialized. In hindsight, HavenCo was caught in a market segment that was hard to monetize. There weren't, it turned out, very many customers willing to pay for the kind of regulatory arbitrage HavenCo offered. Most were better off either complying with the law or ignoring it altogether. In neither case would buying HavenCo's services make much sense.
As an example of a customer better off falling into line with law, consider "a typical HavenCo customer circa 2005," as explained by journalist Simson Garfinkel: MacroMaxx, a company that wants to avoid subpoena risk: MacroMaxx execs could say, "Gee, we don't have that here." The official would be stymied, because the email simply wouldn't be on the premises, and it's up to MacroMaxx whether it keeps any backups around. The primary data would be housed only at Sealand. 517 It's a clever trick on paper, but it doesn't work in the real world. The bits may be on Sealand and beyond a court's power, but MacroMaxx itself is subject to jurisdiction everywhere it does business. As long as it 515. The child-pornography rule came from Sealand law. The spam rule is especially striking, given that in 2000, spam was generally legal. 516. HavenCo would do what Sealand ordered, of course, but the point of choosing Sealand was that Sealand wouldn't order it to do very much. 517. Garfinkel, supra note 1, at 32.

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 461
has control over the data, MacroMaxx can be ordered to produce it. 518 Generations of scammers and tax evaders have learned that the security of offshore banking lasts only as long as they're willing to endure a civil contempt order-in prison. 519 In order to protect itself from the unpleasant application of local law, a business has to avoid touching ground in a jurisdiction altogether. 520 Offshoring just the data isn't sufficient; the company has to offshore itself. Sealand was never big enough to play physical host, as well as virtual. 521 Some businesses are willing to stay purely virtual, but most aren't, for a natural reason: they want to do business. 522 That's what Yahoo! realized when it faced a French court judgment to drop user auctions of Nazi memorabilia: it made substantial money selling ads targeted at French users, it had French offices, and France was a pleasant place for its corporate officers to visit. 523 It's one thing to ignore a small and puritanical jurisdiction you don't need to set foot in and aren't trying to reach anyway. It's quite another to sell into a large market without getting snared up in institutions its legal system can reach. 524 HavenCo repeatedly dealt with companies (especially gambling sites) that wanted to create complete businesses. In order to take payments in a country, the companies would need to incorporate there-and once they had, they typically purchased colocation locally, as well. 525 In Ryan Lackey's words, "Sovereignty alone has little value without commercial support from banks, etc.  Cir. 1999) (finding that Ponzi-scheme operators retained control over an offshore trust account with an "event of duress" clause that purported to remove them as trustees if they were ordered to repatriate funds from it, and affirming the contempt finding against them). 520. One HavenCo customer was indeed brought to heel by a civil lawsuit, albeit years after the HavenCo/Sealand deal had fallen apart. See Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Fast400 Saga Ends: IBM and Stracka Settle Lawsuit, 14 IT JUNGLE (Nov. 21, 2005), http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh112105-story01.html. 521. In HavenCo's defense, the assumption that the location of the data was the critical legal factor in determining jurisdiction over it was hardly unique. It was a commonplace in discussions of data havens, going right back to the original data-protection reports. See REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON DATA PROTECTION, supra note 380. Even the European Union Data Protection Directive, a product of the mid-1990s, arguably makes the hidden assumption that regulation is required at the moment when data is transferred to a different jurisdiction because after that, the first country will lose jurisdiction over it. If companies realized that the costs of noncompliance with local law could sometimes be surprisingly high, they also realized that the costs of compliance could sometimes be surprisingly low. There are and have been exceptions-China's thoroughgoing surveillance and Arab states' extensive indecency controls come to mind-but many developed nations have settled into an equilibrium in which a few specific restrictions on Internet speech coexist with a general freedom for most purposes. HavenCo's one publicly confirmed client, the Tibetan government in exile, 527 is now hosted by an Internet company in Arkansas. 528 U.S. freespeech law proved perfectly adequate, no need of Sealand.
As this example illustrates, the diversity of local values, which at one time seemed likely to reduce Internet speech to only the inoffensive mush that would pass muster in every country, 529 has arguably had the opposite effect. The United States hasn't adopted European restrictions on hate speech; most European countries haven't adopted U.S. restrictions on online gambling. The hate speech pours forth from U.S. servers; the gambling from European ones. For most purposes, cheap commodity hosting on one side of the Atlantic or the other could easily outcompete Sealand's more expensive boutique product in the middle of the North Sea. 530 HavenCo also had trouble competing with free-especially when free met illegal. Its founders understood that professional criminals had little reason to bother with a data haven. "And if you're going to run a secret server where you don't need to get the benefit of jurisdiction, you might as well take a stolen credit card number and go buy a server at a company with thousands of servers." 531 Today, now that vertically integrated criminal organizations control massive botnets of hijacked personal computers, even the stolen credit card and hosting company are superfluous. Why pay for something you can steal more cheaply for yourself?
