November 13, 2000
(Computerworld)
Do you have valuable data that you would like to store beyond the reach of regulators, nosy competitors and litigators? Officers at a new company based on a former World War II gun platform six miles off the coast of England promise that they can house your servers or data with little or no risk of it falling into the wrong hands.
HavenCo Ltd. was founded as a co-location facility whose value proposition is that it won't cooperate with national or international courts that order it to disclose data. "We offer a unique service where a single piece of paper will not give anyone access to our clients' data," said Jo Hastings, HavenCo's chief marketing officer. "We are not necessarily going to engage in warfare; we will just destroy the data."
HavenCo's headquarters are in the British West Indies, but its co-location facility is on a 60-foot tower rising out of the North Sea, in 24 feet of water, six miles east of the industrial port of Felixstowe on the southeastern coast of England. Once part of a network of antiaircraft fortresses built to shoot down Nazi bombers en route to England, the platform was abandoned after the war.
In 1967, a bold former British army major named Roy Bates took advantage of a loophole in international law called "dereliction of sovereignty" to seize the tiny platform, declare it the independent nation of Sealand and proclaim himself prince.
Neither Great Britain nor any other country has recognized Sealand's sovereignty, but its ambiguous legal status gave HavenCo's founders the chance to rent space to store servers and build Internet connections to offer to customers.
Hastings said HavenCo has signed as many as two-dozen companies and organizations for a 90-day beta period. After fine-tuning its services and back-end systems, it will then open for business, charging $1,500 per month for a standard unit of rack space, plus bandwidth costs. HavenCo plans to launch another co-location facility at an as-yet undisclosed location within six months.
Hastings said demand for HavenCo's co-location services has been driven by concern over the British Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, which gives the government the power to conduct covert electronic eavesdropping. It has also been spurred by the FBI's Carnivore Internet surveillance system, which has alarmed U.S. privacy activists.
"Carnivore just couldn't have done a better job for us. We were real happy when that came out," said Hastings, noting that many nations conduct surveillance and that it's not just criminals that would like to avoid it. "We like to think of ourselves as a common-carrier type of business; criminals use the road, but a lot of good people use the road, too."
Once Science Fiction
Data havens free of government control were first imagined by science fiction writers. The idea surfaced in the 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, as well as other "cyberpunk" novels, including Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published last year.
When Bates took over the 6,000-square-foot platform, it was beyond the existing territorial limits of Great Britain. It has maintained its relative independence, despite Britain's expansion of its territorial limits to 12 miles, which encompasses the platform.
According to a press officer at the British consulate in New York, the British government doesn't recognize the sovereignty of Sealand. However, the government has generally kept its hands off, possibly because it was founded before Great Britain claimed the waters in which it stands.
The British Department of Health and Social Security, for example, ruled in 1984 that Roy's son, dubbed Prince Michael, doesn't have to pay his national health insurance fees when he lives in the fortress. The pension department also determined that Roy's military pension shouldn't be paid to him when he resides in Sealand, because he isn't in England during that time.
When Michael Bates fired warning shots at workmen servicing a buoy near the platform, he and Roy were charged with weapons violations. But a British court ruled that the laws didn't apply because they were outside the three miles that Great Britain then claimed as its territorial waters.
Not Defenseless
Despite its minuscule security force, Sealand isn't defenseless. It has threatened to launch a public relations war to defend itself if attacked. Also, the extension of Great Britain's territorial limits means that any country attacking the fortress would have to enter British territorial waters, which would trigger defenses from the U.K.
HavenCo supports customers offering anonymous payment systems, online gambling, pyramid schemes and pornography.
The company's acceptable-use policy forbids spamming, computer hacking and child pornography. Hastings said such activities could prompt law enforcement or Internet service providers to shut down its mainland Internet connections. HavenCo will drop offending Web sites or services that jeopardize its access to the Internet, Hastings added.
She claimed that HavenCo has received several hundred queries from businesses interested in co-location services and Web hosting, which it doesn't provide. Distributed-processing and file-sharing companies have been one of the largest groups of prospective customers, Hastings said.
Many people have also written to demand that HavenCo host embattled music site Napster for free, she said. However, a spokesman for Napster said the company isn't interested in HavenCo's services. Hastings said Internet casinos have asked to locate their transaction servers at Sealand. Some businesses that offer electronic-cash systems are also said to be interested.
Most customers said they are interested in co-location facilities for e-mail archiving or secure data storage. The majority of inquiries have been for secure transactions.
No Physical Access
According to Hastings, even customers won't have physical access to the Sealand fortress. Customers can provide their own equipment, as long as it is X-rayed and examined for bombs or surveillance devices before installation.
