It doesn't need to be a country. Just get some container ships, sail to international waters dragging a fiber cable with you and bam, data haven. You could also operate as a secure key storage. No worries about governments requesting keys as there is no government.

Yes, but it's fairly trivial to drop a "Seal Team 6" in and physically seize whatever they want, or just sabotage your equipment. Also, they could pressure your mainland circuit provider, or simply cut your cable every time you repaired it, which would put you out of business fairly quickly.

I'm not sure a data haven works unless you have a sovereign military that can defend itself against the rest of the world (good luck!)...

A satellite in geosync orbit? Sure, much smaller but definitely harder to reach.

It's still a rather bad trade-off. If you base your operation in a country with strong privacy laws then these at least protect you from that domestic government.

If you base your operation in international waters/outer space then there's literally no privacy law protecting you from anybody, you are fair game for every government out there.

Good idea, but any government that can launch satellites can also shoot them down. It's actually much easier to shoot one down than it is to launch one in the first place.

blowing up a satellite in orbit is a massive escalation over even something like a commando raid -- i believe it would qualify as a violation of outer space treaty as well. a great deal of 'space junk' was generated by china's (one, individual) test of an antisatellite missile in 2011, and it caught a lot of critical international attention over it because it puts other satellites in danger -- thousands of tiny pieces zipping around like a 3d minefield. this hazard would potentially apply to US military satellites as well.

besides this: there are many, many ways to spy on satellites. the US is believed to have at least one satellite that sits 'above' a major middle eastern comms satellite with a football field-sized antenna, passively snooping everything shot at it. you can encrypt it, sure, but do you have high enough trust in your crypto implementations to deal with an adversary like that?

what i'm getting at is, i don't think they would shoot down the satellite.

Try that with the moon.