Farhad Manjoo

To appreciate how America has changed since 9/11, walk slowly through any major city. What you’ll see dotting the landscape is the physical embodiment of fear. Security installations put up after the attacks continue to block public access and wrangle pedestrian traffic. Outside Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, garish purple planters menace rush-hour pedestrian traffic. The gigantic planters have abandoned all horticultural ambition, many of them blooming with nothing more than trash and untilled dirt. “French barriers,” steel-grate barricades meant for controlling crowds, ring many landmark sites — including San Francisco’s Transamerica Building — like beefy bodyguards protecting starlets. Then there are the bollards, the cylindrical vehicle-blocking posts that are so pervasive you wonder if they’ve mastered asexual reproduction. In Washington, bollards surround everything. Not since Confederate Gen. Jubal Early attacked the city in 1864 has the nation’s capital felt so under siege.

It’s not just the barriers, it’s also the buildings. Since 9/11, risk consultants working for police departments, federal agencies and insurance companies have wrested control over many new construction plans. “There’s a sense that security experts are acting as the associate architects on every project built today,” says Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of the New Yorker. Consultants tend to encourage architectural bulk at the expense of grace. As a prime example, Goldberger points to the Freedom Tower, the skyscraper at the center of the proposed new Trade Center site. After the New York Police Department determined that an early design was vulnerable to truck bombs, the building’s architect, David Childs, of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was forced to move the structure far back from the street, and to turn its lower 20 stories into a windowless reinforced concrete pedestal covered in glass. “It’s a pretty grim piece of architecture,” Goldberger says of the tower. “It doesn’t advertise freedom to the world, it advertises fear.”

Goldberger’s assessment jibes with designers’ larger worry over what we’re losing in cities changed by 9/11. Security measures, they say, are undoing the many pleasures and functions of urban life. You don’t need to have studied Jane Jacobs to understand that what’s best about a city is often to be found on or just off sidewalks, in the dense, chaotic and free interplay between people and buildings. This may sound high-minded and theoretical. But by pushing people tightly together in small spaces, cities naturally increase the possibility of social intercourse. Merely strolling down a sidewalk in New York requires and instills more tolerance for other people than you’re likely to need or learn during a year of life in an Atlanta exurb. Cultural theorist Marshall Berman, author of “On the Town,” and other books on New York, adds that after 9/11, “the bonds of civil society were strenghthened in New York.” He believes that now, in an era of low crime, New York feels more united than at any time in the recent past.

But others fear that security measures may be inhibiting urban connections. Setting buildings far back from the street, placing them atop concrete blast shields, crowding sidewalks with barricades, constantly screening people as they enter or exit buildings, electronically surveilling them at every waking moment — these measures push us apart and foster our fears and suspicions. The effect is physical as well as psychic. Goldberger points out that you used to be able to walk around Manhattan, both on the sidewalks and through the lobbies of large buildings, without showing any credentials. Today that’s nearly impossible because entering nearly every building requires passing through a security checkpoint. The checkpoint culture weighs on the soul, reminding us at every point that we live in a dangerous time, and that anyone we see might seek to do us harm.

Many progressive architects argue that this is not how it has to be, and they’ve come up with thoughtful designs that accommodate legitimate security concerns without giving in to our worst nightmares. “Architecture has always elevated our society in times of distress, and always spoken to a sense of great social optimism,” says Tim Christ, an architect at the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, which has won acclaim for the way it has balanced safety and beauty in its public projects, including the enormous new federal building in San Francisco. In New York, in particular, select firms are striving to incorporate the new security mandates into their designs in innovative ways. But conquering fear is difficult, and architects, whose creations will remain on the planet for decades to come, are divided on whether they can succeed. The 9/11 attacks put our cities on the front lines of a new war. Can we keep them from looking like battlefields?

Jersey barriers have no natural business on city sidewalks. That’s not just because they’re ugly — they also do nothing to halt attacks. The barriers, which were designed as lane separators by New Jersey’s state Highway Authority in 1955, are intended to be placed on roads parallel to the direction in which cars are traveling. A vehicle that nudges too close to the barrier will ride up its tapered edge and slide back onto the road, suffering minimal damage. But placed the opposite way — in front of a building to protect against oncoming attack — a Jersey barrier is no match for a fast car or truck. In crash tests, speeding vehicles that hit the barriers at obtuse angles simply knock them over or vault over them straight at the target.

In their rush to beef up security after 9/11, however, few building operators thought much about the aesthetic or practical shortcomings of such barriers. There was no time for such high-minded introspection — buildings needed to install something quickly, and Jersey barriers were all they had. Betsy Vorce, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Center, says that no one at Lincoln Center considers the plant-topped barriers to be a statement of the center’s design sensibility. As part of an overall renovation, the complex is currently looking for a permanent replacement for the Jersey barriers, but it hadn’t given much thought to design of the barricades until recently. In an emergency, Vorce points out, “security is the paramount consideration.”

