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Thursday, April 25, 2013

AT&T Releases Connected Home Security System

AT&T, the wireless carrier, is looking beyond phones and tablets to make more money. The company introduced on Friday its connected home security system in 15 cities.

The security system, called AT&T Digital Life, will allow homeowners to connect appliances like light bulbs, video surveillance cameras and door locks to the Internet and control them remotely with a smartphone app. For the security aspect, the service hooks up to AT&T’s monitoring center, where employees will respond to emergencies and alert the police or the fire department.

Customers can choose between a basic and a more advanced package. The basic package includes the home monitoring service, a 24-hour backup battery and an indoor siren, among other features, for $30 a month and $150 for equipment and installation. The advanced package also includes a glass break sensor, a smoke sensor and a motion sensor for $40 a month and $250 for equipment and installation.

Customers can also pay extra to add things like video surveillance cameras for $10 a month, or connected door locks for $5 month. Equipment and installation cost extra.

AT&T announced plans for Digital Life in January. In an earlier interview, Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Wireless, said he thought home security would be a major opportunity to increase revenue, because only 20 percent of homes have security systems, leaving millions of homeowners as potential buyers.

Finding new revenue streams is important for AT&T and the wireless industry in general. Most people who want a cellphone already own one, so all the phone carriers, with the exception of Verizon Wireless, are seeing a sharp slowdown in the number of subscribers added each quarter; at some point, the revenue from phone bills will stagnate.

Digital Life is initially available in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia.



After Boston Suspect’s Death, Citizen Journalism Fuels Conspiracy Theories


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A video on YouTube that is helping fuel conspiracy theories shows a naked man being ushered into a police car not far from where a gun battle with the bombing suspects took place.

As our colleagues David Herszenhorn and Andrew Kramer report, the parents of the two brothers accused in the bombings at the Boston Marathon insisted on Thursday that their sons were innocent and had no connection to radical Islam.

Speaking at a news conference in Dagestan, the parents, Anzor Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, also made accusations of a conspiracy in which they say their older son, Tamerlan, 26, was killed by authorities after he was captured in Watertown, Mass., in the early morning hours of April 19.

As evidence, Ms. Tsarnaeva described grainy video footage on the Internet showing a man being put into a police car, naked, having apparently been stripped to check for explosives. At the time, some news organizations mistakenly identified him as a suspect. The next day, Ms. Tsarnaeva said, she saw gruesome images of Tamerlan’s dead body that were circulated on the Internet.

“They put him into the police car where he walked naked, naked, and they are saying that it is not my son,” she said. “But I know my son. I know my son. I know the body of my son who I raised from this size.”

“He was alive,” she said. “Why did they need to kill him?”

Ms. Tsarnaeva has dismissed the official account in the United States that Tamerlan died either in a gun battle with police or when he was struck and dragged by a car driven by his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who was trying to escape. Dzhokhar was later captured and has been charged in the bombings.

The medical examiner’s officer has not yet ruled on a cause of death for Tamerlan.

Our colleagues have provided a detailed account of the pursuit of both suspects, which began late Thursday after the shooting of an M.I.T. police officer in Cambridge, led to a gun battle on a quiet residential street in Watertown and ended Friday night with the discovery of Dzhokhar hiding in a boat parked in a nearby backyard. It answers many questions raised in recent days, including whether the younger suspect was armed when he was captured.

In addition to news reports and official statements, there are accounts from ordinary people who used video, images and Twitter posts to document the shootout taking place outside their homes in real time.

Andrew Kitzenberg, who lives on Laurel Street in Watertown, where the gun battle took place, told New York Times reporters at the time, and has since written on his blog, that he was in his living room when he heard multiple “pops” coming from outside at around 12:45 a.m.

When I looked outside my window, I could clearly see two people (the Tsarnaev brothers) taking cover behind an SUV and engaging in gunfire. After witnessing shots being fired I promptly ran up the stairs to my third-floor bedroom to distance myself a little further away from the gunfire. As I ran into my room, overwhelmed by shock, adrenaline and curiosity, I jumped onto my bed to stay below the windows but also have a clear view at the shooters and photograph the event. As soon as I was laying safely on my bed I started taking pictures with my iPhone 5 and captured the following images that documented the terrifying shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers, which then led to an overnight citywide manhunt.

Like so many other images of the Boston Marathon bombing, the video of the naked man has been widely shared, and his identity and why he was ushered into a police car have become much-discussed mysteries. Left unexplained, these questions have become part of a collection of conspiracy theories and loose ends that have cropped up in the aftermath of the bombings and the shootout.

