George Clooney would like to bring a bit of Hollywood to one of the most remote and tense regions in Africa. Not red carpets and swag bags but the cold, intrusive, constant eye of a camera.

“You can go on Google Earth and Google my house,” said the actor. “I thought, if that’s the way it is and they’re gonna be able to Google my house, then people who are committing war crimes, specifically the government of Sudan, should be able to enjoy the same level of celebrity that I do. These people are public figures, and we’re gonna take their pictures.”

Clooney is spearheading an effort to deploy commercial satellites to monitor the border between northern and southern Sudan as the country faces a referendum starting Sunday that is likely to split it in two. Should fighting break out, his wildly ambitious goal – the culmination of his years of engagement with the war-torn country – is to do no less than prevent genocide.

The Satellite Sentinel Project is a collaboration among Not on Our Watch (the human rights organization Clooney co-founded), the Enough Project (an anti-genocide group), the United Nations, Harvard University, Google and Trellon, a company that builds websites. On the project’s site, http://www.satsentinel.org, anyone will be able to see high-resolution images of the 1,250-mile border. If violence breaks out, the site’s backers hope its photographic evidence will put pressure on the U.N. Security Council or other countries to intervene.

Not on Our Watch, which Clooney founded with actors Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon plus producer Jerry Weintraub and former Clinton State Department official David Pressman, provided the project’s $650,000 in startup funds.

“We have the ability to create deterrence,” said Clooney, now on his seventh trip to Sudan and its bordering nation of Chad. “You might not want to put tanks, helicopters or planes on the ground or in these border regions, ’cause we’re watching.”

More than 2 million people died in Sudan’s 1983-2005 civil war, and sporadic fighting has continued since then between the lighter-skinned Sudanese Arabs in the north who want Islamic law and the darker-skinned Africans of the semiautonomous south. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, based in Khartoum in the north, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from the violence. If southern Sudanese, who are largely Christian and animist, vote to secede from the north, the south would take with it about 80% of Sudan’s oil output, a vexing problem for Bashir.