However, in contrast to Bosnia, ICTY had its procedures and staff already in place, allowing for what former chief prosecutor Louise Arbour (now on the Canadian Supreme Court) called "real-time law enforcement." "Confronted with virtually a million refugees," says Blewitt, "we were able to identify key people fairly quickly, take their statements, get a broad idea of what crimes had been committed. Even as the [NATO] airstrikes were going on, we were making preparations to go in immediately with KFOR [the U.N.'s Kosovo peacekeeping force] to get to the forensic sites before they were damaged." That was particularly important because perpetrators have made a greater effort to destroy the evidence of their crimes since the establishment of the Tribunal.

Though investigators were on the ground more rapidly than they were in Bosnia, much of the evidence they collected was still fairly low-tech, such as written or recorded statements from victims and witnesses. The Tele Info van, on the other hand, illustrates the capacity for IT to assist in the investigation of such widespread and calamitous devastation as Blewitt describes. Once the geocoded visual data from the vehicle's eight cameras is downloaded (to a Netfinity server that IBM donated to the Tribunal), investigators or trial attorneys can use a PC to call up a specific street address or global coordinates and have a dated visual image that will show whether buildings were burned, bullet-riddled or defaced.

This particular technological twist has served two main needs of the investigative process: operational intelligence and actual evidence. For example, if a witness says his village was burned in a specific way, say, they burned the butcher shop and destroyed the post office but didn't destroy three houses across the street because they belonged to Serb families, investigators can use the seamless pictures of the village to verify the claim. That's operational intelligence. Using the visual account to corroborate testimony is extremely important in discovering whether people have told the truth or remembered accurately, and therefore how likely it is that they are telling the truth about other things.

The second and even more important use of the photographic data is to provide evidence, an objective measure of the amount of damage done within Kosovo overall. Tele Info's system was a relatively quick and inexpensive way to do it, according to Paul Risley, spokesman for the prosecutor. In December 1999 the first processed tapes from the van came to the Tribunal and, according to David Falces, chief of the ICTY's electronic support services and communication section, they "appear to provide an accurate wraparound image of the area just after the NATO troops assumed control of the province, and they do show widespread destruction of property."&