Lt. Michael Lawn of the Watertown Police Department said in an e-mailed statement that the naked man seen in the video was not Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He did not provide any other details.

Amanda Cox, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I., said that the agency had only two suspects, the Tsarnaev brothers, and had no information about any other possible suspects. Asked about the man in the video, she said, “We are not aware of any arrests.” There is a possibility, though, that someone could have been taken into custody at the local level.

The Boston Globe blog reported this week that the man seen in the video was detained and released as officers searched for the second Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar.

Jess Bidgood, a reporter for The New York Times who has been covering the story in Boston, said she saw the man put into a police car at the intersection of Dexter and Nichols Avenues, down the block from Laurel Street, where the standoff was taking place, between about 12:30 and 1:30 a.m. Ms. Bidgood said she was almost entirely sure that she later saw the same man, with a jacket hanging off him, being taken out of the car and talking with authorities in F.B.I. jackets. They appeared to photograph him, she said, and then he was put into a car again.



Videos Show Aftermath of Possible Syrian Chemical Attack in March

As my colleague Mark Landler reports, the White House said on Thursday that United States intelligence agencies believe with “varying degrees of confidence” that Syria has used chemical weapons against its own people in recent months as President Bashar al-Assad has sought to put down a violent uprising against his family’s four decades in power.

The disclosure was made in a letter from the White House to Congressional leaders. The United States has called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line” that could provoke military intervention, but officials said on Thursday that they would need “credible and corroborated facts” before deciding on a course of action.

United States officials said they believed that the chemical agent sarin had been used and that the culprit was probably the Assad regime and not rebel forces, but they would not specify the dates or locations of the suspected chemical attacks. Britain has been less reticent. In a letter to the United Nations last month requesting a formal investigation, it cited three suspected attacks: two on March 19 in a village west of Aleppo and on the outskirts of Damascus, and one on Dec. 24 in Homs.

Multiple videos posted online by Syrian citizen journalists claim to show the aftermath of chemical attacks in Ateibeh, a village outside Damascus, on March 19, one of the dates cited in Britain’s letter to the United Nations.

Three videos posted to YouTube on March 19 by an account associated with rebels in the Eastern Ghouta region outside Damascus show men being treated in a clinic for injuries they say were sustained during a government attack on Ateibeh that involved chemical weapons.

The first video shows two men: one who lies quietly on a clinic bed, writhing, with an IV tube in his arm, and a second who sits in front of him, describing the attack. The hiss of an oxygen tank can be heard in the background.


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This video claims to show victims injured in a chemical attack in a village outside Damascus.

“Missiles came and they exploded, and they discharged something like water, but it was dark. It emitted a very foul smell,” says the second man, who does not identify himself. “There are still a lot of people in their homes.”

The cameraman asks if someone brought them to the clinic, and the man replies, “Yes, there is no shortage of good people.” The cameraman then says the date â€" March 19, 2013 â€" and pans across the room to show two other injured people lying on beds in the clinic.

A second video begins with close-up footage of the same injured men shown at the end of the first video. One young man lies still, the skin on his face ashen and mottled.

This video claims to show two victims of a chemical attack in a village outside Damascus.

“A new massacre of civilians has been committed in the town of Ateibeh during a chemical strike on the town,” the cameraman says. He then pans across the room to show two more men, one lying on a clinic bed and another, in camouflage pants, breathing through an oxygen mask.

“March 19, 2013,” the cameraman says. “A chemical strike on the town of Ateibeh in Eastern Ghouta.”

The camera continues to pan across the room, and the two men from the first video become visible again. Someone standing off-camera asks the seated man from the first video if many people were injured in the attack, and he begins to answer before the video ends.

“There were no injured, my brother,” the seated man says. “The missiles would fall and spread something like liquid.”

A third video posted by the same YouTube account on March 19 claims to show another person injured by a chemical agent in Ateibeh.

This video claims to show a young man injured by chemical weapons in a village outside Damascus.

The injured person in this video is a young man in a green hooded sweatshirt. He wheezes heavily as someone sticks a thin suction tube in his mouth, up his nose and down his throat. His eyes appear cloudy and vacant, and there is mucus smeared on his cheeks. The cameraman describes him as “injured by a chemical strike in the town of Ateibeh on March 19, 2013.”

This video shows an interview with a doctor at a clinic outside Damascus who treated patients he said were injured by a chemical agent.

A fourth video that claims to be posted from Ateibeh on March 19 shows an interview with a man dressed in medical scrubs, a surgical mask and surgical cap, whom the cameraman identifies as a doctor. He stands next to an unconscious man connected to an IV tube and wearing an oxygen mask. The cameraman repeats the date and asks the doctor a series of questions about his patients.

