Farhad Manjoo

Although the picture contains no clues to the scene’s location or date, to Ibrahim Hooper and CAIR — an Islamic rights group that opposed the war in Iraq — the story the image told seemed clear: The photograph shows an American soldier ridiculing two Iraqi children by making them hold up a sign they don’t understand, CAIR concluded. “If the United States Army is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal,” Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, said in a press release issued on April 2.

In response, the military, which determined that the soldier in the picture was a Marine reservist — Lance Cpl. Ted J. Boudreaux of Thibodaux, La. — launched an investigation. News of the probe sparked a small outcry against Boudreaux; his local newspaper said he had “embarrassed himself, the Marine Corps and, unfortunately, his home state.”

But the anti-Boudreaux fulmination appears to be have been, at the very least, premature, because nobody can determine whether the picture CAIR received is authentic. Boudreaux has told the Marines that the photo is not real. And, indeed, just as the military’s investigation got underway, several other versions of the picture began popping up online. Some were obviously doctored — one version, posted on a Usenet newsgroup, has the boys holding a sign that reads, “We wanna see Jessca Simpson!” But at least one other picture found online appears just as real as the image CAIR received — and this one has the boys holding a sign with a decidedly friendlier message: “Lcpl Boudreaux saved my dad. then he rescued my sister!”

Which picture is the real picture? It appears impossible to tell — even experts in digital imaging are cautious in venturing a guess.

The Boudreaux story illustrates, once again, the emerging weakness of photography in a digital age. There was a time when photographs were synonymous with truth — when you could be sure that what you saw in a picture actually occurred. In today’s Photoshop world, all that has changed. Pictures are endlessly pliable. Photographs (and even videos) are now merely as good as words — approximations of reality at best, subtle (or outright) distortions of truth at worst. Is that Jane Fonda next to John Kerry at an antiwar rally? No, it isn’t; if you thought so, you’re a fool for trusting your own eyes.

Some photographers welcome the new skepticism toward images; it’s good that people are learning not to automatically believe what they see, they say. But many fear that we’re losing an important foothold on reality. Without trustworthy photographs, how will we ever know what in our world is real?

“One of the founders of Doctors Without Borders once said, ‘Without a photograph there is no massacre,’” says Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography at New York University. “You can say Tiananmen Square happened — there was a video, there was a massacre. But if we typically disbelieve the evidence of a photograph, then when the Chinese government says there’s no massacre, what are you going to hold up against that?”

CAIR received its version of the Boudreaux picture in an e-mail from a subscriber to its listserv — in other words, someone who likely shares the group’s point of view regarding the war. Beyond that, CAIR has no idea where the picture came from. Yet the group’s press release reads as if CAIR is certain of the photograph’s authenticity. Nowhere does CAIR suggest that there may be some reasonable explanation for the scene in the picture, or that the image could be a complete fabrication. Instead, the group’s director implores the government to “take action to let military personnel know that such offensive behavior harms America’s image and will not be tolerated.”

Did CAIR jump the gun? Perhaps. But it’s hard to blame the group; this is the power of a photograph. Maybe CAIR could have been more cautious, but as Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the group, points out, CAIR has no way to determine whether a picture was doctored. And caution is hard to summon when you’re faced with something so real. Since before the war in Iraq began, CAIR has been warning that an invasion would “harm our nation’s image and interests in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world.” Now, here was a picture that appeared to prove just how American soldiers were hurting our standing in the Muslim world. Of course CAIR believed it was true.

This is how it goes with pictures. The Internet, many of us know, is mostly garbage. You’re not supposed to believe anything you see online. CAIR probably knows that. Still, every so often a picture or a video pops up on the Internet that is so compelling — so unbelievable — that you can’t help but believe it. You want to believe it. You want to believe that George W. Bush (or Bill Clinton) didn’t have sense enough to remove the lens cap before looking through a pair of binoculars. You may want to believe that Tom Daschle pledges allegiance to the flag with the wrong hand, or that Bush reads books upside down. A series of pictures that appears to show the Israeli police summarily executing a Palestinian may confirm your worst fears about Israeli justice; if it does, you’re going to believe what you see. And if you already suspect that the American military is doing much more bad in Iraq than good, your reaction to a picture of a Marine cruelly mocking Iraqi children will be predictable. You would, as CAIR did, err on the side of it being true.