Similarly, the last decade has shown that casual lawbreakers are mostly content to use highly insecure but free and convenient services, 527. Garfinkel, supra note 1, at 234. 528. This fact can be confirmed by querying the whois servers of Network Solutions Inc., which reveal that the technical contact for tibet.com is Carl Shivers, of Aristotle Inc. in Little Rock, Arkansas. NETWORK SOLUTIONS, http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/tibet.com (last visited Jan. 23, 2012). 529. See ZITTRAIN, supra note 3, at 6-8 (describing the "'slowest ship in the convoy' problem"). 530. See Lackey, supra note 232, audio at 13:25 (estimating the cost of HavenCo colocation at ten times the cost of comparable land-based colocation); HavenCo., Services Rate Sheet, HAVENCO (Oct. 10, 2001), http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20020406103213/http://www.havenco.com/products_and_ services/rates.html (quoting the least expensive hosting plan of $750 per month). The collapse of the dot-com bubble also put paid to HavenCo's expectation that even plain vanilla colocation would be profitable. Even for secure colocation, an undisclosed mainland location offers a better value proposition than an offshore fort that must bring all its equipment in by inflatable boat. In Lackey's words, "We were doing a little bit better than people like WorldCom and Enron, for a while." Lackey, supra note 232, audio at 14:00. 531. Gilmour, supra note 298.

No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 463
rather than pay even a little for actual anonymity. 532 Seven years of copyright lawsuits have done little to stem the file-sharing tide; it would appear that most users don't know or don't care that the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) private police might be watching their downloads. Indeed, the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology-Napster launched the year before HavenCo-helped moot the idea of a data haven for most practical purposes. P2P turned the infrastructure users already had into all they needed to become their own content hosts, and it unleashed them on the world in such great numbers as to make it almost trivially easy to irreversibly spread a file worldwide. In an age of YouTube, BitTorrent, and the darknet, who needs HavenCo?

The Rule of Law As Self-Government
The cypherpunk theory of free speech, sovereignty, and freedom is profoundly antinomian. It asserts, in essence, a natural right to ignore the positive law: the Internet's free-speech grace releases humanity from all obligation to conform its online conduct to the wishes of government. HavenCo fit squarely into what Joel Reidenberg calls a "struggle against the very right of sovereign states to establish rules for online activity ." 533 This move should be at least slightly unsettling. Government and law are generally also thought of as tools for advancing a people's shared values. Under modern political theory, the only legitimate source of legal authority is the mutual consent of the governed. 534 What Rousseau called the "general will" binds the people, to be sure, but it also derives from and reflects their own wishes, thereby ensuring that "it neither has nor could have an interest contrary to theirs." 535 These democratic theories amount to a vision of the rule of law as self-government: laws are legitimate if and only if they derive from the consent of the governed. 536 This is why Reidenberg could say that states were engaged in a "struggle to establish the rule of law" against the threats of the Internet. 537 HavenCo's business model depended on its ability to thwart the general will of any country that crossed its path. 532. Cf. BRUCE STERLING, TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS 242 (2002) ("Then all I have to do is place it offshore in some ninja-haunted concrete data haven and defy the police to come get me!"). 533. Joel R. Reidenberg, Technology and Internet Jurisdiction, 153 U. PENN. L. REV. 1951REV. , 1954REV. (2005 HavenCo and other Internet libertarians attacked this selfgovernment vision of the rule of law in two ways. First, they questioned whether national governance was truly self-government where the Internet was concerned. The Internet's global nature raised sharp questions about any one state's right to set rules for the whole of the Internet. 538 The extreme of this position was John Perry Barlow's claim that the citizens of Cyberspace were no longer part of the political communities of "distant, uninformed powers" and would form their "own Social Contract." 539 More prosaically, they saw national governments as so captured by special interests that actual policy no longer reflected the collective will of their own citizenry. Any of these claims, if true, implied that Internet users were being regulated without their democratic consent-that is, illegitimately.
