Not even the worst earthquake in its recorded history can keep Japan's file-swapping community down. Last month, a team at Northwestern University near Chicago used its own BitTorrent monitoring tools to watch the number of BitTorrent peers exchanging data during the week before the earthquake and the week of the earthquake. They were largely identical, with one exception.

"The exception can be seen in the 24-hour period immediately following the earthquake, which occurred at 2:46pm local time on Friday, March 11th. As the graph shows, the number of BitTorrent peers found online differed by as much as 25 percent in this period compared to the previous week at the same time. Surprisingly, we still see a large number of peers online and activity returns to normal on Saturday morning."

The analysis comes courtesy of the AquaLab group run by Professor Fabián Bustamante, which has had a long interest in P2P work. In 2009, the group released SwarmScreen, which provides "privacy through plausible deniability in P2P systems." In 2007 and 2008, it worked on Ono, a tool that could increase P2P download rates by an average of 207 percent by connecting to better peers. Its new BitTorrent plugin Dasu monitors the network connection over time to see if an ISP is shaping or blocking certain protocols, along with the time of day it does so.

Recently, grad students Zachary Bischof and John Otto mapped data collected from these programs to current events, as with the Japan earthquake. A week earlier, they published their own graphs showing the BitTorrent situation in Egypt and Libya earlier this year when regimes in both countries tried to shut down Internet connectivity.

What nature couldn't accomplish, repressive states were able to achieve.