nowthatsfuckedup.com

» see nowthatsfuckedup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the trade at the center of this site began as a billing problem. chris wilson, twenty-seven, a former police officer in eagle lake, florida, was running a paid amateur pornography site out of lakeland from february 2004. a lot of his would-be customers were deployed to iraq and afghanistan, and card transactions coming from those addresses were being declined as high risk by his processor. the men wanted in and their money could not get through.

so wilson opened a second door. prove you are serving and post photographs from where you are, and the membership costs nothing. the first submissions were what you would expect from that offer: equipment, vehicles, men posing next to things. within months the same forum was carrying photographs of the dead, taken by the people who had been there, uploaded from the same connection as everything else. by 2005 it had somewhere over fifty thousand subscribers and roughly a third of them were military.

i was in ankara in those years, finishing a degree. the shock-site layer of the web was something you knew by name rather than by visiting, and this one was narrower than that layer anyway. it needed an american credit card at one end and an american deployment at the other, and i had access to neither. it is in the list because of what it documents, not because anybody i knew went there.

~ the record ~

~ what the trade actually was ~

the mechanism is worth stating carefully, because it is the only reason this site is remembered. the photographs were not being sold and no money moved in that direction. they were the price of admission to a different part of the site, which means the images had a market value set by pornography, and the men taking them knew it.

wilson's public position was that he was hosting an unedited view of the war from the point of view of the people fighting it, without a slant applied by the news media. that argument was not entirely empty. the photographs were real and they were being taken by participants, and no american newspaper was ever going to print them. the argument also does not survive contact with the fact that the payment for them was access to porn, which is the thing nobody defending the site ever found a way around.

the pentagon had already noticed. in october 2004 it investigated wilson over nude photographs of female service members posted to the site and blocked access to the domain from military facilities in iraq. an army spokesman's answer at the time was that soldiers on the job should not be freelancing, with a first amendment caveat attached. nothing further happened.

~ the charges ~

on 7 october 2005 the polk county sheriff's office arrested wilson on 301 counts, three hundred misdemeanors and one felony, of possessing and distributing obscene material. bond was set at $151,000. stacked end to end the counts carried a theoretical maximum somewhere past three hundred years.

none of the 301 counts concerned the war photographs. sheriff grady judd's charges were about the pornography, which wilson's own attorney described as ordinary by the standards of the internet, and which was being prosecuted under a local community standard in one florida county for material that anybody anywhere could reach. that is the whole legal question the case raised and never answered: whose community, when the server is in one place and the audience is everywhere.

~ the legacy ~

wilson hired a first amendment firm and drew support from the aclu, and the case ended in a plea rather than a ruling. he pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and agreed to close the business and stay out of adult websites for five years. the site kept running for another ninety days on existing subscriber logins before the sheriff's office took control of it, and it was gone by april 2006.

so no court ever decided whether one county could set the obscenity standard for the entire internet, and no court ever addressed the photographs at all. the images had already spread beyond the site by then. wilson went on to run documentingreality.com. the thing that stayed dead was the specific arrangement, and that arrangement remains the clearest surviving record of what the early camera-phone war looked like to the people carrying the cameras.

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