WASHINGTON – Six Navy SEALS and two of their wives are suing the Associated Press for distributing photos taken of the soldiers capturing prisoners of war over a year ago in Iraq, claiming the pictures could endanger the troops in the field.

The photos were obtained by San Diego reporter Seth Hettena after doing a Google Web search for information on a SEAL team charged with prisoner abuse in Iraq. In the course of his research, he discovered a Web page at www.smugmug.com that had photos of the SEAL team in the middle of a raid.

Smugmug is a commercial Web site that allows individuals to post digital photographs to share with friends and family. In the case of the SEAL raids, the photos were not password protected at the time, according to the AP story.

The lawsuit, filed in San Diego Superior Court, could set a new precedent for soldiers suing news organizations during wartime. While the SEALs, who are not named in the suit, are not invoking a criminal statute, they are seeking a court injunction to prevent the AP from publishing any more of the photos originally posted by one of the soldiers’ wives, on what she believed was a password-protected Web site, her lawyer says.

Since Mr. Hettena’s story broke on December 3, the photos of the soldiers have shown up on Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic news channel, and even on a billboard outside of Guantanamo Bay, comparing the SEAL team to Nazis.

The photos of the SEALs show bound and at times bloodied Iraqi detainees. In all cases, the faces of the Iraqis are either blurred or hooded, yet the faces of the Special Forces soldiers distributed by the AP can be easily identified.

A lawyer for the SEALs, which stands for Sea Air and Land, said in an interview last night that disclosing their faces in such a public way could invite potential harm to the fighters who carry out covert missions. Some of the SEALs in the photos are still serving in Iraq.

“We are worried that the identity of these SEALs, whose faces have been spread all over the Arab press and on a billboard in Cuba, has been compromised,” Mr. Huston said.

The AP last night claimed it had done nothing wrong. “We believe AP’s use of the photos and the manner in which they were obtained were entirely lawful and proper,” the wire service’s assistant general counsel, Dave Tomlin, said in a statement.

Even Mr. Huston acknowledged that the woman who posted the photos may not have realized she was placing them on a Web site where they could be seen by the public. “I have seen these files,” Mr. Huston said. “She never invited anyone to look at the photos. She thought this page was password-protected.”

In the December 3 AP story about the photos, a Smugmug spokesman, Chris MacAskill, said: “I think it’s fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages.” Mr. MacAskill did not return phone calls last night from the Sun.

A professor of Internet journalism said the digital age offers very little privacy protection.

“I absolutely believe you have to be very careful about anything you put online. Anything in digital format today, you have to presume could be viewed by the public. There is no assumption of privacy. What is a private fact has not been established in the digital world and may never be,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor of Internet journalism at Columbia University.

Mr. Huston said two of the wives of the SEALs have received threatening phone calls since the AP story was posted. He also alleged that one of the women was being followed.

The AP reported that the photos were being examined by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to determine if the SEALs violated the code of conduct for the Special Forces. Mr. Huston said he did not know of any special investigation.

The AP reporter, Mr. Hettena, wrote on December 3 that he has 40 such photos, eight of which have been published. Some of the photos show SEALs smiling and giving the thumbs up sign next to Iraqi prisoners, causing some to compare their conduct to that of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison.

Mr. Huston said the comparison is inappropriate. “These guys were just in a fire fight,” he said. “Maybe they are just happy to still be alive.”