Ryan Lackey
Ryan Donald Lackey (born March 17, 1979) is an and professional. He was a co-founder of , the world’s first data haven. He also speaks at numerous conferences and trade shows, including , RSA Data Security Conference, on various topics in the computer security field, and has appeared on the cover of , in numerous television, radio, and print articles on and . Lackey operated BlueIraq, a communications and IT company serving the and domestic markets in and during the US conflicts.
Lackey was born in and has also lived throughout the US and Europe, , Sealand, Dubai, and Iraq. As a teenager, he was briefly involved with the Globewide Network Academy. Lackey attended and majored in Course 18 (mathematics). While a student at MIT (he later dropped out due to financial constraints) Lackey became interested in and distributed systems, originally for massively . This interest led to attending several conferences (Financial Cryptography 98, various MIT presentations), participating on mailing lists such as “cypherpunks” and “dbs”, and eventually implementing patented Chaumian in an underground library, HINDE, with Ian Goldberg, named after , a Dutch cypherpunk also present at FC98. In part, he contributed to the cypherpunks movement as one of the longest operators.
In 1999 Lackey lived in the San Francisco Bay Area after a period in before moving to the unrecognized state of off the coast of the and establishing . In December 2002, he left HavenCo following a dispute with other company directors and the Sealand “Royal Family”.
Eventually, BlueIraq’s business model became economically unfeasible due to an escalation in anti-western violence primarily in the form of and troop draw downs. BlueIraq sought to transform itself into a large general consumer cellular telephone company. However, the 2008 financial crisis and the instability of Iraq and Afghanistan made fund raising impossible.
Lackey returned to the US and located in San Francisco where he worked for a number of start-up companies before applying to . He was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2011 round. Lackey founded CryptoSeal, a VPN as a service start-up with a small group of people well known in the computer security community, and secured funding from and a well known venture capital fund. In June 2014, CryptoSeal was acquired by .