Armies of the free world

I'm in the middle of Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, a book about the massacre in Rwanda. It's not as hard to read as Hotel Rwanda was to watch, but this is not a book one reads quickly. For comparison, I read HP and the Half-Blood Prince in two three-hour sittings. I've been reading this for three hours and am about halfway through (it's 356 pages). Thinking on the ignorance, posturing, and bureaucracy that stopped military and humanitarian aid from reaching Rwanda in 1994 gave me a funny idea:

What if a few decades in the future, military peacekeepers were primarily not UN forces, but self-organized clans or guilds* of volunteer mercenaries funded by individual donations? What if one day another man finds himself defending a compound full of refugees like Paul Rusesabagina, but instead of a fax machine has a computer, and emails his bosses in Belgium and blogs about their peril? A mayday like that could spread around the world in hours, transmitted 'virally', as the marketing people like to put it, and if the option to go into danger to save lives was given to individuals, not governments and bureaucracies, another such massacre could be stopped dead in its tracks.

*yes, I'm consciously using computer game terminology even though I'm not a gamer, because the groups of volunteers would come together in a similar way.

Just wanted to put the idea out there. Maybe it only seems like a good idea because it's past my bedtime. Responses (esp from people who know more about Internet stuff than me)?