In addition to these procedural objections to self-government rule of law, there was also a substantive one. Even if national Internet laws really reflected national consensus, such laws were inherently unjust, to the point that it was legitimate to make them unenforceable. 540 The American ideal of free speech as an inalienable right-with its strong overtones of Mill's harm principle 541 -resonated strongly in the age of the Internet. 542 But it is also a profoundly American ideal; other democracies balance free speech against other goals in very different ways. 543 Had HavenCo succeeded, it would have compelled the nations of the world to converge on its preferred model of absolute free speech in preference to all other laws and values. The normative self-government rule-of-law debate over HavenCo thus hinges on whether one believes in a single universal value of unfettered free speech or in "differences in culture, history, and tastes that are legitimately reflected in national and local laws.  REV. 1367REV. , 1375REV. -76 (1996. 539. John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in CRYPTO ANARCHY, supra note 394, at 27, 27. 540. One might argue that HavenCo had a competing rule-of-law vision here, one that emphasized specific individual rights the rule of law must protect. See TAMANAHA, supra note 507, at 102-13. This argument resonates with HavenCo's experience in that it recognizes the antidemocratic character of individual rights. Id

B. International Law
In 2002, Ryan Lackey succinctly captured a profound irony in HavenCo's relationship with law when he explained, "Our customers don't want to break the law, they want a different set of laws they can comply with." 545 As we have seen, this Internet-abetted form of regulatory arbitrage renders national law meaningless. 546 At the same time, however, Lackey spoke in terms of "complying" with law, rather than "evading" or "breaking" it. HavenCo offered formal legal compliance without any corresponding substance.
Thus, HavenCo wasn't an exercise in pure lawlessness. The viability of its offer-and indeed, its very existence-depended on law, specifically the international law of states. HavenCo's product differentiator was Sealand law. But if Sealand is just Roughs Tower and not a political entity with the rights of a state, then it and its law exist wholly at the sufferance of the United Kingdom-making HavenCo an expensive, impractical alternative to its competitors in London. 547 It is therefore time to consider the question of Sealand's statehood under international law. 548 It would take a full article to do justice to the arguments for and against. 549 Instead, the next few pages will discuss the principal precedents on point, and offer a few rule-of-law observations about the nature of the claims made by Sealand's proponents.

Sealand and International Law
If Sealand is part of the territory of the United Kingdom, or subject to its jurisdiction, all other questions are moot. The United Kingdom believes that it is, which in a sense is the end of the matter. No other state, or at least none with a seagoing navy, has questioned that claim. As in the 1960s and in 1978, Roy Bates and his family will be allowed to remain, so long as their presence does not seriously threaten any important interests of the United Kingdom. But if they do, the Royal Navy will take appropriate action. As in the past, Sealand is protected mainly by the Ministry of Defense's unwillingness to use violence against its defenders. This is a public relations question, not a legal one. 545. Gilmour Still, we might ask whether the legal materials back up the claims made by the United Kingdom or by Sealand. One source of ambiguity over the years has been the overlapping legal questions at stake. There are at least four: (1) whether Sealand is a sovereign state, (2) whether the United Kingdom has the jurisdiction to prescribe the legal consequences of actions taken there, (3) which court or courts would have jurisdiction to hear the case, and (4) who owns Roughs Tower as a matter of English property law. The bureaucratic dithering of 1966-1968 was primarily concerned with (3) and (4): that is, not with the interesting question of what Sealand was, but with the more prosaic one of how to obtain legal leverage over Roy Bates within the accreted mess of a legal system still bearing the traces of Henry VIII, and worse, of Henry II. 550 The place to start is the 1968 prosecution of Roy and Michael Bates on charges of violating the Firearms Act, Regina v. Bates. 551 No one contended that Roughs Tower was British territory in itself. Instead, the parties joined issue on the question of whether the court's jurisdiction extended to the platform, seven miles off the coast. The court considered two possible theories: admiralty jurisdiction and jurisdiction over British subjects.