But in a never-ending war, it’s never quite clear when the emergency is over. After the 9/11 attacks, especially in New York and Washington, there wasn’t exactly a moment in time when people could decide that the situation was now finally safe and that the barriers could come down. So they stayed up, and not just at Lincoln Center.

In the days after 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange, about a half-mile south of the World Trade Center, decided to limit vehicular traffic on the streets that run past the building. Officials blocked off the seven intersections surrounding the Exchange using a jury-rigged combination of Jersey barriers, traffic cones, bright fences and sandbag-laden pickup trucks. The barricade system looked ad hoc and temporary, like checkpoints you might see in war-torn cities in the Middle East. But the system wasn’t temporary at all. It stayed in place for four years.

Living and working in a militarized cityscape is a toxic affair. The blocked-off intersections surrounding the Stock Exchange suggested a city that had barricaded itself inside its own worst fears. In 2004, business tenants in the Financial District began threatening to leave because their employees had grown weary of the indignity of spending time in such a dreary wasteland. “It wasn’t just the perception but the reality that this place was a target that had everbody on edge,” says Noah Pfefferblit, president of Wall Street Rising, a nonprofit neighborhood group in lower Manhattan. Residents no longer wanted to be constantly reminded of the dangers they faced “by seeing a visually overwhelming security presence.” City planning authorities finally stepped in to save the Financial District; they selected a TriBeCa firm called Rogers Marvel to come up with a new way to protect the area.

I took a walk through the district on a recent sweltering weekday afternoon. The Stock Exchange continues to block vehicles at its surrounding intersections, but instead of idling pickups, the streets are now populated with giant sculptural boulders called NoGos. The NoGos, designed by Rogers Marvel, are blocks of heavy concrete covered in multifaceted boxes of shimmering bronze. They resemble a comic-book artist’s take on a barricade, a playful and handsome gem whose actual purpose — keeping a speeding truck laden with explosives from getting anywhere near the Stock Exchange — is invisible to the public. In fact, people have found many uses for the barricades. At 2-and-a-half feet tall, a NoGo makes an ideal seat. Suited Wall Street types crowd about the NoGos at lunchtime and kids climb and stretch on them as if they were a downtown jungle gym.

Like other architects who’ve been working to design better ways of securing public sites, Jonathan Marvel is wary of providing many details about his firm’s projects. But he is keen to discuss why, after 9/11, he became interested in working on security infrastructure. He says that as he looked out on the streets of New York in the months after the attacks, he began to sense that architects weren’t being consulted about this newly crucial aspect to urban design. “Everybody within the design community is distressed by what’s happening,” Marvel says. “To navigate public space you have to meet a new threshold that wasn’t there before. Everywhere is like the airport now — the barriers, the lining up, the undressing. At the airport all that is an unfortunate necessity, but when you have to do it in a building, that’s when — as a designer and as a citizen — I find it unacceptable.”

Marvel describes today’s increasingly barricaded streetscape as “a throwback to the Middle Ages, where there was a moat and drawbridge separating one side of society from the other.” If Marvel was in business back then, he might have turned the moat into a fountain. His philosophy entails creating security devices whose true function isn’t clear from their form, devices that, like those NoGos, also fill some other public purpose.

In Battery Park City, just across West Street from ground zero, and home to the World Financial Center, Marvel’s firm reduced the threat of truck bombs simply by redesigning the streets surrounding the targeted buildings. On North End Avenue, the main thoroughfare leading to the WFC buildings, the firm proposed subtly raising parts of the roadbed and inserting sharp turns at strategic locations on the road. Not only did the new configuration force vehicles approaching the buildings to slow down — which is important because a fast truck bomb can cause a lot more damage than a slow one — reshaping the street also created a pedestrian walkway and a small park in the area.

Just outside the World Financial Center buildings, Rogers Marvel designed what the firm calls a Tiger Trap, a sidewalk plaza built on top of the kind of collapsible concrete used to stop runaway planes at airports. The concrete is strong enough for pedestrians to walk on but it crumbles under the weight of a truck. In tests, a Tiger Trap has stopped a 15,000 pound vehicle going at 50 miles per hour. But that capacity will remain completely invisible to people who visit the site.

In design circles, such innovative security efforts have gained prominence, and public agencies that wield the greatest influence in urban design — such as the planning authorities in New York and Washington and the General Services Administration, which builds federal office buildings — have begun to encourage permanent and elegant architectural responses to security threats.

