These Satellite Images Document an Atrocity

Then there's Boldong, a town on the side of a fertile mountain that was attacked and burned early in the conflict but has since been rebuilt. A center for state-run logging operations before the war, Boldong is a strategic site. It's now held by the rebels, but according to Amnesty's information, the government wants to retake it, possibly to restart logging operations.

The team definitely wants Boldong.

Next up is Fanga. Near the same fertile soils as Boldong, the town has been attacked several times, but so far, it looks as though the Janjaweed and the government forces still haven't occupied it. Bromley notes that because of the multiple attacks, new destruction might not be as clear. Blätter says she's going to put parentheses around it.

Blätter sighs. "I want to get all of them," she says. But that's not an option. She pauses and then, in a businesslike tone, says she'll think some more before making a decision on Fanga.

And so it goes, down the list. Bromley stops at Silea. Flint had described a town of at least 500 households, but Google Earth shows only a few scatted huts. He asks Nelson to double-check the location.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, BROMLEY IS BACK AT HIS NEW YORK AVENUE OFFICE. The night before, he discovered a typo in the list they'd drawn up -- one that could have meant putting in a $2,500 order for the absolutely wrong location. This has been a rushed week. So today, he's going to redo the list from scratch, quietly and free of distractions, and make sure he gets the same coordinates.

Before he maps, he pulls up a program he calls his "fuzzy matcher." It's based on a set of village names and coordinates for Sudan generated by the United Nations. When he types in a name, the program searches for exact or, as the name suggests, fuzzy, matches, returning all possibilities and their official coordinate information. He types in "Boldong."

"Now this is what you want to see," he says. "One 'Boldong' and where we expect to find it."

The phone rings. It's Nelson calling from across town. Over the past two days, both men repeatedly measured the distance between Abu Sakim and Kafod. It turns out the towns are about 6 miles apart. If the researchers put in a special, slightly more expensive order, they might get both in one shot. But there's also a chance the satellite would capture just one town at the very far edge of the frame, or, even worse, that it would only get half of one town. The risk's just not worth it. Abu Sakim's out.

"That's tough math right there," Bromley says. "Hopefully, the information makes your decision for you. But sometimes you have to choose one over the other, and literally you're just looking at a Word document." (Days later, the team will learn how good a decision this was: Abu Sakim had made the list by mistake -- by the time they were discussing it, it had already been overrun.)

Moving down his list, Bromley types "Hashaba" into the fuzzy matcher. On this one, there are 36 near-matches.

By late afternoon, Bromley has what looks like a solid coordinate list for all of the threatened villages, so he turns his attention to the images he has in hand. He's going to convert them into Google Earth files, viewable by the 100 million people or so who have downloaded the program.