On Tue, 2 Jan 1996, Jay Holovacs wrote:
Commercial satallites have land based corporate owners. Remember the success that Alabama had a few years ago pulling the plug on a New York based softporn tv satellite distribution system. They simply went after the assets of the satellite companies and got quick cooperation.
About ten years ago a group I was involved with were thinking about putting something into space as a publicity stunt. One company we talked to claimed they could put 1 kg into orbit on one of their sounding rockets for about $ 30,000 (that's a 1 kg satellite, not $ 30,000 per kg). How small can you build a "data haven" satellite ? Looking a few years into the future, you could probably stick a stripped-down Linux laptop with solar cells and a stripped-down satellite telephone as a Net link on top of a slightly larger rocket and charge for on-orbit storage using ecash... Using remailers it should be pretty-much untraceable. Mark