Forget legal council. Laws change on a whim if you haven't noticed. Voluntary trade is under attack. We need to quit asking for permission to do business. We can do that on Tor.
I think Tormail is a good example to follow. They have their main servers hidden somewhere, and the public-facing website at tormail.org is a vps that's running nothing more than a Tor node and a copy of socat.
+1. This is also now basically the architecture that The Pirate Bay uses:
"All communication with users goes through TPB's load balancer, which is a disk-less server with all the configuration in RAM. The load balancer is not in the same country as the transit-router or the cloud servers," The Pirate Bay told us.
"The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they're running TPB, they can't look at the content of user traffic or user's IP-addresses.” [...]
The worst case scenario is that The Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer. All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be re-installed at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world.
"If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images," The Pirate Bay says.
"They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password," they add.
