In my first novel (2003) a computer network guy posted the names and particulars of all of the federal agents in several states on a dispersed system somewhat analogous to gnutella and other music programs. I’m not sure what’s possible today.
The WiFi networking coupled with mesh network e.g. Freifunk would allow a community to have good networking independent of ISPs. The peer-to-peer network file sharing programs will work just fine over a mesh of that type. It's more viable than what we did with our ham radio packet networks in the 80's.
There are alternative firmware loads for the Linksys WRT-54G router that natively support Freifunk. I don't recall whether that is an AODV or OLSR mesh. The routers that support it were Linux based. Later board revisions moved to a different OS and smaller memory footprint to save money. The best configurations are running dual frequency bands. A "backbone" on 802.11a goes router to router. Local connectivity is achieved on 802.11b/g on 2.4 GHz. The antennas are small and easy to place high on your house.
Oh, I thought he just used the normal interwebs and uploaded the list from a terminal at one of his customers where his identity couldn't be traced.