Although HavenCo technicians perform basic maintenance on the machines, the servers themselves are run remotely by customers who are responsible for their own actions. Hastings said clients must indicate ahead of time whether they want to be reimbursed for the cost of servers that will be sacrificed if Britain or another legal entity makes a credible demand for their data.
Citing privacy and security concerns, Hastings declined to name any firm that has signed on as a beta customer. The only customer HavenCo has named previously is Tibet Online, which represents the exiled Tibetan government and seeks to operate without the interference of China.
On the eve of the beta launch last month, David Del Torto, executive director of the San Francisco-based Crypto-Rights Foundation, announced that his organization will be among the first group of data-haven pioneers.
"It is important to be hosted by a government that is very friendly to the basic concepts of freedom," he said. "We can't really do that in this country anymore, and it is important to have one place in the world where we can."
Jim Dempsey, senior staff counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, said any attempt to avoid the geographical jurisdiction of governments is ultimately futile, because nations can still exercise jurisdiction over their citizens and arrest employees of HavenCo or freeze bank accounts on their own shores if the threat is deemed great enough.
Investor Confidence
Investors, however, are banking on HavenCo keeping its head above water. The data-haven project has attracted investment capital from Avi Freedman, vice president of network architecture at Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and Joichi Ito, chairman of Infoseek Japan. Freedman reportedly invested $500,000, and Ito reportedly put in $200,000. Another $400,000 was raised from anonymous investors.
Hastings said HavenCo's goal is to raise a total of $3 million before it closes its first round of funding at the end of the year. She confirmed that Freedman is interested in supporting Sealand partly because it could inspire other nations to rethink their laws on data surveillance and other restrictions.
In the meantime, the process of turning a gun platform into a fat-pipe server farm is moving forward. HavenCo has paid an undisclosed sum to the Bates family for a one-year lease on Sealand, with an option to purchase. The fortress is now equipped with two generators, a large fuel tank and enough food to endure a year-long blockade.
Nearly all of the seven 22-foot rooms inside each of the platform's support cylinders are being transformed into machine rooms, using the existing blast doors to withstand explosions. HavenCo is seeking to stuff the cylinders with enough data storage, servers and transaction processors to create a global networking hub.
Del Torto said he believes HavenCo is the ideal place to locate his foundation's archive, mailing lists and double-blind remailers for anonymous e-mail.
"We will put up a massive archive with everything published about cryptography, plus source code and tools, and no matter what country you live in, you can download whatever you like," he said.
HavenCo's $1,500 monthly fee includes basic management, possible extended management, physical security, power and discounts for prepaying for 10 months. There's also a $1,500 set- up charge per machine. HavenCo said it can accommodate up to 10,000 standard units of rack space without expanding. It has also promised to deliver almost 1G byte/sec. of Internet bandwidth by the end of the year at cheaper prices than those in Europe.
According to Ryan Lackey, HavenCo's chief technology officer, the company is still a few months away from providing this, but it can offer 1G byte/sec. as needed to its edge caches, with tens of megabits per second to the facility through diverse routes. Lackey said HavenCo will buy transit and peering agreements from Internet service providers at multiple locations around the world and that it will install high-capacity routers at major facilities. By installing routes and peering at remote locations, Lackey said, HavenCo can install edge caches and then handle the return of data back to Sealand servers.
Satellite Backup
If potential providers such as Amsterdam Internet Exchange BV and London's Telehouse International Corporation of Europe Ltd. are pressured to cut Sealand's link, HavenCo said it can reroute data to satellite communications and other Internet service providers.
In May, HavenCo installed three satellite connections, but Hastings declined to name the providers. HavenCo has also set up a 155M bit/sec. microwave link, provided by New York-based Winstar Communications Inc., that Hastings said HavenCo is testing.
Hastings predicted that HavenCo will pull in between $50 million and $100 million in revenue by the end of its third year in business. But, she added, much of the money will be reinvested in expensive projects such as laying fiber to the fortress, a project the company hopes to finish late next year.
Neither the U.K. nor any other nation has yet attempted to exercise jurisdiction over Sealand, Hastings said, but attempts by angry nations to cut HavenCo's Internet connection could be best countered with redundancy.
"We would like to get multiple jurisdictions in the next year and a server or two running in a few different places so that if they cut us off, despite their best efforts, we will have capacity elsewhere," said Hastings.
Del Torto said he believes chances are good that some nation will try to harass HavenCo, but the intelligence community will probably choose covert interruption of connectivity rather than direct intervention.
"There is always an opportunity for someone to come in with a big stick and threaten them, but their business model seems quite sound for having an answer to that kind of thing," said Del Torto.
Harrison is a freelance writer and former Computerworld staff writer.