Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable once the idea of escape from them is suggested.

- Alexis de Tocqueville

Grainy, dark, and pixilated, the picture was featured on the front page of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the London Times, the BBC and as the feature picture of every major media acronym’s webpage.

And it didn’t come from one of the hi-tech hi-fidelity cameras that had escorted in terrorism’s first appearance on the world stage but from the same small device that’s, by now, likely resting in your own pocket. The camera-phone pictures snapped – or, more precisely, clicked – by the terrified Londoners trapped inside the Underground train struck outside Kings Cross Station captured both the first-person terror of a victim of the attack and a novel permutation in the evolution of terrorism.

The first images from the site of a terrorist attack were for the first time not produced by international media coverage, but instead produced by the cameras on passengers’ cell phones, “the latest innovation in the grim art of terrorism documentary.”¹ And in this instance, they begin to flow from their users’ cell phones and out into the world only fifteen minutes after the first Underground explosion.

This marked a dramatic departure from every act of terrorism that preceded it, the instantaneous creation of user-controlled media marked the turning of a new page in the story of terrorism. Despite all the media coverage following the events of 7/7, the most salient points about the assault were summarily missed in the coverage that was paradoxically breaking for countless consecutive hours following the bombings.

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The first point was an intrinsic part of the coverage itself. The media had its usual array of breathless reporters making their on-scene commentary, attempting to be at once erudite and timeless. It also had its cut-aways to in-house terrorism experts who offered their impulsive and largely unfounded speculation about who or what had carried out the attacks. During all this, one little-noticed picture silently captured the world’s attention and all that was salient and novel about the terrorist attacks – while simultaneously shifting the very nature of media coverage forever.

In the same way that the new broadcasting technology of the 1970s – the mini-cam, the battery-powered video recorder, and the time-base corrector – magnified the global audience of a terrorist attack exponentially, the emergence of the camera phone as a medium in the theater of terrorism marks another step in the development of modern terrorism. No longer does the terrorist have to court the attention of major media outlets, giant and often intransigent, stubborn corporations.

Media coverage is now self-assembling and instantaneous.