In 2001, the National Capital Planning Commission rejected several bulky plans to protect the Washington Monument, including one proposal to surround the site with a ring of almost 400 bollards. Instead, the commission — which had thrown up Jersey barriers at the monument after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, another temporary measure that had become permanent — chose a brilliantly invisible plan by the Philadelphia landscape architecture firm Olin Partnership.

Olin proposed using an 18th century fortification called a ha-ha, a long, low wall sunken inside a trench used by European gardeners to keep animals corralled without visible fencing. Olin designed a series of granite ha-has along the pathways leading to the monument; the simple system, which keeps the site safe from vehicles in a way that’s friendly to people, was installed in 2005.

“If we are going to remain a social culture, we have to allow people to live in an environment that is physically safe but isn’t replete with physical barriers,” says David Rubin, a partner at Olin. “There’s a growing demand for that sophistication.”

Others aren’t so sanguine. Vishaan Chakrabarti, former director of the Manhattan office of New York Department of City Planning, says one problem with invisible security installations is that they often don’t satisfy security consultants. “A lot of security folks are trained to believe that a place needs to look secure,” Chakrabarti says. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of security infrastructure is that sometimes appearance can be more important than actual strength. A Tiger Trap is more effective at blocking a truck bomber than a Jersey barrier — but a Jersey barrier looks more menacing. “Especially if you’re a private entity, what you’re trying to do is make your place look secure so the bad guys go next door,” Chakrabarti explains. “The problem is the design and planning community is trying to make the stuff invisible — they’re trying to say, ‘Let’s make the NoGos as small as possible.’ The security people might say, ‘All right, technically, scientifically, that smaller thing may protect against the same level of threat as something bigger — but it doesn’t look as defensive.’”

Even sites that have been designed to cleverly address security, Chakrabarti says, are victims of security creep, a culture in which security officials keep putting up more NoGos, or increasing the perimeters around buildings, long after the designers have had their say. “What’s difficult is that these things sort of require constant monitoring,” Chakrabarti says. New emergencies throw any design asunder. In New York, “there was a big push for Jersey barriers during the Republican Convention,” says Rick Adler, the founder of RSA Protective Technologies, a firm that designs perimeter security systems. “It was like half of the push after 9/11. People just put up anything they could.”

For those who argue that security experts now trump architects in urban design decisions, the plans for the Freedom Tower constitute Exhibit A. Critics have long derided the design as too bland for the charged site, an uninspired mingling of the visions of two very different architects — Skidmore’s David Childs, whom the developer Larry Silverstein selected to work on the site, and Daniel Libeskind, who won a competition to become the master planer for ground zero. But it was in June 2005, when Childs unveiled a plan to satisfy the New York Police Department’s assessment that a previous design was too vulnerable to truck bombs, that the critical clamor rose to fever pitch.

To minimize the building’s vulnerability to street-side explosion, Childs moved it away from its surrounding roads and sidewalks. The building will be set back an average of about 90 feet from West Street, the busiest thoroughfare running past the site. Childs also changed the manner in which the tower meets the ground, converting the previous designs’ inviting entryway into a 200-foot-tall podium constructed of reinforced concrete. The concrete base would serve as a blast shield surrounding the lobby; there would be some openings to let in light at its higher edges, but it would primarily be unadorned of windows. Tenants would work high up above the lobby, far out of a truck bomber’s way. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times’ architecture critic, wrote that the plan represented “exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world.”

Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, told me that he thinks much of the criticism was premature. The concrete base the firm unveiled in 2005 was never supposed to be the final plan; architects had always meant to dress the Freedom Tower’s pedestal in something more attractive. A few months ago, they did just that, proposing to clad the building in panels of glass prisms that would shimmer in sunlight. The laminated glass would also be safe for occupants — in the event of a blast, it would shatter into tiny harmless pieces, much like a car’s windshield.

Galioto believes the new glass-clad base will make the Freedom Tower both exceedingly safe and habitable. He says the design shows that the terrorist attacks haven’t changed architecture so much as they changed “the practice of architecture.” The best architects, he says, will find ways to create beauty within the new constraints. As an example, he points to the new Seven World Trade Center, also designed by his colleague David Childs.

Tower 7 does seem to stand as a monument to the possibility of realizing grace in a grim world. The original 47-story granite-and-glass building that stood across Vesey Street from the Trade Towers disappeared into the ground at 5:21 p.m. on 9/11. The new tower, which opened in May, is an elegant glass parallelogram that now dominates ground zero. Like the Freedom Tower, 7 also sits atop an enormous concrete vault (it’s not there for blast resistance but because it houses a Con Edison substation that powers much of Lower Manhattan). But from the street, the concrete isn’t visible. Childs has covered the base with handsome stainless steel panels designed by the celebrated TriBeCa designer James Carpenter. Carpenter also designed the tower’s exterior glass cladding, which surrounds its office space from the eighth story to the top. He chose glass that’s low in iron and coated with an anti-reflective material that keeps out radiant heat; the glass is so transparent that at certain hours, when the sun hangs low on the horizon, Tower 7′s walls seem to disappear, and you can see through entire floors of the building.

