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An interesting sidebar/addendum to my earlier post about Clay Shirky's essay re: cameraphones and cultural revolution:

Rumsfeld bans camera phones in Iraq

LONDON (AFP) - Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a business newspaper reported.

Quoting a Pentagon source, The Business newspaper said the US Defense Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.

[more]

A similar ban was already in effect, I believe, as reported on 60 MINUTES II a couple of weeks ago (the night that they ran clips from a video diary shot by one of the soldiers stationed at a military prison in Iraq, who commented several times on the tape about how she wasn't supposed to have a video camera with her...) So this means, what, they'll examine every soldier's phone? Daily searches of guards and soldiers who ostensibly are trustworthy? I assume that most soldiers don't have cameraphones and other "banned" devices, but how would you know? Is it the honor system that keeps them in line -- and if that's the case, then where'd all those pictures from Abu Ghraib come from in the first place?

Anyway, it certainly bolsters up Shirky's original thesis. A clampdown like this is almost certainly going to generate more pictures rather than suppress them, because of their now-forbidden quality. Ain't technology wonderful?

posted by Gus at 6:35 PM | |