The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed

Each leg contained seven levels, each level a concrete room 24 feet in diameter and lit with a single light bulb. A foot steel deck, rising 60 feet above the frigid seawater, lay across the two squat legs and provided space for latrines, radar, and gun emplacements. In , artist Stephen Turner spent six weeks alone in a nearby North Sea fort called Shivering Sands in order to conduct an "artistic exploration of isolation. Sharman had ordered his men to build "fully rigged galleons, kids' toys, and so on" as a way of keeping the mind's demons too busy for free play.

Fifty years in the briny air had not improved the comfort of the forts. Every day I ritually sweep around the tent, an act akin to maintaining a clearing in a wood. Roughs Tower was farther up the coast from Shivering Sands. On approach, the two pillars and the rusting platform of Lackey's redoubt looked more like Neptune's abandoned banquet table than the spot from which the next great Internet revolution would be launched. The tower had not deteriorated as badly as the abandoned Shivering Sands, but conditions could still be brutal. Shower facilities were minimal, since the muddy North Sea water created problems for the desalinator not that a visitor would want to take many showers; as Lackey put it later, "our shower wasn't properly grounded and thus led to shocks".

Lackey also admitted that North Sea winters were "worse than I expected. Not everyone involved with HavenCo wanted to live this way.

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Even the cook found a better opportunity; according to Lackey, "She went off to the north of England to become a stripper. But the miserable conditions gave HavenCo something unique: The company had grand plans to run fiber-optic cables from Roughs Tower to English and Dutch Internet exchange points, to stuff one leg of the fort with computer servers and diesel generators, and to host just about any sort of Internet activity that might be frowned on in less liberty-loving jurisdictions. The entire project was about pushing free speech to its radical limits.

Apart from child pornography and spam, most activities were fair game. No rules governed "copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records This sort of talk wasn't likely to please countries like the United States, where online gambling was forbidden. For their part, European states tended to frown on speech with Nazi overtones.

China wouldn't like "free Tibet" sites, while Saudi Arabia wouldn't tolerate even adult pornography. And the extraordinarily powerful global music and movie lobbies weren't about to sit idly by while a North Sea naval fort turned into Pirate Central. But what were any of them going to do — summon HavenCo to court? Lackey went on to lay out his vision of an alternative to existing nation-states — which in his estimation were already overregulated and were heading in the direction of less, not more, personal liberty.

The alternative that we have is to create ways that you can use technical means or use structuring or anything else to sort of take some of the bite out of some of these regulations. Really, nothing we're doing is enabling a truly new thing that you couldn't do if you were willing to break the law. It's just that we're making it legal.

Could sticking some servers inside the leg of a sea fort really make such behavior "legal"? Perhaps Lackey had picked up a bit of "fort madness" already — but he had a reason for thinking HavenCo might work. Roughs Tower wasn't just a rusting North Sea fort. It also claimed to be the world's tiniest country, called "Sealand.

Bates was a true character, who had gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War at age fifteen and later saw action in places like Italy, Iraq, and Syria. His family said that Bates was taken prisoner — among many other adventures — during the war and put on a plane that then crash-landed on Rhodes. Bates tried to escape but was "captured stealing a fishing boat by the Fascista and later rescued from execution by firing squad by a passing German officer. Of course he was — it was just the sort of life Bates led.

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He once told an interviewer, "I might die young or I might die old, but I will never die of boredom. In , hooked on the pirate radio trend, Bates decided to seize Knock John, a Roughs Tower clone that stood closer in to shore, to house his radio transmitter. Knock John was already occupied by other pirate radio operators, so Bates and a small crew physically ejected the men and set up their own Radio Essex station there. But Knock John was within the United Kingdom's three-mile territorial waters, and Bates was soon hauled into a UK court on charges of illegal broadcasting.

Undeterred, Bates and his then fourteen-year-old son Michael packed up their gear and moved a few miles farther out.

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On Christmas Day , they took a boat to Roughs Tower. It too was already occupied by radio pirates running a station called Radio Caroline, but Bates dealt with the problem just as he had on Knock John.

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He seized the platform by force and left his own men in charge, but bad weather meant they could not be resupplied with food; they eventually had to be rescued by a government lifeboat sent from the mainland. Roughs Tower was soon reoccupied by Radio Caroline, but Bates remained determined to secure the fort. In April , he partnered with Radio Caroline and agreed to share the platform. When a Radio Caroline crew member suffered severe rope burns and was taken ashore, however, Bates found himself in sole possession of the place.

He refused to let Radio Caroline staffers reboard.

Defiant, Roy Bates painted his name on the side of the platform in large white letters. Caroline tried again, more dramatically, on June Bates and company again fought off the attackers with petrol bombs. When they withdrew, one man was left dangling from a ladder for two hours until a lifeboat from nearby Walton-on-Naze rescued him. Soon after the clashes with Radio Caroline, Bates announced that Roughs Tower was its own country, the Principality of Sealand, and that he was its prince.

Bates gave his wife Joan the title "princess" as a birthday present in As it turns out, people really like keeping their data secret sometimes with good reason and getting their entertainment for free. On the libertarian side of the equation, many hackers and programmers have an honorable interest in building software that helps people protect and share data — but unfortunately many of their creations end up in the hands of spammers, drug dealers and worse.

At several points during his narrative, Anderson describes a U. The Internet Police is only just released, but the speed of current events means it could already use a few extra chapters. Nick Kolakowski is an editor at Slashdot. His first book, a work of comedic nonfiction titled How to Become an Intellectual, was published by Adams Media in Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Book Review in Disciples: A well-researched, accessible account of America's foremost spymasters. Non-Fiction , History , United States.