These are two scenes from the vast quantity of images which SPOT, Landsat, Sovinformsputnik, and other satellites record daily and store in databases: ready to be browsed and bought. They are collections of data -- although they are presented as picture elements (pixels) which resemble an image -- information waiting to be examined and interpreted, snapshots in time and space, this time of a war.

"The former Yugoslavia is the most listened to, photographed, monitored, overheard and intercepted entity in the history of mankind." -- U.S. State Department official, quoted in the New York Review of Books.

Kosovo names, among other things, the conflict in which classified NATO images were finally released to the public. And they were not simply pictures of the conduct of the war but of its ostensible reasons. This time, in addition to footage of bombs and missiles, the public could see ethnic cleansing in progress: high-resolution imagery of mass graves, refugees in the mountains, burning villages and organized deportations. It was the war in which satellite images were used as a way of forming public opinion. The manner in which they were released, however -- as pictures -- shows less the facts-on-the-ground than the ability of the technology to record, in minute detail, these facts. No data, strictly speaking, was forthcoming at press briefings, and certainly not the raw data available commercially. "I won’t talk about what kind of imagery that is," said the Pentagon spokesman.