The potential of the camera phone image to speak truth to power cannot be underestimated. As James Fallows observes, "History is driven by ideas and passions, and by unforeseeable events....History is also driven by science and technology."
When technology slams headlong into inhumane and unjustice acts, people begin to take notice. Today, we are on the verge of a digital revolution with the emergence of cell phone technologies -- one that can be seen as a positive force used to promote democracy or one that may eventually be used to destroy it.
Pictures from Abu Ghraib of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners,the tsunami disaster, the subway bombings in London, the execution of Saddam Hussein, the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, and more recently the photographs of Egyptian police torturing suspects suggests the emergence of a hyper-mediated surveillance society.
The motivation to photograph atrocities by the perpetrators, such as in Abu Ghraib prison, Haditha, and in Egypt indicates how people in positions of power and control blindly operate by a code of conduct that is beyond any law -- human or devine. The soldiers and police making these images possess a sense superiority and impunity toward those they deem to be the enemy. The pictures they make may be made as evidence, entertain, or propaganda.
When 21-year-old Egytian minibus driver Imad Kabir was hung upside down and sodomized, his torturers recorded the proceedings with a camera phone and then transmitted the video to the Kabir's co- workers as a warning. The pictures eventually made their way onto the Internet and two police offers were jailed in the incident.
Originally conceived as an act of oppression against those opposing the government's authority, the Egyptian camera phone images reveal the often rumored and insidious truth about the mistreatment of prisoners. It is extremely difficult for any government to deny such cases of abuse when the evidence appears so indisputable.
The camera phone images we have seen in recent years are glimpses of a world we have heard about but have seldom seen. Images of atrocity and abuse, revealing the darkest side of humanity, speak truth to power as history unfolds before our eyes.