The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison prove this point. While the government tried to control the media, its own soldiers were using new technology to "basically create homemade porn with their digital cameras," says Donald Winslow, a photojournalist and the editor of News Photographer magazine. "They assembled them into galleries and e-mailed them to people -- it's ludicrous when you think about it, but to a generation of soldiers that are maybe in their later teens or 20s, at some point this seemed like a good idea and they did it."

Those shots -- the reportedly thousands of them that were casually snapped on digital cameras and passed around on the Internet among military friends and family members -- slipped beyond the control of government officials, making their way to CBS, to the New Yorker, and to the Washington Post, which now claims to have a gigantic stash of them. And while the Pentagon announced it was investigating allegations of torture several months ago, it wasn't until we saw the pictures that we realized the horror of what had happened in Saddam's former dungeon.

"People often ask me if there have been any iconic images from this war," Howe says. "And until now I would say no, there really haven't been any iconic images. But now I think that the images out of Abu Ghraib might become the ones we remember from this war, and if that happens it will be the first time in history that iconic images will have been taken by amateurs." For Howe, this watershed will mark a revolution in photography, the emergence, he says, of a brand new way of documenting the world around us.

It's not clear, yet, what this new, close-up view of battle will mean for the enterprise of war-fighting. Pedro Meyer, a veteran photographer who has embraced digital technology, points out that in 2005, technologists expect more than 60 billion pictures will be snapped on cellphone cameras alone. "Imagine what the number will be 10 years from now?" he asks. What will this ubiquitous documentation do to our will to fight wars? How will wars change if people can always see what's on the front? Will they become cleaner, or dirtier? Will we have fewer atrocities, or more?

"Imagine if World War II were fought in this environment," says Winslow. "Imagine if we were sitting here in the midst of watching American troops in battle in Europe. And all of a sudden you watched a video of a couple thousand prisoners of war in Auschwitz being led into an extermination room. Or if you had a traffic cam in Dresden and you sat and watched the city being bombed. That's not that much different from the environment we have today."

But Winslow doesn't know whether the Holocaust would have happened in an era of cellphone cameras; maybe the Germans wouldn't have shied away from their atrocities even despite the constant photography. The lesson from Abu Ghraib, or from Nick Berg, is that you never know what technology can reap. Digital cameras were never meant as a tool for documenting torture, and the Web was not invented as a way for fanatics to broadcast pictures of their murders. But here we are. "They've become tools of war," Winslow says.

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