This story reminded me of an idea I had years ago:
Google is using its popular online mapping service to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. In a project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, inaugurated Tuesday, the Internet search company has updated its Google Earth service with high resolution satellite images of the region to document destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps.My idea? After Rwanda and the Bosnian war and news of slaughter and the concentration camps, I wondered why it was that there were no camera bombs out of which hundreds of little C-U-See-Me style cameras on parachutes are deployed over sites of atrocities broadcasting direct to satellites, landing unseen or picked up by those on the ground to record what was happening to them. The lack of video for CNN to show over and over has been as much the difference between the war on terror and larger human rights disasters like Darfur.
Comments
Gordo - April 12, 2007 12:41 pm
Cameras have the uncomfortable habit of unflinchingly capturing everything they 'see'. Why do you think media access to battlefields is so tightly controlled in modern warfare? All sides do things they'd rather not see on the evening news.
Jay Currie - April 13, 2007 6:09 am
It is a great idea.
Just as lots of computers in the hands of the poor is a great idea. And lots in the hands of the poor buggers stuck in madrassas thinking they are being educated.
Little, cheap cameras. Video and still.
I like it a lot and it beats the heck out of surveillance cameras at ATMs and on street corners.