Following up on this week's erroneous reports of a "Rumsfeld phonecam ban" in Iraq, I filed this story for Wired News today:
While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not have signed a ban on new consumer digital-imaging technologies, he did express clear concern about the unforeseen impact of such technologies during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 7.
"People are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon,"
Rumsfeld said.According to [DoD spokesperson Lt. Col. Ken] McClellan, some Defense Department lawyers may be reviewing how the spread of consumer digital-imaging technology among military contractors and enlisted personnel affects the military's obligation to abide by a Geneva Convention article against holding prisoners up to public ridicule.
"Lawyers may have looked at that and said, 'It's probably a good idea to get these things out of the prisons.' There's no Pentagon-induced rule in the theater at this time … but there may or may not be some discussion taking place as to how the [Pentagon's April 14 directive on commercial wireless technology] might be supplemented in Iraq to prevent things we saw at Abu Ghraib."
Link to Wired News story; Link to previous BoingBoing post
