Stuart Hill, owner of the 2.5 acre island of Forvik in the Shetland Islands has declared that he does not recognise the authority of the government and that he is returning the island to its rightful status as a Crown Dependency (like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). Shetlopedia has an extensive entry on Forvik Island.
On May 23rd I helped sail a Seawolf 26 from Harwich to Ramsgate. Realising that we would pass quite close to Sealand. I asked the skipper if we could make a close approach and he obliged, which allowed me to get a good photo.
Sealand is up for sale - if I had a spare 750m euros floating around I might be tempted:-)
HavenCo is a company that offered the "ultimate" secure hosting facility on Sealand. Ryan Lackey was very closely involved with HavenCo but departed for various reasons which he explained in a talk titled "HavenCo: what really happened" on 2003-08-03 at DEFCON 11 in Las Vegas. The slides he used are available here as a pdf. He is now involved with a new venture called metacolo. Declan McCullagh reported on the talk in an article for CNET News called Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk?. This article also quotes a representative of Sealand who disputes Ryan's account.
In Electing to Leave, a Harpers guide to expatriating on November 3, Bryant Urstadt explains how difficult it is for Americans to renounce their US citizenship. The boldest approach he suggests, is to start your own micronation.
Since reading about Sealand I have often thought it might be worth putting something about micronations on my website.
Recently I read about Aland, a group of islands which form an autonomous, demilitarised and monolinguistically Swedish province of Finland. However, since Aland is not actively seeking to break with Finland it seems that it is not considered a micronation.
For more micronation related websites check out the dmoz category.
www.zenatode.org.uk Ian Gregory 2010
