The Royal Thai Navy plans to remove a house built on a platform 12 miles off the coast of Phuket according to the Bangkok Post.

American Chad Elwartowski and his Thai partner Supranee Thepdet, also known as Nadia Summergirl, were reportedly living in the house, built by Ocean Builders, to promote the concept of “seasteading.”

“Seasteading is the concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, called seasteads, outside the territory claimed by any government,” says the company on its website.

In a promotional video posted to YouTube in March, Elwartowski toasts his partner with champagne on the roof of their ocean dwelling. He says 20 more floating homes are planned so others can join them in a libertarian-style community that they believe will be beyond legal jurisdictions.

Governments “have a monopoly on land but they don’t have a monopoly at sea,” Elwartowski says in the video. “We’re looking forward to freedom-loving people to come join us out on the open ocean.”

© Getty Images Tropical andaman seascape scenic off mai khao beach and wave crashing on sandy shore in phuket thailand with airplane takes off on sky in summer season. In an earlier video, he says international waters are “where there are no laws other than the law of the sea.”

But Thai authorities have a different view. They have filed a compliant, accusing the couple of breaching a section of the country’s criminal code that relates to threatening the sovereignty of a state, and erosion of a state’s independence, according to the Post. The charges carry the death penalty.

“We have already prepared a vessel, equipment and manpower to move the structure. We will try to move it within a week’’ a Thai vice-admiral told the newspaper.

Elwartowski says the couple are now in hiding. “This is ridiculous. We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed,” he said on his Facebook page.

He told TIME by email that he and his partner “have no claim to the home. It was never ours, we just lived there and promoted it.”</s>Thai authorities have raided a floating home in the Andaman Sea belonging to an American man and his Thai partner who sought to be pioneers in the “seasteading” movement.

Seasteading promotes living in international waters to be free of any nation’s laws.

Thailand’s navy said the pair had endangered national sovereignty, an offence punishable by life imprisonment or death. The floating home lived in by an American man and his Thai partner (Royal Thai Navy via AP)

The navy filed a complaint against the couple with police on the southern resort island of Phuket.

Chad Elwartowski said in an email that he believes he and Supranee Thepdet did nothing wrong.

The couple, who have gone into hiding, had been living part-time on a small structure they said was anchored outside Thailand’s territorial waters, just over 12 nautical miles from shore.

Thai authorities said they have revoked Mr Elwartowski’s visa.</s>Two people are in hiding after the Royal Thai Navy occupied a small structure off the coast of Thailand, in which the couple had been living as part of a movement called “seasteading” — the creation of autonomous homes in international waters.

As reported in the Bangkok Post, the Royal Thai Navy filed a criminal complaint with police about the two occupants, American Chad Elwartowski and his Thai girlfriend Nadia Supranee Thepdet, under a section concerning threats to national soveignty. These offences carry sentences of life in prison or death. Thai authorities also say they have revoked Elwartowski’s visa.

“This is ridiculous. We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed,” Elwartowski said in the Facebook post, now hidden from the public. He said he and his girlfriend were safe, but hiding from police.

The two are the first seasteaders to put to sea as part of a group called Ocean Builders, an enterprise aimed at creating a community of floating homes, by developing and selling structures that can be self-sustaining in international waters. The couple’s home was constructed by sinking a long spar and placing an octagonal platform on top of it.

Following the incident Saturday, the Ocean Builders group posted a statement on their website saying that Elwartowski and Thepdet were not responsible for building the seastead, but were merely tenants. They said that though they initially feared the seastead had been immediately destroyed, there was some indication that it was still afloat.

Daniel A. Nagy, a personal friend of the couple who had visited them in Thailand before their seastead was launched, said in a Facebook message that “Basically, Chad and Nadia are blazing the trail, trying out how to seastead. A lot of people, including myself are following them closely to learn from their experience.” Nagy said he hadn’t heard anything from Chad or Nadia beyond what Ocean Builders had stated online.

On Thursday, Ocean Builders published another post showing data extracted from an on-board tracker emitting a signal that shows it to be 14 nautical miles from the nearest Thai island, meaning it is outside of Thailand’s territorial waters. However, it is within 24 nautical miles, meaning it is within the contiguous zone that allows states to exercise some control in order to prevent “infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations within its territory or territorial sea.”

Ocean Builders is just one group in the wider seasteader movement, of which the Seasteading Institute is the biggest player.

The Institute was founded by Patri Freidman, the grandson of the famous economist Milton Friedman, and funded in part by a $1.7 million donation from the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

“Seasteaders envision a vibrant startup sector for governance, with many small groups testing out innovative ideas as they compete to better serve their residents’ needs,” the company’s website says.

The seasteading community is at its core a libertarian enterprise. They envision a world that maximizes freedom, where people are able to “vote with their homes,” simply sailing away from any community where government becomes too big or where they are unhappy.

Peter Thiel, one of the most high-profile tech-y libertarians in the world, spoke at a 2009 convention hosted by the Seasteading Institute in which he discussed why he thought seasteading was an important endeavour for humanity.

“The question of whether seasteading is desirable or possible is in my mind not even relevant — it is simply necessary,” Thiel said.

The idea of seasteading fits into the decentralized and competitive idea of governance that is part of the libertarian tradition. However, the difficult legal questions about where homes could be located, as the recent incident near Thailand shows, could be a major problem for the movement.

“Maybe there will be some reaction,” Thiel said in his 2009 address. “Maybe there will be an aircraft carrier coming toward the seastead. But if you have 10,000 seasteads, maybe it’ll be too late.”

In a 2017 interview with the New York Times, however, Thiel expressed some reservations about the technological and engineering feasibility of seasteads, noting they were “still very far in the future.”