“We have with us one of the doctors who deal with the victims of indiscriminate shelling on the town of Ateibeh with toxic substances whose composition is unknown,” the cameraman says. “Doctor, please, can you tell us about the symptoms that are caused by this shelling? What are the possibilities of verifying the substances being dropped on this area?”

“Unfortunately, most cases we’re getting are deaths,” the doctor says. “The cases we’re getting that are still alive are exhibiting asphyxiation, spasms, slow heart rate, very low blood pressure. Truth be told, it is probably the material organic phosphate.”

“Doctor, what are the substances or drugs you are giving to those patients to revive them or save their lives?” the cameraman asks.

“We are using salt serums and we’re giving them atropine,” the doctor says. “Atropine is for when the heart slows down. We keep giving them atropine until they seem to react. Unfortunately, we rarely get a reaction.”

“Doctor, what do you ask the world to do in the wake of this shelling? What is the response?” the cameraman asks. “Or what kind of substances can we provide for people, antidotes to those chemicals?”

The doctor responds:

Unfortunately, if the world doesn’t want to stand by us militarily or doesn’t want to help us, the least they can do is send up a few atropine ampoules. We, to be honest, when we get a patient we can use up to 15 atropine ampoules in one hour. And we desperately need atropine. And there is a drug called Obidoxime. If they can provide us with Obidoxime, we don’t want anything else from them, neither weapons nor support. We just want them to help the patients we have here â€" the patients here that we are losing day after day. They’re all civilians and all children. What are they guilty of, those people? They just want medicine. We don’t want relief efforts. If you’re not capable of just sending us medicine, you will be held accountable by God.



Government Requests to Remove Material From Web Rise, Google Reports

A lot of attention was given last year to a YouTube video that insulted Islam and led authorities in several countries to press Google, which owns YouTube, to remove the video from the site.

Those requests represented a small fraction of the total requests to Google to remove items from its sites. All told, in the second half of 2012, the company said it received 2,285 requests from government authorities to remove material, including videos, blog posts and links posted to the company social networking account, called Google Plus. That figure is more than 25 percent higher than in the first half of 2012.

The latest transparency report from the company, released on Thursday, is a snapshot of how nerve-racking the Internet can be for governments worldwide, including democratic regimes.

Brazil, for instance, sent Google more than three requests a day on average during the period covered by the report. Most of those were about posts that insulted a political figure, in violation of Brazil’s recent electoral code, which prohibits defaming or offending political candidates. Google said it had obeyed 35 of those court orders and was appealing the rest.

British police asked YouTube to take down a picture of an officer depicted in a “racist uniform.” Google refused.

Indian authorities sought to persuade Google to take down maps that depicted a disputed border in the province of Kashmir. They didn’t succeed. India also pressed Google to remove dozens of videos and a blog post during a bout of deadly ethnic violence against the people of its Northeastern region. Government authorities cited national laws intended to maintain public order. Google said it complied with some of those requests. In some cases it blocking videos inside India but did not remove them altogether from the Web.

American law enforcement agencies asked the company to remove three videos that they said defamed police officers and prosecutors. Google refused. In response to court orders, the company took down 771 items from Google Groups that the company had concluded defamed a man and his family.

And from Argentina came a request to remove an image of the country’s president, showing her in a “compromising position,” as Google called it. The company said it “age-restricted” the image in accord with its own community guidelines.

The examples illustrate the negotiations that government agencies often have have with Web giants like Google, which maintain their own jurisprudence of sorts. Community guidelines, though, can be difficult to enforce consistently across the world.

A case in point: 20 countries, including the United States, asked Google to look into removing the “Innocence of Muslims” video that circulated on YouTube last fall, leading to deadly protests in some countries where Muslims were a majority. Google said the video did not violate the company’s community guidelines, though it removed the video from 10 countries, either because it broke national laws â€" like in the case of countries including India, Russia, and Singapore â€" or because of what the company called “difficult circumstances,” as in Libya, where the video prompted deadly protests, and a United States ambassador and three other Americans were killed.

Google is not the only Internet company to contend with these requests. Facebook routinely receives take-down requests from users and government authorities. It stepped in last week, for instance, to remove a page that had emerged to track down a falsely identified suspect in the Boston bombing.

Facebook does not make take-down requests public. Twitter began doing so last year.

Google was an early adopter of transparency reports, and this has allowed it to identify trends over time. Since 2010,  more than a third of its content removal requests  were over reported defamation, by far the largest category of removal request, the company reported on Thursday, while pornography, national security and copyright violation accounted for a small fraction of the take-down requests.