In an age in which a picture is never quite what it seems to be, the opposite reaction — one of complete skepticism when faced with a photo you desperately hope is fake — is also evident. Immediately after CAIR sent out its press release, right-wingers at the Free Republic discussion site began picking the picture apart, looking for flaws in its design. Some pointed out that the soldier appeared to be wearing Army fatigues, which didn’t fit with the Marine Corp’s ranking of lance corporal. Many also said that the text on the sign seemed digitally manipulated. “I’m no handwriting expert, but this writing appears a bit too curvilinear for someone who’s a native user of the Roman alphabet,” one person wrote. But beyond anything in the image, for many Freepers the biggest clue that the picture was fake was that CAIR was saying it was real. The Freepers don’t trust CAIR; why should they trust a picture that it says it received by e-mail?

Several Freepers created their own doctored versions of the photograph in order to show how easily digital images could be manipulated. But all of their home-brew photos were pretty much obviously doctored. Indeed, of all the alternate versions of the Boudreaux picture to show up online, only one (besides CAIR’s version) seems believable — the one that claims that Boudreaux “saved” the boy’s dad and “rescued” his sister.

The source of this image is a mystery. It seems to have first been posted on Image Dump, a site that allows people to submit pictures for others to rate. The picture was posted anonymously, but was accompanied by this caption: “Grateful Kurdish children thank a marine, Lcpl Boudreaux. An obviously doctored version of this photo with an offensive statement clumsily pasted on has been floating around the internet as part as some sort of cowardly smear campaign. Let’s hope Boudreaux gets to tell his story and how he helped this family.”

The caption is signed by someone who calls himself doggod91. Doggod91 seems to be the same person who runs a blog called Heretic 2004, a site that espouses a curious blend of political positions. The proprietor is a fan of John Kerry and an opponent of Bush, but he’s also a critic of “pacifists,” of Palestinians, and of antiwar types in general. Interestingly, doggod91 also likes Photoshop tricks.

Several experts, including those in Salon’s art department, could not say definitively which picture — doggod91′s or CAIR’s — was real. Some believed that the one with the “positive message” was authentic; others believed just the opposite. Almost everyone suggested that both could be fake.

The Marines say they have called in the Naval Criminal Investigative Services for help in the investigation of the picture, and detectives there could finally get to the bottom of the story. Digital forensics is said to be a new science, but there has recently been much interest in the detection of forged digital pictures, and some tools provide hope in the effort to pin down fakes. For instance, Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College, has been developing ways to analyze the actual code that makes up a digital photograph in order to check its authenticity; altered images can look quite different, statistically, from natural images, Farid has found. Other researchers have come up with algorithms for detecting when one part of an image has been copied and moved over another part of an image, a popular method of forging pictures. (See a PDF of this research here.) It’s possible that NCIS could use any of these — and probably even more advanced — techniques in finding the truth behind the Boudreaux picture.

But until there’s a formal conclusion, your decision on the photograph would seem to come down to whom you trust. Doggod91 did not respond to several e-mail inquiries sent to the address posted on his blog, so it’s impossible to tell where he found what he calls “the real picture.” But given his politics, believing that doggod91′s photograph is authentic is at least as difficult as believing that CAIR’s is authentic, and you are free to choose whichever version of reality you’re happier with. This is perhaps the ultimate message in the controversy surrounding the Boudreaux picture: In the digital world, a picture isn’t assessed on its own terms. You are no longer responsible for believing your own eyes; only if you trust the person who produced the photograph should you conclude that it shows what it purports to show. Otherwise, you can guiltlessly dismiss it as a fake.

