Earlier this week, I blogged the Pirate Bay's announcement of a plan to set up mirrors of its servers in high-altitude aerial drones with wireless Internet links. TorrentFreak has a discussion of Electronic Countermeasures, a project from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, a London thinktank. Electronic Countermeasures does much of what TPB proposes, creating an "aerial napster" that uses autonomic swarm formation to create, disperse, and reform high-throughput temporary networks in the sky.b

Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today, was amazed to read the announcement, not so much because of the technology, because his group has already built a swarm of file-sharing drones.

"I thought hold on, we are already doing that," Young told TorrentFreak.

Their starting point for project "Electronic Countermeasures" was to create something akin to an 'aerial Napster' or 'airborne Pirate Bay', but it became much more than that.

"Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere," says the group describing their creation.