Researchers Call Out Twitter Celebrities With Suspicious Followings

Security researchers recently shed a bright light on the multimillion-dollar underground market for fake Twitter followers. Now, they are highlighting what they believe to be some of the market’s high-profile clientele.

In a follow-up to their earlier report, two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, call out Twitter accounts that added or lost a large number of followers in one day. Their list includes brands like Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton; politicians like Newt Gingrich, Representative Jared Polis and Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister; and the rappers 50 Cent and Sean Combs, known as Diddy.

Social media experts say there are several reasons why Twitter users would want to acquire large volumes of Twitter followers. For some people, it simply feeds the ego. For people and brands, a large Twitter following or Facebook fan base helps increase their visibility. If followers are constantly clicking on links to a brand’s landing page, it also lifts the brand’s position in Google’s search results.

“It’s natural for brands to want to build their Twitter and Facebook accounts because they are constantly looking for ways to expand awareness of their products and services and expand opportunities to create consideration of their products compared to others,” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “The more content they publish, and more links people click on, the better their Google search results. ”

Ms. Etlinger added that there was corporate pressure to justify a company’s investment in social media. Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” offer some of the few seemingly hard metrics in an otherwise squishy realm of social media.

“Many brands struggle to measure the top line value of social media,” Ms. Etlinger said. “So there is a thirst to show momentum in different ways, one of which is to show that the brand has a bigger audience today than it did yesterday.”

Some major brands have expressed skepticism about the impact of social media fans and followers. Last month, Coca-Cola, whose flagship brand has over 700,000 Twitter followers and more than 60 million Facebook fans â€" more than any other brand on Facebook â€" said a corporate study found that online buzz had no quantifiable impact on short-term sales.

Social media fans and followers tend to be volatile, brand experts say. They may start following a brand for a specific contest or sweepstakes, then drop off when the campaign ends. But Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli said the follower changes they charted were drastic enough to warrant suspicion that they were purchased.

For example, Mr. Polis, a Democrat from Colorado with 22,140 Twitter followers on his personal @jaredpolis Twitter account, gained, on average, 15 new followers a day for two years. Then, last July, he added 19,705 new Twitter followers. A few months later, he lost 13,332 Twitter followers in one day.

A representative for Mr. Polis denied he had purchased fake followers and said one explanation for the sudden gains and subsequent losses was a “follow-back” campaign. Last July, Mr. Polis said he followed a large number of new people from his personal account and asked them to follow him back. In March, he said he stopped following those accounts because he was becoming frustrated by the lack of relevant content in his Twitter feed. He now follows only 2,200 people. He surmised that a large number of followers may have stopped following him, too.

But Mr. De Micheli said that reasoning does not justify the sudden 19,705 jump in Mr. Polis’s followers in one day. Twitter’s own policy prevents users from following over 1,000 new people a day: “Every Twitter account is technically unable to follow more than 1,000 users per day,” Twitter says on its Web site. “Please note that this is just a technical limit to prevent egregious abuse from spam accounts.”

As for the sudden drop, Mr. De Micheli said it would be extremely rare for 13,332 followers to stop following the congressman on the same day. To have them stop following his account, Mr. Polis would have had to block 13,332 people manually, since the only way to stop an account from following you is to manually block it.

“Nearly the exact amount of followers ‘magically appeared,’ then disappeared,” Mr. De Micheli said. He suggested that the losses was more likely due to Twitter, which routinely deactivates accounts it deems fake.  He said Mr. Polis’s follower drop matched “what the typical ‘low quality’ fake followers acquisition-drop graph looks like” when Twitter deletes those accounts.

The researchers also call out Diddy, whose verified @iamdiddy account gained 185,399 Twitter followers one day last June â€" a 3,063 percent increase from the account’s average daily gain â€" and then inexplicably lost 393,665 followers one day last month, 6,504 percent more that his average daily follower loss.  A representative for Mr. Combs did not return a request for comment.

Likewise, 50 Cent lost more than 190,342 Twitter followers over the course of one day last January, a 5,370 percent jump from his average daily follower loss. A representative for 50 Cent did not respond to a request for comment.

Mercedes added 28,283 followers one day in October 2012 â€" a 20,992 percent jump from the brand’s average daily follower gain. A spokesman for Mercedes did not respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, Pepsi added 71,686 Twitter followers one day in November 2011 and has not added that number of Twitter followers in one day since. Before the bump, Pepsi followers trailed the number of people who followed Coca-Cola, which had more linear growth. After the bump, Pepsi’s followers surpassed Coca-Cola’s.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said that the bump was because of promotional campaigns. “The spikes correlate with paid activations with Twitter â€" such as promoted Tweets â€" that were designed to boost our following around key brand activations,” Mr. Dahncke said, citing a Pepsi summer concert series and “X Factor” and N.F.L. promotions that year. “The followers are validated as real followers and are not fake accounts or bots.”