The first possible basis of jurisdiction was "the old jurisdiction of the Admiral." 552 Nineteenth century courts limited their admiralty jurisdiction to ships flying the British flag. 553 When Parliament responded to these decisions by extending the common-law courts' jurisdiction to ships of any flag, it explicitly confined the law's reach to territorial waters: those within three miles of the shore. 554 Since the prosecution in Bates conceded that Roughs Tower was not a ship (much less one flying the British flag) and that it was not within the three-mile limit, the Bateses could not be prosecuted under admiralty jurisdiction. 555 The other possible basis of jurisdiction was Parliament's "power to legislate over British Subjects anywhere." 556 In some cases, Parliament clearly had: murder, bigamy, and treason were offenses wherever committed. 557 Based on rules of statutory construction, however, the court concluded that Parliament had intended the Firearms Act to "operate only within the ordinary territorial limits." 558 Summarizing his holding, 550 (2), and certainly not about (1). Indeed, under common principles of international law, the United Kingdom's right to proscribe activities on Sealand that cause harm within the United Kingdom is wellestablished. 561 Any ambiguity created by the decision should have been cleared up by the United Kingdom's 1987 extension of territorial waters to twelve miles, an act that seems unproblematic under international law. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allows each nation to "establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles." 562 One could try to argue that Sealand had achieved statehood before 1987, so that it would be entitled to claim its own territorial waters to the median line between England and Sealand. 563 Sealand has indeed made such a claim. 564 But here, too, international law has taken the United Kingdom's side. 565 The 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf provides that "no one may . . . make a claim to the continental shelf, without the express consent of the coastal State," 566 and UNCLOS made the rule even more explicit. 567 Courts in 559. Id 312. But see Vitànyi, supra note 548 ("The tendency to extend the jurisdiction of the coastal States to artificial islands and installations on the high seas which are not used for purposes of exploration or exploitation of the natural resources of the continental shelf is manifestly contrary to the Convention of 1958."). 567. See UNCLOS III, supra note 562, art. 60(2), at 419-20 (giving "coastal State" "exclusive jurisdiction" over artificial islands and other similar structures within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ)); id., art. 80, at 430 (extending EEZ rights under article 60 to apply also to "artificial islands, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 cases involving artificial islands near the Floridian and Italian coasts have upheld coastal states' rights to prohibit upstart artificial islands. 568 Let us assume, counterfactually, that the United Kingdom was willing to allow Sealand to be a state. Would it be one? Unfortunately, "international legal sources provide no satisfactory definition of 'state.'" 569 The "best known formulation of the basic criteria" is probably the 1933 Montevideo Convention, 570 which sets out four conditions: "(a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other States." 571 The Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations uses a similar four-element test. 572 These lists are controversial and have been criticized as being both over-and underinclusive, but there is no commonly accepted alternative codification. 573 Modern practice may be converging on requiring additional elements as preconditions to international recognition, such as democratic self-government and protection of minority rights-but these may or may not be conditions of statehood itself. 574 I will use the Montevideo criteria to structure the following discussion, with particular reference to the 1978 decision by the Administrative Court of Cologne, In re Duchy of Sealand, holding that Sealand was not a state. 575 installations and structures on the continental shelf"). As of this writing, the Convention has been ratified by 161 states. 568 The first Montevideo criterion is territory. Traditionally, "territory" in international law refers to "an enclosed part of the surface of the earth." 576 Taking that requirement literally, the Duchy of Sealand court held that "[a] man-made artificial platform . . . does not constitute a segment of the earth's sphere." 577 As a matter of language and precedent, this reasoning is defensible: "territory" comes from the Latin terra, or "earth," and historically, state territory has referred only to land. 578 But functionally, it's at least a little anomalous. From the perspective of actual human affairs, the pro-Sealand case here is commonsensical; Sealand is enough of a stable place to have been inhabitable for the past four decades. If a place can support an otherwise coherent and independent political community, why should it matter whether the "territory" is made out of soil or concrete standing on the seabed? 579 This point is visible in the Duchy of Sealand court's strained attempt to distinguish the cases of "territory which was once connected to land and then submerged by the sea," 580 and "[t]he formation of land by the erection of dykes or dams and similar structures on the sea-shore or in coastal waters." 581 In both of these cases, accession principles are clearly at work; the land lost or gained can be regarded as part of the larger landmass, and thus as belonging to it. 582 Sealand, however, seems to the court connected with nothing but the sea. If so, the court's discomfort with calling Sealand "territory" might actually cut in its favor-as a recognition that the tower stands too far out to sea to be trivially assimilated to the British Isles.
