This tale of Google Earth being used to monitor violence in Darfur, as well as this, raises an interesting point. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke tells of how the Bosnian War parties were hugely impressed by the mapping software running on computers the US State Department brought to the conference – they could pull up any view of each and every border proposal!
Later, the Israelis brought a staff of cartographers to each of the meetings after Wye River to study the exact details. This is something that will never happen again – now the best two mapping visualisation applications, Google Erf and NASA World Wind, are free to anyone with a laptop. And both are capable of displaying almost any form of information over the globe.
It’s like the surrealist mission, to place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.