But what’s most striking about 7, considering its location, is its pronounced ordinariness. Inside, the building has been outfitted with a thick concrete core to protect its elevators and stairwells in the case of attack. Compared to the previous WTC towers, it’s got wider stairwells for emergency egress, and its floors are protected by a much thicker layer of fireproofing. Its designers call it the “safest office building in America.” But from the outside, you can’t tell any of this. “One of the best things about it is that it looks like many other elegant, sophisticated glass office buildings rather than like something different,” says Goldberger. “I think it’s a very nice building.”

But Tower 7 doesn’t eliminate all of Goldberger’s concerns about the site, or about the way urban design has been corrupted by security. He concedes that Childs’ new plan to surround the Freedom Tower’s base in glass mitigates the harshness of the concrete pedestal, but he points out that it “doesn’t deal with one of the key problems of all those designs, which is that they’re set back so far from the street that the whole nature of a civilized street life is all wiped away.”

Many designers and planners agree that the practice of setting new buildings back from the street is one of the most troubling security impositions. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs told of the “intricate sidewalk ballet” that characterized the stretch of Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, where she lived in the 1960s. The ballet involved locksmiths, shopkeepers, butchers, longshoremen, teenagers, tailors, toddlers — people of all stripes whose everyday interactions on the packed street, she argued, provoked a sense of “casual public trust” in the community. Today’s security installations reduce our chance encounters on the street and risk breaking our casual public bonds.

“Cities basically operate off their street life, and if buildings become just big blank walls because people are afraid of the street, it’s fundamentally contradictory to what cities are all about,” Chakrabarti says. He adds: “You look at the charts that a lot of security people use and they’ll say, ‘The building has to be X-hundred feet from the street.’ You start thinking about that en masse and what you’re talking about is the suburbs. That kind of thinking, when it starts becoming cumulative, could really endanger something that we really want and need, which is a dense urban environment.”

Architects, like many artists, are by nature a contemplative and slightly anxious lot, and some are given to exaggeration over the actual practical difficulties imposed by post-9/11 security measures; where you or I might see only a line of ugly Jersey barriers or buildings inhospitably far away from the street, a designer will see the seeds of civic destruction. It is, in other words, possible to get carried away in this analysis, and Chakrabarti, for one, understands that setting back some new buildings in the city isn’t going to turn New York into a suburb. Moreover, in the case of the World Trade Center site, setbacks won’t be anything new. As Goldberger has pointed out, 16 acres of lower Manhattan in 1968 were destroyed to create the “superblock” upon which the original World Trade Center was set. Ground zero’s new design will restore the streets eliminated then — therefore we might see more street-side interaction in the new design because it adds streets to the map.

A few designers even point out that moving buildings away from streets can make for a nice addition to cities. Barbara Nadel, a New York architect who edited a volume called “Building Security: Handbook for Architectural Planning and Design,” says that if they’re designed cleverly, plazas built in the spaces created by set-back buildings might become useful open areas in otherwise too densely packed metropolises. Right now in many cities, she says, “there’s not enough open space where you can sit down and have a lunch or take in the sun.” When you push a building away from the sidewalk, you create precisely such an area.

In renderings showing a street view of the future Freedom Tower, the building’s concrete base is surrounded by a large plaza topped with trees, steps and a fountain. If you’re working in downtown New York one day 10 years from now, the steps might be a nice place to stop and have a burrito. On the other hand, you can see in this picture the cause of architects’ fears. The plaza is surrounded by a line of vehicle-blocking posts that resemble tombstones, and you’ve got to climb a mountain of stairs to get to the building, barricaded against the street.

And this illustrates the main flaw in using architecture as a tool to fight terrorism — we’re building structures that may last forever but are frozen around our present-day fears. Architecture is an art form of anticipation, the challenge of building structures that will continue to be meaningful and useful in the decades and centuries to come. Truck bombs, on the other hand, are an acutely modern phenomenon. “There’s a tendency right now to design out of fear of the last generation of terrorism,” Goldberger argues. “The reality is terrorists are very smart, they’re way ahead of us. And yet we’re still worrying about truck bombs and giving up so much of what is important to us.”

Certainly we can make buildings that are easier to escape from during disaster, or that are less vulnerable to total collapse, Chakrabarti says. But architecture is ultimately a weak defense against terrorism. “As soon as you get into the notion of people flying planes into buildings,” he says, “you’re talking about a scale of madness against which architecture should not be the line of defense.”

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.

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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.”