The situation is reversed, however, when it comes to the second Montevideo criterion: population. The Duchy of Sealand court is committed to a substantive vision of a state: it needs a communal identity, a "common destiny." 583 Sealand's citizens, on the other hand, "have not acquired their 'nationality' in order to live with one another and handle all aspects of their lives on a collective basis, but on the contrary they continue to pursue their individual interests outside the 'Duchy.'" 584 In its words, "the life of a community is lacking" 585 because a people "must be aimed at the maintenance of an essentially permanent form of communal life in the sense of sharing a common destiny." 586 This is a thick vision of the role of government; it expresses a strong commitment to an affirmative welfare state. 587 It's also a communitarian vision of society: it wouldn't recognize "live and let live" as valid principle of social order, not when there is a "common destiny" to be pursued. A minimal Nozickian state could not legitimately exist under this reasoning. 588 The contrast with Sealand's position is striking. Dr. Walter Leisner's expert opinion takes population to its utter limit: "The Principality of Sealand has people constituting a nation although their number is very marginal; jus gentium does not provide for a minimum number of citizens." 589 How many is "very marginal," one might ask. The Duchy of Sealand court accepts that there are 106 Sealand citizens and that there are "30 to 40 persons permanently living on the platform." 590 As we have seen, however, Sealand's actual population has almost always been four or fewer, and at many times only one or two. Leisner's opinion is not engaged in rhetorical excess-if there is a minimum population threshold at all, Sealand likely falls short of it. One person could constitute a valid "population" under his reasoning, but Sealand needs a one-person, onestate principle if it is to exist at all. His interpretation of international law renders the population prong essentially meaningless: it will be satisfied as long as there is a litigant who cares to assert that she constitutes the relevant population.
The positions are similar when it comes to Montevideo's third criterion: government. The Duchy of Sealand court is committed to a thick view of government, and Sealand to a thin one. The court's words on government are worth quoting at length: The life of the State is not limited to the provision of casinos and places of entertainment. Rather a State community must play a more decisive role in serving the other vital human needs of people from their birth to their death. These needs include education and professional training, assistance in all the eventualities of life and the provision of subsistence allowances where necessary. The so- called "Duchy of Sealand" fails to satisfy any of these requirements. 591 Again, this is a thick, social-welfare view of what it takes to constitute a "government." Other international law authorities focus more narrowly on effective control: "the actual exercise of public power over the people and within the territory of the State." 592 While it may seem that Roy Bates had effective control over Sealand-particularly given his expulsion of the invaders in 1978 593 -the related idea that the purpose of a control test is the maintenance of public order is problematic for HavenCo. 594 Once again, Sealand's competing theory could best be described as minimalist. 595 Sealand's government has been somewhere between an unincorporated family business and a marionette show in which a multitude of formal offices are manipulated by a few puppeteers. At the time of the invasion Achenbach was both Prime Minister and Chair of the Privy Council, and Duchy of Sealand described him as Foreign Secretary and Chairman of the Council of State. 596 This is a Model U.N. vision of government: everyone who shows up gets to hold an important office. 597 The fourth Montevideo criterion-"[c]apacity to enter into relations with other States"-is the most vexed of the four. One scholar calls it "not a criterion, but rather a consequence, of statehood," 598 and other commentators agree. 599 The Duchy of Sealand opinion doesn't even mention it.
A more helpful framing may be to focus instead on the other side of "relations with other states"-whether the putative state's government is recognized by its peers. 600 Scholars have fiercely debated whether recognition is constitutive of statehood, or merely an acknowledgement of it. 601 Either way, however, the practice of other states at least provides valuable evidence. As one wag puts it, "[A] nation is only recognized as a nation if other nations that have been recognised by other nations recog-UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 nise [sic] it. Got it?" 602 There's a certain unavoidable circularity to this approach, but it has the virtue of conforming to general practice. This would not seem to be a promising line of argument for Sealand to pursue. At present, no other nation officially recognizes Sealand. Indeed, the United States and United Kingdom have repeatedly said that they do not. So has the United Nations. "Recognition itself need not be express," 603 however, and Sealand's advocates have pointed to acts over the years that supposedly constitute de facto recognition or "acquiescence" in Sealand's claims, such as the 1968 acquittal in Regina v. Bates and the United Kingdom's failure to reoccupy Roughs Tower after Bates occupied it. 604 Germany is said to have recognized Sealand by sending a diplomat to negotiate for Pütz's release after the 1978 invasion. 605 And Sealand's citizens have managed to travel into various countries by presenting Sealand passports. 606 Ironically, these arguments for de facto recognition are even more formalistic than the arguments for Sealand's legal statehood. They all share a certain "gotcha" quality: that a country, notwithstanding its official protestations, will be bound by an isolated statement made in a context when sovereignty might not be the first thing on its officials' minds. 607 Take, for example, the idea that a diplomat's visit to Sealand to lobby for a German citizen's release in 1978 constituted irrevocable diplomatic 602. RYAN ET AL., supra note 12, at 6. 603 Various offers have been made to Prince Roy on behalf of different persons to negotiate on his behalf to have his country recognized by certain of the small minor Governments throughout the world but Prince Roy has not sought official recognition as this venture is entirely a commercial venture and not a political one and he does not wish to be recognized formally as a State by any particular Government. To do so would create problems as it would necessitate him appointing an Ambassador with additional unnecessary expense and no financial gain at all. Id. 606. See Hastings, supra note 318. The examples given online all appear to predate the age of computerization that was ushered in by the standardization on machine-readable passports. Dr. Leisner considers this "doubtful" evidence, as "it was not the Foreign Office authorities of these states" who endorsed the passports. Leisner, supra note 549. He then goes on, however, to argue that since England and France had a policy against endorsing East German passports, the fact that they endorsed Sealand's constituted recognition. Id. 607. See SHAW, supra note 603, at 387 ("State practice has restricted the possible scope of operation this concept of implied recognition to a few instances only . . . ."). Ian Brownlie writes, "Recognition is a matter of intention." BROWNLIE, supra note 592, at 93, and it is unlikely that other governments have intended to recognize Sealand. No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 473 recognition. 608 This isn't an argument that Germany tends to treat Sealand as a state in practice; it's an argument that Germany is estopped from denying that Sealand is one. 609 The passport arguments have a similar quality. Countries certainly do treat their passport policy as an extension of their diplomatic positions. Thus, some countries will stamp visas for travelers from the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) but not the passports themselves, and both the Republic and the People's Republic of China (i.e., the mainland) do not consider travel between them to be "international" and therefore do not stamp each other's passports. But what Sealand's advocates describe is not so much a systematic government practice as the occasional lapse from it.

