Background
Lackey was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and has also lived throughout the United States and Europe, Anguilla, Sealand, Dubai, and Iraq.
Lackey was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and has also lived throughout the United States and Europe, Anguilla, Sealand, Dubai, and Iraq.
Lackey attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and majored in Course 18 (mathematics).
He also speaks at numerous conferences and trade shows, including DEF CON, Republic of South Africa Data Security Conference, on various topics in the computer security field, and has appeared on the cover of Wired Magazine, in numerous television, radio, and print articles on HavenCo and Sealand. Lackey operated BlueIraq, a VSAT communications and Information Technology company serving the Department of Defense and domestic markets in Iraq and Afghanistan during the United States conflicts. As a teenager, he was briefly involved with the Globewide Network Academy.
In part, he contributed to the cypherpunks movement as one of the longest Anonymous remailer operators.
In 1999 Lackey lived in the San Francisco Bay Area after a period in Anguilla before moving to the unrecognized state of Sealand off the coast of the United Kingdom and establishing HavenCo. 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 Improvised Explosive Devices and troop draw downs. BlueIraq sought venture capital 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 United States and located in San Francisco where he worked for a number of start-up companies before applying to Y Combinator. 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 Ron Conway and a well known venture capital fund.
In June 2014, CryptoSeal was acquired by CloudFlare.