But the researchers note that a one-day gain of more than 70,000 followers because of a promotional campaign is unlikely. “The peaks are very high even through traditional advertising, and the shapes of the curves don’t really convince us,” Mr. De Micheli said, that the peaks are due to “traditional Web advertising.”

Mr. Stroppa said that a major Pepsi partnership with Twitter last year did not result in the same bump.  Pepsi’s followers looked particularly suspicious when compared to those of Starbucks, one of the longest-running major brands on Twitter. Starbucks regularly advertises on the service and pays to promote its posts. Starbucks’ biggest daily follower gain is 17,562, compared to Pepsi’s 71,700. (Sixty-six percent of Pepsi’s followers are legitimate, according to Status People, an online service that claims to decipher real followers from fake and inactive accounts.)

There are now more than two dozen online services willing to sell fake followers. Based on the number of fake accounts offered through those services â€" excluding overlapping accounts â€" Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli estimate that there are now more than 20 million fake accounts on Twitter. Those accounts can be sold to multiple buyers. At quoted rates, the two said a conservative estimate is that fake Twitter followers offer potential for a $40 million to $360 million business.

Twitter said discerning real accounts from spam accounts can be difficult. “Spam is a problem that faces the entire Web,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman. “We have a variety of manual and automated methods that evolve over time for dealing with spam, and have even sued many of the most prominent spam organizations to keep them off our service. Users can also flag potential spam accounts for our review.”

Ms. Etlinger of Altimeter cautioned brands from dealing in fake followers. “There will always be people who try to game the system in every nook and cranny of business,” she said. “But brands should know that Twitter and Facebook are getting very good at weeding out fake fans and followers. So any gains would just be temporary.”



Researchers Call Out Twitter Celebrities With Suspicious Followings

Security researchers recently shed a bright light on the multimillion-dollar underground market for fake Twitter followers. Now, they are highlighting what they believe to be some of the market’s high-profile clientele.

In a follow-up to their earlier report, two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, call out Twitter accounts that added or lost a large number of followers in one day. Their list includes brands like Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton; politicians like Newt Gingrich, Representative Jared Polis and Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister; and the rappers 50 Cent and Sean Combs, known as Diddy.

Social media experts say there are several reasons why Twitter users would want to acquire large volumes of Twitter followers. For some people, it simply feeds the ego. For people and brands, a large Twitter following or Facebook fan base helps increase their visibility. If followers are constantly clicking on links to a brand’s landing page, it also lifts the brand’s position in Google’s search results.

“It’s natural for brands to want to build their Twitter and Facebook accounts because they are constantly looking for ways to expand awareness of their products and services and expand opportunities to create consideration of their products compared to others,” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “The more content they publish, and more links people click on, the better their Google search results. ”

Ms. Etlinger added that there was corporate pressure to justify a company’s investment in social media. Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” offer some of the few seemingly hard metrics in an otherwise squishy realm of social media.

“Many brands struggle to measure the top line value of social media,” Ms. Etlinger said. “So there is a thirst to show momentum in different ways, one of which is to show that the brand has a bigger audience today than it did yesterday.”

Some major brands have expressed skepticism about the impact of social media fans and followers. Last month, Coca-Cola, whose flagship brand has over 700,000 Twitter followers and more than 60 million Facebook fans â€" more than any other brand on Facebook â€" said a corporate study found that online buzz had no quantifiable impact on short-term sales.

Social media fans and followers tend to be volatile, brand experts say. They may start following a brand for a specific contest or sweepstakes, then drop off when the campaign ends. But Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli said the follower changes they charted were drastic enough to warrant suspicion that they were purchased.

For example, Mr. Polis, a Democrat from Colorado with 22,140 Twitter followers on his personal @jaredpolis Twitter account, gained, on average, 15 new followers a day for two years. Then, last July, he added 19,705 new Twitter followers. A few months later, he lost 13,332 Twitter followers in one day.

A representative for Mr. Polis denied he had purchased fake followers and said one explanation for the sudden gains and subsequent losses was a “follow-back” campaign. Last July, Mr. Polis said he followed a large number of new people from his personal account and asked them to follow him back. In March, he said he stopped following those accounts because he was becoming frustrated by the lack of relevant content in his Twitter feed. He now follows only 2,200 people. He surmised that a large number of followers may have stopped following him, too.

