Dreams of Offshore Servers Haunt The Ocean-Based Micronation of ‘Sealand’

Late Christmas Eve, 1966, a retired British army major named Paddy Roy Bates piloted a motorboat seven miles off the coast of England to an abandoned anti-aircraft platform “and declared it conquered,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Urbina. Bates used it as a pirate radio station, sometimes spending several months there while living on tins of corned beef, rice pudding, flour,…