The Rule of Law As Formal Legality
Sealand's claims to statehood reflect a theory of the rule of law as formal legality: the consistent and evenhanded application of general prospective rules. 610 In Lon Fuller's words, "Surely the very essence of the Rule of Law is that in acting upon the citizen . . . a government will faithfully apply rules previously declared as those to be followed by the citizen and as being determinative of his rights and duties." 611 This condition, which Rawls called "justice as regularity," 612 ensures equality before the law 613 and protects law's subjects from the arbitrary exercise of power. 614 Sealand's advocates claim that international law has established rules on statehood-territory, population, government, and recognition-and Sealand is entitled to have its status adjudged according to those rules. What is sauce for England is sauce for Sealand. If international law had not prior to 1968 imposed a threshold test for population, for example, it would be a violation of the rule of law to impose such a test after the fact to catch Sealand. 615 The point resonates-but we should also be clear on its limits and implications.
Speaking to the HOPE conference in 2002, Ryan Lackey proudly explained that Sealand satisfied "all the technical requirements" 616 for statehood, as though other nations were holding it back for unfair reasons not actually in the books. 617 Perhaps, but if so, then Sealand satisfies almost nothing but the technical requirements. Sealand's arguments illustrate the "emptiness" 618 of formal legality; they obscure any consideration of the underlying purposes of the rules or the justice of the resulting regime.
The normative case that Roy Bates's family constitutes the sort of historically connected political community traditionally recognized under international law is weak at best. Or rather, if the Bates family is justified in constituting itself as a nation, the fact that it happened to occupy Roughs Tower is surely the least important of the normative justifications for its self-rule 619 -and we are most of the way to Robert Nozick's ideal of a purely consensual state. 620 Some may find this vision appealing, but it is a substantial departure from the traditional functions of international law in regulating the rights and duties of states. 621 HavenCo's implicit appeal to international law looks even stranger when juxtaposed with its disdain for national law. If the rule of law is a matter of formal legality, then any properly general and prospective national regulation of the Internet ought to pass muster. 622 Conversely, if the rule of law also makes substantive demands, it's unclear what makes the international law guaranteeing Sealand's sovereignty legitimate. It's difficult to find a theory of law that invalidates the laws of every nation on earth and still upholds international law.
And yet legality was inarguably important to HavenCo; if not, it would never have bothered with Sealand. Recall Lackey's quip that "Our customers don't want to break the law, they want a different set of laws they can comply with." 623 The unifying thread in its attitudes towards national and international law was a willingness to disregard the idea that law is an expression of the political will of a community. HavenCo rejected national Internet regulations because it didn't believe that those regulations reflected the values of any community that was en- No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 475 titled to have its values respected. And it embraced the formal strictures of international law out of a belief that those formal strictures would tie the hands of the nations of the world-again, regardless of what the communities in those nations thought or deserved.
