What to do when the internet goes down

This story first aired in June 2015.

There are lots of reasons you can find yourself offline: a natural disaster, government censorship, or simply a flaky ISP. Nathan Freitas researches alternative network technologies, and he knows first-hand what it's like to not have internet access -- he was in New York City during 911 and for the major power outage in 2004, he was in Boston during the marathon bombings and he's lived in remote parts of Nepal.

That got Nathan thinking about alternatives to the internet -- ways that small groups of people can set up their own peer-to-peer networks, from the bottom up. He thinks there are lots of ways you can share digital information without ever going online, and he calls this kind of ad-hoc sharing "Wind."