Firefight video at the Globe and Mail...

...did not get the soldier who shot it in trouble in this case. But over the long run personal videos, and internet access in general, will be increasingly hot potatoes:

The gritty video captures the crackle of machine-gun fire, the boom of explosions and the whoosh of shrapnel passing dangerously close overhead.

But this compelling glimpse of Canadians under fire during a patrol west of Kandahar wasn't shot by a journalist travelling with the troops. Rather it was taken by a soldier himself.

When Cpl. Philippe Lemieux's reconnaissance unit was ambushed by insurgents Saturday morning, the 26-year-old soldier pulled out his personal camera, caught the action and gave a copy to The Globe and Mail.

By Monday, his video was on the newspaper's website – and Lemieux's commanders were asking questions about this soldier-turned-videographer. Back at defence headquarters in Ottawa, military policy-makers were again wrestling with the challenges of fighting a war in the digital age.

Lt.-Cmdr. Pierre Babinsky, a military spokesperson, said commanders were surprised to see the video online.

"Yes we were and funnily enough, so was Cpl. Lemieux when he found out how quickly the video had ended up on the Web," Babinsky said in an interview from Afghanistan.

Welcome to the wired battlefield, where many Canadian soldiers on the front line have a small digital camera tucked beside their guns.

Thanks to those cameras – and easy Internet access at the main base at Kandahar Airfield – soldiers are sending back pictures and videos to family members, friends as well as blogs and websites like YouTube.

"Everybody there seems to own a camera," said one soldier who has served in Afghanistan.

"This is our first big operation in the digital age ... at the end of the day, all you can do is put out policies and then you make sure soldiers are aware of them," said the soldier.

But the military's gripe with Lemieux wasn't that he was taking pictures as his unit was taking fire. Rather, they weren't happy that he hadn't vetted the video with commanders before handing it over to the media.

"We like to review anything that would come out of the battlefield to ensure there is no violation to operational security," Babinsky said.

Soldiers taking pictures, even for personal use, have to abide by the same rules that govern journalists embedded with the Canadian Forces. That means no pictures of sensitive military topics like the watchtowers around a base or classified equipment within the vehicles...

...the incident does renew old tensions within defence headquarters about how much access soldiers should have to the Internet, whether personal cameras should be allowed on operations...

As for Lemieux, Babinsky says he won't be punished since there were no security concerns with the footage he had taken...

Such video might also be used for training and as part of the historical record.