Another setback for the seasteading movement was the end of a deal the Institute had made with French Polynesia, which appears to have disintegrated.

The idea of a microstate utopia is nothing new. The most famous example is the Principality of Sealand, which claims its status as a micronation and is entirely confined to an old anti-aircraft platform off the coast of the United Kingdom.

Even more relevant to the seasteaders vision, perhaps, is the Republic of Rose Island, a platform constructed by an Italian engineer in the Adriatic in 1967, which included everything from a restaurant to a bar and dance floor. Italian police eventually occupied the microstate and it was destroyed by the Italian navy, leading the founder to declare a government-in-exile.</s>BANGKOK, April 19 (Reuters) - A senior Thai government official on Friday urged a U.S. man and a Thai woman on the run from a possible death sentence for building an off-shore "sea home" to fight the charge in court.

The two, Chad Elwartowski and his partner Supranee Thepdet, have been accused of violating Thai sovereignty by raising a small cabin on top of a big, weighted spar in what they say are international waters, 14 nautical miles off the west-coast Thai island of Phuket.

But Thailand says the structure is in its 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

"I urge them to get a lawyer to fight this case," Supoj Rodruang Na Nongkhai, the deputy provincial governor of Phuket, told Reuters.

He said the two were believed to be in hiding in Thailand.

They have been charged under a law on the violation of sovereignty, which stipulates punishment of life in prison or death.

"Thailand will proceed with everything according to the law. We are not threatening them," Supoj said.

The pair are part of a "seasteading" movement that advocates the building of floating communities in international waters beyond the bounds of any national laws.

But the Thai navy raided their home this week and authorities revoked Elwartowski's visa and charged them.

Elwartowski and Supranee were not available for comment.

A group of entrepreneurs called Ocean Builders, which funded the construction of the floating home, said the two had done nothing wrong.

The group said in a statement the home was in a so-called contiguous zone of 12-24 nautical miles, where very limited Thai regulations applied, and they had no intention of setting up any independent state or "micro nation".

"The two of them present neither a danger to Thai sovereignty nor the shipping routes," the group said.

An official at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok said it was providing appropriate assistance to Elwartowski, who had engaged a lawyer.

In a video posted last month detailing the raising of his prototype floating home, Elwartowski said 20 more similar houses would be up for sale to forge a community.

"I'm looking forward to the good rules that people create as a community, and coming up with smarter systems as opposed to the systems they have already," he said. (Reporting by Panarat Thepgumpanat, Chayut Setboonsarng, and Panu Wongcha-um Editing by Robert Birsel)</s>BANGKOK -- Thai authorities have raided a floating home in the Andaman Sea belonging to an American man and his Thai partner who sought to be pioneers in the “seasteading” movement, which promotes living in international waters to be free of any nation's laws.

Thailand's navy said Chad Elwartowski and Supranee Thepdet endangered national sovereignty, an offence punishable by life imprisonment or death.

It filed a complaint against them with police on the southern resort island of Phuket. Thai authorities said they have revoked Elwartowski's visa.

Elwartowski said in an email Thursday that he believes he and Supranee - also known as Nadia Summergirl - did nothing wrong.

“This is ridiculous,” he said in an earlier statement posted online. “We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed.”

The couple, who have gone into hiding, had been living part-time on a small structure they said was anchored outside Thailand's territorial waters, just over 12 nautical miles from shore. They were not there when the navy carried out their raid on Saturday.

The Thai deputy naval commander responsible for the area said the project was a challenge to the country's authorities.

“This affects our national security and cannot be allowed,” Rear Adm. Wintharat Kotchaseni told Thai media on Tuesday. He said the floating house also posed a safety threat to navigation if it broke loose because the area is considered a shipping lane.

Seasteading has had a revival in recent years as libertarian ideas of living free from state interference - such as by using crypto-currency including Bitcoin - have become more popular, including among influential Silicon Valley figures such as entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Elwartowski, an IT specialist, has been involved in Bitcoin since 2010.

Several larger-scale projects are under development, but some in the seasteading community have credited the Andaman Sea house with being the first modern implementation of seasteading.

“The first thing to do is whatever I can to help Chad & Nadia, because living on a weird self-built structure and dreaming of future sovereignty should be considered harmless eccentricities, not major crimes,” Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who heads The Seasteading Institute, said on his Facebook page.

The floating two-story octagonal house at the centre of the controversy had been profiled and promoted online by a group called Ocean Builders, which touted it as a pilot project and sought to sell additional units.

The group describes itself as “a team of engineering focused entrepreneurs who have a passion for seasteading and are willing to put the hard work and effort forward to see that it happens.”

In online statements, both Elwartowski and Ocean Builders said the couple merely promoted and lived on the structure, and did not fund, design, build or set the location for it.

“I was volunteering for the project promoting it with the desire to be able to be the first seasteader and continue promoting it while living on the platform,” Elwartowski told The Associated Press.

“Being a foreigner in a foreign land, seeing the news that they want to give me the death penalty for just living on a floating house had me quite scared,” Elwartowski said. “We are still quite scared for our lives. We seriously did not think we were doing anything wrong and thought this would be a huge benefit for Thailand in so many ways.”

Asked his next step, he was more optimistic.

“I believe my lawyer can come to an amicable agreement with the Thai government,” he said.

Associated Press journalist Tassanee Vejpongsa contributed to this report.
The Royal Thai Navy is planning to remove a house that was allegedly constructed illegally 12 mi (19.31 km) off the Thai coastline to promote seasteading. The owners had planned to start a community of at least 20 houses in the area. Thai authorities have filed a complaint, which if prosecuted could carry a death sentence for "threatening the sovereignty of a state, and erosion of a state's independence".