But Mr. De Micheli said that reasoning does not justify the sudden 19,705 jump in Mr. Polis’s followers in one day. Twitter’s own policy prevents users from following over 1,000 new people a day: “Every Twitter account is technically unable to follow more than 1,000 users per day,” Twitter says on its Web site. “Please note that this is just a technical limit to prevent egregious abuse from spam accounts.”

As for the sudden drop, Mr. De Micheli said it would be extremely rare for 13,332 followers to stop following the congressman on the same day. To have them stop following his account, Mr. Polis would have had to block 13,332 people manually, since the only way to stop an account from following you is to manually block it.

“Nearly the exact amount of followers ‘magically appeared,’ then disappeared,” Mr. De Micheli said. He suggested that the losses was more likely due to Twitter, which routinely deactivates accounts it deems fake.  He said Mr. Polis’s follower drop matched “what the typical ‘low quality’ fake followers acquisition-drop graph looks like” when Twitter deletes those accounts.

The researchers also call out Diddy, whose verified @iamdiddy account gained 185,399 Twitter followers one day last June â€" a 3,063 percent increase from the account’s average daily gain â€" and then inexplicably lost 393,665 followers one day last month, 6,504 percent more that his average daily follower loss.  A representative for Mr. Combs did not return a request for comment.

Likewise, 50 Cent lost more than 190,342 Twitter followers over the course of one day last January, a 5,370 percent jump from his average daily follower loss. A representative for 50 Cent did not respond to a request for comment.

Mercedes added 28,283 followers one day in October 2012 â€" a 20,992 percent jump from the brand’s average daily follower gain. A spokesman for Mercedes did not respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, Pepsi added 71,686 Twitter followers one day in November 2011 and has not added that number of Twitter followers in one day since. Before the bump, Pepsi followers trailed the number of people who followed Coca-Cola, which had more linear growth. After the bump, Pepsi’s followers surpassed Coca-Cola’s.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said that the bump was because of promotional campaigns. “The spikes correlate with paid activations with Twitter â€" such as promoted Tweets â€" that were designed to boost our following around key brand activations,” Mr. Dahncke said, citing a Pepsi summer concert series and “X Factor” and N.F.L. promotions that year. “The followers are validated as real followers and are not fake accounts or bots.”

But the researchers note that a one-day gain of more than 70,000 followers because of a promotional campaign is unlikely. “The peaks are very high even through traditional advertising, and the shapes of the curves don’t really convince us,” Mr. De Micheli said, that the peaks are due to “traditional Web advertising.”

Mr. Stroppa said that a major Pepsi partnership with Twitter last year did not result in the same bump.  Pepsi’s followers looked particularly suspicious when compared to those of Starbucks, one of the longest-running major brands on Twitter. Starbucks regularly advertises on the service and pays to promote its posts. Starbucks’ biggest daily follower gain is 17,562, compared to Pepsi’s 71,700. (Sixty-six percent of Pepsi’s followers are legitimate, according to Status People, an online service that claims to decipher real followers from fake and inactive accounts.)

There are now more than two dozen online services willing to sell fake followers. Based on the number of fake accounts offered through those services â€" excluding overlapping accounts â€" Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli estimate that there are now more than 20 million fake accounts on Twitter. Those accounts can be sold to multiple buyers. At quoted rates, the two said a conservative estimate is that fake Twitter followers offer potential for a $40 million to $360 million business.

Twitter said discerning real accounts from spam accounts can be difficult. “Spam is a problem that faces the entire Web,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman. “We have a variety of manual and automated methods that evolve over time for dealing with spam, and have even sued many of the most prominent spam organizations to keep them off our service. Users can also flag potential spam accounts for our review.”

Ms. Etlinger of Altimeter cautioned brands from dealing in fake followers. “There will always be people who try to game the system in every nook and cranny of business,” she said. “But brands should know that Twitter and Facebook are getting very good at weeding out fake fans and followers. So any gains would just be temporary.”



Researchers Call Out Twitter Celebrities With Suspicious Followings

Security researchers recently shed a bright light on the multimillion-dollar underground market for fake Twitter followers. Now, they are highlighting what they believe to be some of the market’s high-profile clientele.

In a follow-up to their earlier report, two Italian security researchers, Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, call out Twitter accounts that added or lost a large number of followers in one day. Their list includes brands like Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz and Louis Vuitton; politicians like Newt Gingrich, Representative Jared Polis and Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister; and the rappers 50 Cent and Sean Combs, known as Diddy.

Social media experts say there are several reasons why Twitter users would want to acquire large volumes of Twitter followers. For some people, it simply feeds the ego. For people and brands, a large Twitter following or Facebook fan base helps increase their visibility. If followers are constantly clicking on links to a brand’s landing page, it also lifts the brand’s position in Google’s search results.