That is, HavenCo's position makes sense if one envisions international law as an autonomous system of binding rules, beyond the power of the system's participants (here, the nations of the world) to modify as they went along. 624 Sealand is a "state" with inviolate rights because it has "territory," a "population," and a "government," regardless of whether these things bear much relationship to other things with the same names, or whether any political institution is willing to stand behind this interpretation of the law. This is rule by law, not rule through or of law-it is law without politics. 625 The world, however, is inescapably political. Any discussion of Sealand's formal sovereignty is beside the point given that the United Kingdom plausibly asserts jurisdiction over it. 626 It seems unlikely that international community would have responded to protect Sealand from the United Kingdom or another state acting with the United Kingdom's acquiescence. 627 Ryan Lackey told a crowd at the HOPE conference that if Osama bin Laden were on Sealand, he expected the United States to wipe it out in minutes. 628 Even for less controversial material, dropping the servers into the sea was always HavenCo's fallback plan. 629 Even UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2012 more tellingly, in 2001, some of Sealand's staff were treating nearby Great Britain as a security asset, not a risk. In the words of Alan Beale, Sealand's Chief of Security at the time, "The British government wouldn't allow a foreign power to [take over Sealand], and they certainly wouldn't want any terrorists out here." 630 As NPR's Scott Simon put it, "HavenCo does not recognize British law, but it relies on British security to make the platform a safe investment." 631

C. Sealand Law
To explore HavenCo's relationship to Sealand law, let us start at the end of the relationship. In his 2003 Defcon presentation, HavenCo's Ryan Lackey described the company as "probably effectively 'nationalized.'" 632 His point was that what had originally been a hosting company operating out of Sealand had come under Sealand's complete operational and managerial control. True, HavenCo had never been a particularly reliable business partner for its customers, it defaulted on its contractual obligations to Sealand, and its transfer to Sealand control was mutually agreed-to. Still, the endgame cut out HavenCo's investors and creditors completely: Sealand never issued shares or paid off the $220,000 it owed Lackey. 633 According to Lackey, Sealand even stole personal computers he left behind. 634 Sealand law had nothing to say on the matter, or, at least nothing that HavenCo could rely on. Intuitively, this comes across as a failure of the rule of law. But here it is the "rule of law" in yet a different sense than we have been considering so far.

The Rule of Law As Restraint on Government
The expropriation of property without justification is a violation of the rule of law as a restraint on government. This vision of the rule of law emphasizes that government itself is subject to law. 635 It's visible in Thomas Paine's "in America the law is king," in Theodore Roosevelt's "[n]o man is above the law," and in John Adams's "government of laws, and not of men." 636 It protects individuals against tyranny, against the No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 477 arbitrary exercise of power. Where pure formal legality requires only that government act through law, this vision of the rule of law expects that law will put limits on the government's ability to act at all. 637 It is thus to some extent a substantive theory of the rule of law. 638 The ideal of government limited by law is frequently linked to citizens' ability to plan for the future. 639 Reliable property and contract rights play an important role in this story. Businesses care about the stability of their legal environment, thinkers argue: without secure property rights, investment and entrepreneurship are difficult or impossible. 640 We have seen this argument already in HavenCo's clients' commercial need to fit themselves into the framework of law. 641 It also applies to HavenCo itself. It had computers to buy, bandwidth bills to pay, and employees to feed. It needed paying clients-and legal stability for its operations. Colocation is a commodity business; ordinarily, it's supposed to be safe, reliable, and boring.

HavenCo and Sealand Law
It's possible to see HavenCo's relationship to Sealand, then, as a failure of the rule of law. 642 Think, for a moment, about HavenCo's options following the "nationalization." It could have argued that its rights had been violated, and brought an action in whatever tribunal Prince Regent Michael had seen fit to establish. But its decision would have been purely advisory as to the Prince Regent, 643 and in any event, it seems unlikely that the rest of Sealand's political community-Michael 642. See RYAN ET AL., supra note 12, at 12 (describing "the too-close relationship between the operators of HavenCo and Prince Michael" as "the most damaging" factor in HavenCo's failure). This is not the only possible interpretation. Another way of describing the breakdown of HavenCo's relationship with Sealand is that Sealand took its identity as a would-be member of the international community seriously enough that it brought its internal Internet policies into rough congruence with international norms, regardless of whether it was legally obligated to do so. See GOLDSMITH & WU, supra note 3, at 85. 643. THE PRINCIPALITY OF SEALAND: CONSTITUTION OF 1966 art. 3, http://www.muu.fi/amorph 03/downloads/pdfs/principality_of_sealand.pdf ("The opinion of the tribunal shall be conveyed to the Sovereign who shall issue a Decision as appropriate said Decision to be subject to enforcement as seen appropriate.").

