By Crispin Sartwell

When I was 15, I declared Crispin Sartwell to be an independent nation. My body was its sovereign territory. Its border was my skin. Its national anthem was "Give It to Me" by the J. Geils Band.

My declaration of independence had various immediate benefits. You could not enter Crispin Sartwell without obtaining a visa from me, for example. And the laws of the United States no longer applied to my behavior.

Seems I was not alone in my revolt against imperialistic powers. Even before Crispin Sartwell became independent, former British Royal Fusilier Paddy Roy Bates had landed on an abandoned World War II antiaircraft platform six miles off the coast of Britain and declared all 6200 square yards of it to be the Principality of Sealand.

Ever since Sealand's independence in 1967, Prince Roy and his wife, the former model Princess Joan, have been trying to figure out what the heck to do with their principality. They tried pirate radio. They tried issuing passports and stamps. There have been coups and invasions and perhaps a bit of money-laundering and illlegal arms dealing: all in all an exciting history.

But now, thanks to a group of American cyberpunks known collectively as Havenco and led by one Sean Hastings, Prince Roy has a plan. Sealand is being set up as a "data haven" where your information can be protected from the prying eyes of government agencies. If you want your email to be unmonitorable or your electronic transactions untraceable and untaxable, Sealand's servers could be your best bet.

The internet raises unprecedented issues with regard to privacy and liberty. As the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling said early on, "Information wants to be free." And the net has provided an unprecedented opportunity for free expression.

One of the greatest barriers to freedom of the press has always been access: only a few wealthy people could own newspapers and magazines. But the web has made it possible for many people to publish ideas that are too eccentric or controversial to appear in the mainstream press.

A perfect example of the problems created by the free flow of information on the internet is the debate that has erupted about the Napster program. Written by 19-year-old college dropout Shawn Fanning, it allows people easily to download music without paying for it. The recording companies, of course, would like you to pay for their products. But their products now consist of digital information, and so they keep escaping into the huge virtual wilderness of cyberspace.

At the outset, the internet was a lawless, wild territory in which almost anyone could do almost anything. It was an anarchic fantasy of free people and free expression. In its pure form, that era is certainly over. Microsoft and America Online/Time-Warner increasingly consolidate access to the internet and generate its content.

Congress tries to regulate internet pornography. And even as the U.S. government relaxes restrictions on encryption software that can increase the confidentiality and security of electronic communications, other governments such as China crack down. And as the justice department tries to detach Microsoft's net software from its operating system, Microsoft continues to try to achieve a seamless continuous monopoly.

The cowboys, meanwhile, have sometimes mutated into cyberterrorists in response to the consolidation. In the Philippines, a disillusioned computer science student named Onel A. DeGuzman allegedly released the Love Bug on an unsuspecting world to protest the cost of internet access.

The exponential growth of the Love Bug plague showed that the net is still wild. But the response shows the dilemmas involved in regulating it. The government of the Phillippines had trouble finding a law under which they could prosecute their suspect. Existing laws against vandalism and assault didn't quite apply to the act of writing code. And the havoc that the Love Bug created had no respect for political borders. As the thing rolled across the physical and cyber worlds, infecting whatever it touched, it was difficult to say where the crime was committed, and hence where DeGuzman should be prosecuted.

Perhaps the crime happened not in the Phillippines, but in the everywhere and nowhere of cyberspace. But then by whom could this crime be prosecuted? The internet has no government. As time goes on, the political boundaries between countries may simply become obsolete. Transactions of all kinds - social, sexual, economic - are enacted between electronic personalities ("screen names," for example) rather than physical persons. So "who" goes to jail "where"? Beats me.

Indeed, it's a bit hard to see what exactly has to be located in Sealand to make it a data haven. There will be satellite uplinks and microwave transmitters, no doubt, and certainly information storage and retrieval systems. But the persons communicating with one another along the routes that flow through Sealand will be located in countries that may have laws against what they're doing.

In a sense, Sealand does not even need to be a physical location. It seems possible that one could simply declare one's website to be an independent nation: declare a certain spectrum of bandwidth to be autonomous. In fact, the physical Sealand has the problem that it has never been formally recognized by the English government, which still claims ownership. But a piece of cyberterritory is subject to no country's clear sovereignty.

Whether or not the governments and corporations will be able to dominate access to and expression on the net is an open question: never underestimate the power of a huge, rich bureaucracy. But one thing that is already clear is that the net forces us to rethink the very ideas of commerce, politics, diplomacy, and violence.

These now take place in a virtual space that no government or corporation can yet fully claim, that all governments and corporations share with grad students, novelists, poodle enthusiasts, and whoever else might log on.

The folks who would regulate the net will have to come up not only with new enforcement procedures, new modes of surveillance and censorship, but also with news ways of conceptualizing the very idea of enforcement. They will not always be able to prosecute a crime as though somebody committed it at a certain physical location, and they will no longer be able to trace a crime to its source in a physical body. Tomorrow's criminals might be syndicates of simulated personae.

So it doesn't bother me that the United States has never formally recognized Crispin Sartwell's territorial integrity and security concerns. I'm going virtual, baby, and I'm routing my cybernation through the Principality of Sealand.