Nation of Sealand for Sale

I have known about the tiny artificial nation of Sealand for some years now from an information security perspective. It first grabbed my attention back in 2000 when the tiny nation tried to build a facility in one of its towers to serve as a data store called Havenco. The idea was that it would be a hosting facility that was nearly impervious to physical intrusion since it was several miles out to sea. And as a nation that is not signatory to copyright treaties, it was vowing to allow anyone to use its servers to host any kind of data they wanted to as long as it wasn’t child porn. So yeah, if the MPAA was after you for downloading movies, you could move the data there, along with the thousands of MP3’s you had been collecting for several years.

I guess the hosting project wasn’t making any money, ’cause the Prince of the country is selling the nation to the highest bidder.

From Reuters here:

LONDON – For sale: the world’s smallest country with its own flag, stamps, currency and passports.

Apply to Prince Michael of Sealand if you want to run your own storm-tossed nation — even if it is just a wartime fort perched on two concrete towers in the North Sea.

Built in World War Two as an anti-aircraft base against German bombers, the derelict platform was taken over 40 years ago by retired army major Paddy Roy Bates who went to live there with his family.

He declared the platform, perched seven miles off the east coast of England just outside Britain’s territorial waters, to be the principality of Sealand.

The self-styled Prince Roy adopted a flag, chose a national anthem and minted silver and gold coins as its currency.

Official Sealand homepage is here. Wikipedia has an entry too.