Cyberpunk and technothriller literature has anticipated this, going all the way back to the 1980s -- but most prominently in Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel Crypto

Cyberpunk and technothriller literature has anticipated this, going all the way back to the 1980s -- but most prominently in Neal Stephenson's 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, where the main characters work to set up an underground data haven in the fictional SE-Asian Sultanate of Kinakuta. Back then, it was naturally assumed that large databases and archives would need to be hosted in secure offshore locations, for obvious legal reasons. (IIRC, Cryptonomicon has an amusing segment where the characters describe the US legal system's discovery processes. "Never, ever send anything in email" was the gist of it.) Fast forward to today, and there are two great data havens -- SciHub and Libgen -- which, by design, are correctly and appropriately difficult for the US Government and its loathsome civil legal apparatus to grasp. The third great data haven is the Internet Archive, which was unwisely based in the US and managed as though it were a legitimate tech company. The lawyers smell the blood in the water and I fear it's not long for this world. What the world needs is a pared-down distributed version that's more slippery and totally unresponsive to legal complaints.