“It’s natural for brands to want to build their Twitter and Facebook accounts because they are constantly looking for ways to expand awareness of their products and services and expand opportunities to create consideration of their products compared to others,” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “The more content they publish, and more links people click on, the better their Google search results. ”

Ms. Etlinger added that there was corporate pressure to justify a company’s investment in social media. Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” offer some of the few seemingly hard metrics in an otherwise squishy realm of social media.

“Many brands struggle to measure the top line value of social media,” Ms. Etlinger said. “So there is a thirst to show momentum in different ways, one of which is to show that the brand has a bigger audience today than it did yesterday.”

Some major brands have expressed skepticism about the impact of social media fans and followers. Last month, Coca-Cola, whose flagship brand has over 700,000 Twitter followers and more than 60 million Facebook fans â€" more than any other brand on Facebook â€" said a corporate study found that online buzz had no quantifiable impact on short-term sales.

Social media fans and followers tend to be volatile, brand experts say. They may start following a brand for a specific contest or sweepstakes, then drop off when the campaign ends. But Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli said the follower changes they charted were drastic enough to warrant suspicion that they were purchased.

For example, Mr. Polis, a Democrat from Colorado with 22,140 Twitter followers on his personal @jaredpolis Twitter account, gained, on average, 15 new followers a day for two years. Then, last July, he added 19,705 new Twitter followers. A few months later, he lost 13,332 Twitter followers in one day.

A representative for Mr. Polis denied he had purchased fake followers and said one explanation for the sudden gains and subsequent losses was a “follow-back” campaign. Last July, Mr. Polis said he followed a large number of new people from his personal account and asked them to follow him back. In March, he said he stopped following those accounts because he was becoming frustrated by the lack of relevant content in his Twitter feed. He now follows only 2,200 people. He surmised that a large number of followers may have stopped following him, too.

But Mr. De Micheli said that reasoning does not justify the sudden 19,705 jump in Mr. Polis’s followers in one day. Twitter’s own policy prevents users from following over 1,000 new people a day: “Every Twitter account is technically unable to follow more than 1,000 users per day,” Twitter says on its Web site. “Please note that this is just a technical limit to prevent egregious abuse from spam accounts.”

As for the sudden drop, Mr. De Micheli said it would be extremely rare for 13,332 followers to stop following the congressman on the same day. To have them stop following his account, Mr. Polis would have had to block 13,332 people manually, since the only way to stop an account from following you is to manually block it.

“Nearly the exact amount of followers ‘magically appeared,’ then disappeared,” Mr. De Micheli said. He suggested that the losses was more likely due to Twitter, which routinely deactivates accounts it deems fake.  He said Mr. Polis’s follower drop matched “what the typical ‘low quality’ fake followers acquisition-drop graph looks like” when Twitter deletes those accounts.

The researchers also call out Diddy, whose verified @iamdiddy account gained 185,399 Twitter followers one day last June â€" a 3,063 percent increase from the account’s average daily gain â€" and then inexplicably lost 393,665 followers one day last month, 6,504 percent more that his average daily follower loss.  A representative for Mr. Combs did not return a request for comment.

Likewise, 50 Cent lost more than 190,342 Twitter followers over the course of one day last January, a 5,370 percent jump from his average daily follower loss. A representative for 50 Cent did not respond to a request for comment.

Mercedes added 28,283 followers one day in October 2012 â€" a 20,992 percent jump from the brand’s average daily follower gain. A spokesman for Mercedes did not respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, Pepsi added 71,686 Twitter followers one day in November 2011 and has not added that number of Twitter followers in one day since. Before the bump, Pepsi followers trailed the number of people who followed Coca-Cola, which had more linear growth. After the bump, Pepsi’s followers surpassed Coca-Cola’s.

Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said that the bump was because of promotional campaigns. “The spikes correlate with paid activations with Twitter â€" such as promoted Tweets â€" that were designed to boost our following around key brand activations,” Mr. Dahncke said, citing a Pepsi summer concert series and “X Factor” and N.F.L. promotions that year. “The followers are validated as real followers and are not fake accounts or bots.”

But the researchers note that a one-day gain of more than 70,000 followers because of a promotional campaign is unlikely. “The peaks are very high even through traditional advertising, and the shapes of the curves don’t really convince us,” Mr. De Micheli said, that the peaks are due to “traditional Web advertising.”

