The videos speed through cyberspace on YouTube and other Internet sites, multiply on video discs and hop from one cellphone to the next. “I got mine on a USB stick,” said Michael Tan, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of the Philippines, speaking of the Katrina Halili video.

At a recent international conference on sexual mores in Hanoi, he said, researchers busily shared their data. “One Vietnamese came up to me and gave me copies of a film on a USB stick,” said Michael Tan. “I gave it to an Indian colleague. It’s almost like international solidarity: ‘You might want to study this.”’ In Malaysia, Health Minister Chua Soi Lek, 60, was defiant after he was filmed in a hotel room with a woman who was not his wife. “I am the man in the video,” he said at a news conference, and he denounced political enemies for underhanded tactics. He then resigned from the cabinet, from Parliament and from his executive position in a major political party.

In Indonesia in late 2006, a prominent politician was caught naked with a well-known pop singer in a blurry, one-minute video. The politician, Yahya Zaini, was forced to give up his seat in Parliament and his position as head of religious affairs in the Golkar party. But no place can stage a scandal with the panache of the Philippines, and the country has been consumed with the drama of Katrina Halili and her surgeon friend, Dr. Hayden Kho, 29, who performed liposuction on her before becoming her lover.

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