To some photographers, the new age of photographic uncertainty is an unsettling development. “My work is about witnessing my time and events,” says Ken Light, a veteran photojournalist and a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “My career as a photographer has been based on seeing America through a lens that is critical of institutions and of the culture.” Among other things, Light has photographed the Texas death row, the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta, and migrant workers crossing the Mexican-American border. His pictures are powerful precisely because they’re credible, because they’re real. If you’re a supporter of the death penalty, you can read 10,000 words on the horror and loneliness of death row and still come away unmoved, dismissing the whole thing as one subjective writer’s bluster. Stubborn as you might be, though, perhaps just this one Ken Light picture of a 21-year-old waiting for execution will jar you from your settled view. This is what attracts Light to photography. It’s difficult to shake criticism that comes through a camera, he says, because “people sense a deeper truth in photographs” than they do in other media.

But Light worries that the truth we see in photographs will diminish in a digital age. He has two nightmares: First, that fake pictures will be mistaken for true pictures, rattling the political discourse. But a scarier proposition for him is that, in the long run, people will start to ignore real pictures as phonies. When every picture is suspect, all pictures are dismissible, Light fears, and photography’s unique power to criticize will decline.

Light recently found himself at the center of his first nightmare. An old picture he took — a 1971 shot of John Kerry at an antiwar rally in Mineola, N.Y. — was swiped from the Web site of Corbis, Light’s photo agency, and seamlessly stitched with another picture from Corbis, photographer Owen Franken’s 1972 photograph of Jane Fonda at a rally in Miami Beach, Fla. Nobody knows who did it, but whoever it was had a good eye for doctoring. The composite photo, showing a thoughtful, appreciative Kerry next to a fired-up Fonda, was given a border, a headline, a caption and an Associated Press credit; it looks like an authentic newspaper clipping showing Kerry closely associated with Hanoi Jane, a woman hated by many of the veterans who support Kerry.

The composite image spread around the Internet with lightning speed, even catching the attention of some in the media; on Feb. 13, the New York Times reported its existence, describing the picture in detail but noting that its origins were “unclear.” It didn’t take long for Light, Franken and sites like Snopes.com — dedicated to debunking Internet rumors — to show that the picture was fake. Eventually, the record was set straight. As Light later wrote in the Washington Post, “The Internet has come as close as it gets to a correction. If you use a search engine to look for my Kerry picture now, you’ll find the hoax explanations before you see the photo itself.” But it still took some time to put things right, and perhaps too much time — what if the picture was found online just weeks before the election? Fred Ritchin, of NYU, has a specific case in mind: “Seriously, what if there’s a picture of one or another political candidate in bed with a woman who’s not his wife two days before the election?” he asks. What if its authenticity was impossible to determine quickly? (Ken Light still has the original negative of his Kerry photo, but modern photographs, taken on digital cameras, might not provide this handy way of proving which is really the “original” picture.) How would society deal with such a political earthquake?

If a doctored photo ever does lead to the defeat of a political candidate or some other disaster — puts the wrong guy in jail, say — one immediate consequence might be a quick decline in the trust we have in pictures. And to Light and Ritchin, people in awe of the power of photography, this is a terrifying thing. In the absence of trustworthy photos, says Ritchin, “The institutions in power will increase their power.” Then he adds, “Look at Rodney King. For years and years there was brutality in the LAPD. It wasn’t until the video came out that we all knew about it, because we saw it.” Light echoes that idea. “It’s one thing when it’s a silly photo, but when it’s massacres, executions, all those things, it becomes very dangerous. How do newspapers know when they see something if it’s real or not? Let’s say I’m at a newspaper and I get this picture of this cop beating up this guy, which could be a great picture. But what if it isn’t real? Should I run it?”

