Temporary Autonomous Zone

Marty Levine of the Pittsburgh City Paper profiles the Second Revolutionary Army of the United States, "which resembles the First Revolutionary Army about as much as a dozen people who meet in Squirrel Hill's Wightman School Community Center can reasonably be expected to." The group has big plans for later this year:

Russ Schneider and a small group of compatriots plan to form a new country on the sidewalk of a busy Pittsburgh intersection and secede from the union this summer. For an hour.

"Well, we have to start small," Schneider says. "We don't have the numbers to grab Florida."…

Their 60-minute country, says Schneider, will be called Free America. Its citizens "won't be subject to irrational laws. Our nation will be at war with nobody. We won't have any type of police force harassing them. Our librarians would never report what they read to a centralized government."

The new nation won't be around for long, but it does intend to respect the rules of diplomatic propriety:

"We're trying to get a permit from the city," he says. "Because you know, you can't secede from the union without getting a permit from the city."