Ryan Lackey

The idea came straight out of cypherpunk folklore: put the servers somewhere no state has jurisdiction. Sealand, a Second World War sea fort off Suffolk that had declared itself a principality in 1967, looked ideal. HavenCo promised hosting beyond the reach of governments, with exceptions only for spam and child abuse material.

What it actually had was a concrete platform, thin bandwidth, few customers and a "monarch" with opinions. Lackey left in 2002 and explained what went wrong at DEF CON the following year, in a talk that was mostly about the gap between sovereignty on paper and sovereignty in practice. He later built satellite links in Iraq and founded the VPN company CryptoSeal, which Cloudflare acquired in 2014.