No. 2]
SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 479 though the 1975 constitution explicitly prohibits the death penalty. Sealand's history is heavily dotted with the irregular use of force: the expulsion of Radio Caroline staff, the defense with Molotov cocktails, the repeated shots at British ships on official duty, and the 1978 invasion. This is a country where state violence has never been far from the surface. 651 As Roy Bates put it, "I can tell them to murder someone if I want to. I am the person responsible for the law in Sealand." 652 Even more fundamentally, Sealand simply lacks the population to support political institutions like a professionalized judiciary, political parties, and an independent press. 653 The number of residents on the platform, after all, is in the single digits, and the number of total citizens isn't much larger. 654 Multiple office holding is common. 655 Even when such institutions do exist in theory-like the Senate described in its constitution-it's unclear whether they ever meet, nor is there any indication in the record that their work is anything other than playacted. This isn't a picture of a country in which the rule of law has a thick hold.
In both national and international settings, HavenCo tried to drive a wedge between law and politics. The same was true on Sealand. HavenCo was utterly dependent on Sealand law-but perhaps too willing to overlook the numerous red flags in Sealand's political system.

D. Connections
We have seen that HavenCo simultaneously thumbed its nose at national law and relied on international law to protect Sealand. Both of these choices came back to haunt it when it came to Sealand law. Its opposition to national authority led it straight to Sealand, the world's minimal possible state-but the minimal possible state is not actually a safe base of operations. 656 A country whose government is committed to the rule of law and which has extensive political and social traditions holding it to that commitment, can offer the necessary stability. If the govern- No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 481 tionalism accepts the necessity of government power but uses law, institutions, and norms to limit that power. HavenCo, however, started from the premise that rule-of-law constitutionalism had failed. Its founders believed that no traditional nation-state could be trusted to protect essential human rights. Where constitutionalism aims to tame Leviathan, HavenCo hoped to escape from Leviathan entirely. The deep irony of HavenCo's story is that it sought to use law to do so: international law would hold Leviathan at bay while Sealand law guaranteed the essential freedoms. As we have seen, Sealand's history gives reason to question whether either international law or Sealand law could be counted on to do the work HavenCo needed them to. This shouldn't be a surprise. HavenCo needed law, but offered no workable theory of where that law would come from.

V. CONCLUSION
In December 2010, the Sealand government sent its Facebook and Twitter followers a message: Sealand has been asked to give #Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a passport and safe haven. With recent releases by Wikileaks : Are they a guardian of the public right to information or a hugely irresponsible threat to security of the international community? 663 That the Internet's latest mutineer would sooner or later be linked with Sealand should come as no surprise. 664 From pirate radio to the Pirate Bay, Sealand exerts a magnetic pull on all those who would remake the world by standing outside of existing legal systems. Little wonder, too, that Sealand's history has taken us to tax havens and cyberspaces, or that Sealand holds pride of place in books on micronations and seasteading. They are all rebels against the existing order of things.
But, as one review of a book on pirate radio puts it, "Ya gotta have rules, it turns out, even if you're a rebel." 665 All of these dissident utopians must face the same three issues of law that HavenCo did: how far will they push against national law, how will they protect their right to exist No. 2] SEALAND, HAVENCO, AND THE RULE OF LAW 483 press-shield law, and a parliament founded in 930. (No, there is not a "1" missing from that date.) One last example may be helpful. Every so often, someone complains about the "maritime" flags in U.S. courthouses. 669 The theory is that gold fringe and an eagle on the standard transform the "American flag of peace" into the "military" or "maritime" "flag of war," under which civilian courts have no jurisdiction. 670 There are hundreds of such theories. 671 They never work, 672 but they also never stop coming. 673 No matter how patiently the courts explain that Ohio is a state, or that individuals are not sovereign, or that a filing is valid even if its caption spells your name in capital letters, the arguments never cease.
I am not concerned with why people are willing to believe what one commentator, perhaps unfairly, calls "Idiot Legal Arguments." 674 People believe all sorts of strange things, and occasionally some of them turn out to be true. Instead, it's worth asking why people expect these heterodox legal arguments to work. The cases involve tax protesters, militia members, prison inmates-people who have extensive, firsthand experience being at the wrong end of government's stick. Either their faith in a fearless and independent judiciary is strong indeed, or something else is going on.
We can sharpen the point. In Stephen Vincent Benét's famous short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, contract law and a jury trial are binding even on the devil himself. 675 Like the tax protesters and like HavenCo, Benèt imagines that there is a great and malevolent power afoot in the world, that law will suffice to hold this power back, and that law will do this of its own accord, simply because it is the law. This vision of law invests it with supernatural force; it collapses law into a system of magic words. 676 But law is not an external, autonomous system of self-enforcing rules: it is made by people, for people, and of people. No judge sitting in