There are already signs that our trust in pictures is slipping away. People used to get fooled all the time by nude pictures of celebrities online, says Ed Lake, also known as the Fake Detective, a man who dedicates much of his time to pinning down the fakery behind purported naughty pictures of people like Gillian Anderson and Sarah Michelle Gellar. (Lake was the subject of an entertaining profile in Wired recently, titled “These Are Definitely Not Scully’s Breasts.”) Now, Lake says, “Most of the e-mail I get is about real pictures. Now they automatically think it’s fake.” David Mikkelson, who, with his wife, Barbara, runs Snopes, said something similar. Many times when people ask Snopes to review photos, the pictures turn out to be real, Mikkelson says. What’s actually wrong with the pictures are the descriptions that are added on to them online, sometimes out of malice but mostly just as a guess. “The pictures were thrown out on the Internet and people have no idea what they mean, so they just make up a description,” he says.

While photographers like Light and Ritchin aren’t pleased that the Internet has caused the public to question every picture, there are some photographers who would welcome the public’s wary eye when it comes to pictures. For too long, these photographers say, pictures have been burdened by a need to provide a level of fidelity with the real world that is actually beyond their reach; pictures need to be liberated from this constraint, they plead. “Photography is only the medium that is a witness to itself,” says Pedro Meyer, a celebrated Mexican photographer who leads a movement that embraces, rather than eschews, digital manipulation. “Photographs say, ‘You can trust me because I am.’ What other medium does that?”

Meyer would like photographs to be treated like any other bit of information — in an ideal world photos would be given as much credence as words. “We don’t trust words because they’re words, but we trust pictures because they’re pictures,” Meyer said in an interview with Wired several years ago. “That’s crazy. It’s our responsibility to investigate the truth, to approach images with care and caution. People need to realize that an image is not a representation of reality.”

Meyer is remarkably sanguine in the face of Ritchin’s nightmare scenario — how will we ever know a massacre has occurred if we don’t have believable photographic proof? “If you take my logic of using photographs along the same line of thought as using words, then look how easy it becomes,” he says. “What do you do with text? You have to have other sources to confirm that something happened; if you don’t have other sources to confirm something, you can’t conclude it happened. Now enter into the picture this fact — over the last 12 months there have been more cellphones with cameras sold than all other cameras, digital or analog combined. Cameras are becoming ubiquitous. We have the possibility for the first time to cross-reference everything, something that was never done before. It doesn’t matter if the picture is a shitty little picture, it’s a reference.” And if you have enough references, it doesn’t matter if one person doctors an image; if a hundred — or maybe a thousand — cellphones say a massacre occurred, it probably happened.

In a cross-referenced, constantly photographed world — a thing that might scare you but that is probably becoming inevitable — we would probably have better proof of what actually happened in an important event than we do today, Meyer says. A single photographic image is important, Meyer says, but we can’t rely on it to tell a whole story. The Rodney King video was important, but we should note that it did not in fact prove anything about the LAPD. In court, the police officers accused of beating King were acquitted, despite the video. The video may have been horrific, but jurors, at least, seemed to decide that it didn’t convey the whole truth of what occurred that night. The video was just one slice of reality; the jury seems to have considered other things at least as important as the pictures — what happened before the camera was snapped on, what happened outside of the camera’s field of view, what happened in people’s minds.

And in the end, it’s perhaps this sense of caution that we need to bring to the mysterious photograph of Lance Cpl. Boudreaux. As Snopes’ Mikkelson says, “Whether or not the photographs are real in a physical sense is only part of the story.” The rest of the story is what happened outside the frame, what the Marine and the boys and whoever took the picture (whichever picture is real) were thinking at the time. Why are they there, near that hut? Why is the kid in the Real Madrid T-Shirt not as happy as the boy with the sign? Is the whole thing a joke? If so, who is in on the joke? Does one of the boys know what’s on the sign? Are the boys being made fun of, or is the soldier, or are we? “You can’t know what’s going on without knowing the rest of the story,” Mikkelson says.

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”