Bork tapes
Series of videotapes rented out by Robert Bork / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bork tapes were a series of 146 videotapes rented out by Robert Bork, then a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, from Potomac Video in Washington, D.C.[1] He had been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Ronald Reagan on July 1, 1987. His contentious confirmation hearings made him a subject of intense media scrutiny, based especially on his views concerning privacy in the Constitution.[2][3] Michael Dolan, a writer at the Washington City Paper who frequented the same video rental store, discovered Bork's visits and asked for a record of his rental history, which the assistant manager granted in the form of a Xerox copy.
On September 25, the City Paper published Dolan's survey of Bork's rentals in a cover story titled "The Bork Tapes".[4] The revealed tapes proved to be modest, innocuous, and non-salacious, consisting of a garden-variety of films such as thrillers, British drama, and those by Alfred Hitchcock.[5][6][7] The subsequent leakage and coverage of the tapes resulted in Congress passing the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which forbids the sharing of video tape rental information, amidst a bipartisan consensus on intellectual privacy.[8][9][10] Proponents of the VPPA, including Senator Patrick Leahy, contended that the leakage of Bork's tapes was an outrage.[11][12] The bill was passed in just over a year after the incident.[13][14]