The Fall of Data Haven Sealand 210
Fluffeh writes "Ars has a great article about the history of Sealand, a data haven — a place where you can host almost anything, as long as it follows the very bare laws of Sealand Government. Quoting: 'HavenCo's failure — and make no mistake about it, HavenCo did fail — shows how hard it is to get out from under government's thumb. HavenCo built it, but no one came. For a host of reasons, ranging from its physical vulnerability to the fact that The Man doesn't care where you store your data if he can get his hands on you, Sealand was never able to offer the kind of immunity from law that digital rebels sought. And, paradoxically, by seeking to avoid government, HavenCo made itself exquisitely vulnerable (PDF) to one government in particular: Sealand's.'"
This is why we have Tor (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that you could escape from your own government's laws by keeping your data somewhere else is preposterous on its face. At some point, you have to get that data, and that data will have to cross into your own location, which would make you in possession of the data and liable for possessing it. Unlike Swiss bank accounts which hold money secretly for you, and are relatively safe from the prying eyes of the government, data is something that is not as easily picked up in person.
Tor onions. Are they good or are they whack?
Re:ah, libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
A person who believes that oppression is best handled by the private sector.
Failed for practical reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Sealands failed because hosting anything there was crazy expensive and their only known data link was WIFI from the UK mainland.
Also anytime the UK government felt like shutting them down they could. The UN won't defend a country it doesn't recognize.
Cables still have to come ashore (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the big problem that Sealand's cables would still have to come ashore somewhere? Even if they used satellite the ground stations would still be in somebody's jurisdiction.
The only way I can see their concept working is on their local LAN. Once they hook up to the internet, they can simply be regulated through their upstream carriers.
Re:Cables still have to come ashore (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ah, libertarians (Score:4, Insightful)
Democrat, n:
A person who believes the more government you have, the freer you are.
Republican, n:
A person who believes that every American is born with a mandate to love Jesus and murderously despise foreigners.
Inaccurate and inflammatory statemens are fun!
Re:ah, libertarians (Score:1, Insightful)
Libertarians have been repeatedly shown to have the least sense of humour of all Internet kooks.
A good joke does, after all, tend to be determined implicitly by a vote of peers then spread freely by them. A single powerful man cannot monopolise all the jokes, nor will the covetous dreamer get rich from marketing his jokes to wealthy men. Frankly it's only a matter of time before libertarians declare humour to be a dangerous manifestation of statism.
Re:ah, libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
aka, an idiot who doesn't know history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_National_Detective_Agency [wikipedia.org]
"Pinkerton's agents performed services ranging from security guarding to private military contracting work. At its height, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more agents than there were members of the standing army of the United States of America, causing the state of Ohio to outlaw the agency due to fears it could be hired as a private army or militia."
and do you know what these guys did when people tried to exercise their freedoms?
the rise of pinkertons is why we have things like minimum wage, hours per week to work, no child labor, etc.
because without government, the private sector WILL rape you and enslave you, until the people get fed enough and fight back. why? MORE PROFIT, MOOOOORRRREEEE. there is no other motivation. and this motivation blows right past respect for freedom, or anything else
the government sucks. its just that compared to all other options, the government is the best option
Re:You can't opt out of capitalist imperialism (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a vast oversimplification, our standard of living is based on being able to hire people to work many hours for one of our hours. If you had to pay US wages to all the people that produce your goods then prices would be higher and your effective wealth lower.
This is so wrong it is almost humorous... except for the fact that many people believe it and don't understand where the wealth of 1st world countries come from.
No, the wealth of people in major industrialized countries comes from the ability to work more effectively and be able to perform tasks with less effort and to collectively be able to do things in less time or to produce more with the same amount of labor. This is usually done not through hiring slaves or paying people in 3rd world countries, but rather through designing machines or better manufacturing processes that people who live in countries with less wealth.
If you take how many farmers it takes to grow a bushel of wheat or corn in America vs. Ethiopia or Madagasgar, there is a huge difference. One farmer in America can feed nearly a thousand people out of his (or her) own labor. In Ethiopia, perhaps a dozen people. In practice this difference is even more exaggerated but the basic principle still hold true. This also applies to how cloth is manufactured, how lumber is harvested and machined down to be able to construct housing, and just about everything which can be imagined that is made by the hand of men.
Face it, if 3rd world countries simply stopped selling stuff to 1st world countries, those 1st world countries wouldn't starve or even go without luxuries. Many like the United States even historically didn't even depend much upon foreign trade and domestically has been able to produce just about everything it needed and then some. If these "wealthy countries" simply pulled in on themselves with an isolationist movement, they would still be wealthy and be able to tell these poorer countries to "get lost" or even "nuke themselves into oblivion" for all that matters.
Yes, in the short term there might be some inflation if suddenly goods and services from poorer countries stopped flowing into the wealthy countries. But they would recover and in fact the incentive to increase efficiencies in the factories that would at that point by necessity have to be domestic producers would likely improve to the point that overall wealth would even increase relative to the amount of labor that an ordinary worker would have to perform in order to maintain a given standard of goods, services, and supplies available to that individual citizen in that country. Over the long term, the wealthy would become even wealthier.
As for the poor countries, as soon as they told off the wealthy countries they would also be cut off from the wealth of those countries and be forced to make their own luxuries... which they may or may not be able to do. If anything, there would be short-term deflation and then they would spiral downward in a vicious cycle of economic collapse that would be hard to recover from.
You claim that creating more wealth is hard. Absolutely it is! It takes primarily the ability for letting people make their own decisions acted out on a massive scale so that eventually the best ideas can come forward. Bad ideas will be presented too, but those will eventually disappear in the marketplace of ideas... or simply in an open market in general that allows anybody to participate. If you are in a government or society that doesn't allow these ideas to come forth, that society will literally be poorer because of it. Individual personal liberty is the key to wealth creation. Some people simply enjoy living in poverty and I don't mind if they want to follow that as a sort of religion or philosophical principle. I just don't want to be forced at gunpoint to be one of them.
Re:ah, libertarians (Score:5, Insightful)
Republican, n:
A person who believes that every American is born with a mandate to love Jesus and murderously despise foreigners.
If you think that's an inaccurate statement, you haven't been paying attention to the primary debates.
Re:You can't opt out of capitalist imperialism (Score:5, Insightful)
This is usually done not through hiring slaves.
Really? Then why are American corporations measuring their success in terms of "profit per employee" lately? Last time anybody did that was prior to the Civil War...
Back when Henry Ford revolutionized industry, he realized right away that it was no one else's responsibility to hire potential customers. So the real question is: with so many people making stuff they can't possibly afford to buy, who the fuck is supposed to buy it?
That's the real reason behind the current economic collapse -- a culture of companies that are all trying to squeeze out a little extra profit by hiring people that can't quite afford the product they're producing. The result is more wealth, sure, but when everyone starts doing it, everyone has fewer customers. More wealth X fewer customers = reduced profits. So they try to squeeze harder, and they start using slave-labor metrics to guide their decisions, and the economy continues to become more and more suceptible to disruption as fewer and fewer people actually have the power to make choices in it. Seriously, what's the difference between Soviet bureaucrats and today's wealthy capitalists? Either way you've got 1% of the population planning the economy.