Come to Iceland. Law is on your side here and the infrastructure is coming along.
One consideration, though, is that we're all US citizens, and so even if we set up a Hong Kong company with Hong Kong servers, we'd be at risk to US court orders or any civil/criminal action. So for US citizens, the only real solution is technical controls, or legal/legislative reforms in the US.
The NZ government has no hesitation in breaking whatever laws it needs to in order to satisfy US requests.
They would, however, need highly trusted agents in several legal jurisdictions. Agents who they trusted with the ability to bring the company down. Still... I think I might pay for a service like that, if some of the principle participants were people I trusted so I was sure it wasn't a honeypot.
If you need advice from experts at setting up a legal foreign business, LMK, and I'll send you a few referrals.
The Swiss SIGINT equivalent is called PTSS: https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss/index.html https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss/legal.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_intelligence_agencies
And don't get me started in HK, NZ or Iceland. If you really want to protect Osamas IRC server and worse with your VPN service, you require specific political protection from the host country.
Are you kidding!?
Essentially from lavabit it appears if you don't have technical capabilities inside the service already in place to provide pen trap level realtime reporting, they can compel you to install a pen trap device, and provide all keying/etc. required to make it work.
On June 10, the federal government served a court order on Lavabit issued under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment of the Stored Communications Act.
The Stored Communications Act (SCA, codified at 18 U.S.C. Chapter 121 §§ 2701–2712) is a law that addresses voluntary and compelled disclosure of "stored wire and electronic communications and transactional records" held by third-party internet service providers (ISPs). It was enacted as Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA, Pub.L. 99–508, 100 Stat. 1848, enacted October 21, 1986).
(emphasis mine)
Users generally entrust the security of online information to a third party, an ISP. In many cases, Fourth Amendment doctrine has held that, in so doing, users relinquish any expectation of privacy. The Third-Party Doctrine holds "…that knowingly revealing information to a third party relinquishes Fourth Amendment protection in that information."
It doesn't follow that a private individual can be compelled to install a pen register on his/her own infrastructure.
Hahahaha. NZ bent over backwards to let the US decimate mega. Let's be honest, we have/had basically each of those countries be complicit in extraordinary rendition, extradition, or compliance with US IP-law.
What do you honestly think will happen when we, in the name of international security and terrorism prevention, ask them to hand over a few computers instead of, well, people?
Advertised cryptography/anonymizing services really can't exist in a climate where all rules are thrown out the window because terrorists.
Of course a party of 3 out of 63 is not going to make big waves legislatively, but the center-right coalition wouldn't touch this issue. Hell, the previous administration didn't want to touch the issue either. Noise, that's all.
Although, for the most part, it has good intentions.
I wonder how broadly that could be interpreted. The UK doesn't give me hope.
Isn't it likely that Iceland has – as all functioning countries – a surveillance apparatus and is cooperating with the US? For the latter, the usual legal trick is not to spy on your own citizens but to ask a partner service for data about your own citizens …
Strict privacy laws can be great, however, they are no protection from surveillance. Surveillance is usually excluded from privacy laws as far as countries are snoopy and not 'just' private entities.
There is no spy agency in Iceland. We are a nation of roughly 350k people. Last interior minister actually sent the FBI packing when they came to investigate something.
Spying electronically on Icelanders is a useless and expensive pursuit, if you want to know anything you go downtown and sit around while your average Joe or Jane talk about it.
Seriously though, it is amazing how much information can be gleaned from someone (rightly or wrongly) if you just sit down and talk with them for a bit. And even more information about someone's true feeling can be determined from their non-verbal communication, something that electronic surveillance (like email snooping) can do nothing about.