Mr. Stroppa said that a major Pepsi partnership with Twitter last year did not result in the same bump.  Pepsi’s followers looked particularly suspicious when compared to those of Starbucks, one of the longest-running major brands on Twitter. Starbucks regularly advertises on the service and pays to promote its posts. Starbucks’ biggest daily follower gain is 17,562, compared to Pepsi’s 71,700. (Sixty-six percent of Pepsi’s followers are legitimate, according to Status People, an online service that claims to decipher real followers from fake and inactive accounts.)

There are now more than two dozen online services willing to sell fake followers. Based on the number of fake accounts offered through those services â€" excluding overlapping accounts â€" Mr. Stroppa and Mr. De Micheli estimate that there are now more than 20 million fake accounts on Twitter. Those accounts can be sold to multiple buyers. At quoted rates, the two said a conservative estimate is that fake Twitter followers offer potential for a $40 million to $360 million business.

Twitter said discerning real accounts from spam accounts can be difficult. “Spam is a problem that faces the entire Web,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman. “We have a variety of manual and automated methods that evolve over time for dealing with spam, and have even sued many of the most prominent spam organizations to keep them off our service. Users can also flag potential spam accounts for our review.”

Ms. Etlinger of Altimeter cautioned brands from dealing in fake followers. “There will always be people who try to game the system in every nook and cranny of business,” she said. “But brands should know that Twitter and Facebook are getting very good at weeding out fake fans and followers. So any gains would just be temporary.”



Looking at Facebook’s Friend and Relationship Status Through Big Data

Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine, released a detailed report Wednesday about people’s friendships and relationship habits on Facebook.

The research is corralled from the details of more than one million people who have signed up for a free feature on the Wolfram Alpha Web site, Personal Analytics for Facebook, that uses complex algorithms to answer questions and generate reports about the social network.

The research found that, on average, people have 342 friends on Facebook. This has continued to grow rapidly in recent years. But that number does not include everyone on the service, as “there are significantly more people who have almost no Facebook friends.”

The differentiating factor between people who are ultra popular on the site, and those who are Facebook loners, seems to come down to age.

“After a rapid rise, the number of friends peaks for people in their late teenage years, and then declines thereafter,” wrote Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur. “Why is this? I suspect it’s partly a reflection of people’s intrinsic behavior, and partly a reflection of the fact that Facebook hasn’t yet been around very long.”

The report also showed the relationship status of people across Facebook. People begin to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” in their early 20s, and then at around 27 begin to tag themselves as “engaged.” The next step, of course, is letting the world know they are married. The marriage relationships status continues to grow slowly for people in the late 20s all the way to age 60.

One curious addition to the relationship aspects of the research found that with age, “the fraction of people who report themselves as single continues to increase for women, while decreasing for men.”

A number of teenagers tend to muddy the statistics slightly by tagging themselves as “married” at a very young age. This is often a result of a strange Facebook hack that teenagers use to note that they are best friends with someone.

Mr. Wolfram compared the data from his research to the United States census data, and found that the two were almost identical, with Facebook users and the real world marrying in their mid-20s.

Using the Facebook data, researchers were also able to determine that although Facebook’s users now total 1 billion, the majority of people on the service are young.

The research also highlights other relationship information â€" including how people tend to meet and tag friends into grouped clusters around school, work or personal settings, and how the geographic location of friends changes for 18-year-olds as they begin to leave their hometown and head off to college.



Looking at Facebook’s Friend and Relationship Status Through Big Data

Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine, released a detailed report Wednesday about people’s friendships and relationship habits on Facebook.

The research is corralled from the details of more than one million people who have signed up for a free feature on the Wolfram Alpha Web site, Personal Analytics for Facebook, that uses complex algorithms to answer questions and generate reports about the social network.

The research found that, on average, people have 342 friends on Facebook. This has continued to grow rapidly in recent years. But that number does not include everyone on the service, as “there are significantly more people who have almost no Facebook friends.”

The differentiating factor between people who are ultra popular on the site, and those who are Facebook loners, seems to come down to age.

“After a rapid rise, the number of friends peaks for people in their late teenage years, and then declines thereafter,” wrote Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur. “Why is this? I suspect it’s partly a reflection of people’s intrinsic behavior, and partly a reflection of the fact that Facebook hasn’t yet been around very long.”

The report also showed the relationship status of people across Facebook. People begin to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” in their early 20s, and then at around 27 begin to tag themselves as “engaged.” The next step, of course, is letting the world know they are married. The marriage relationships status continues to grow slowly for people in the late 20s all the way to age 60.

One curious addition to the relationship aspects of the research found that with age, “the fraction of people who report themselves as single continues to increase for women, while decreasing for men.”

A number of teenagers tend to muddy the statistics slightly by tagging themselves as “married” at a very young age. This is often a result of a strange Facebook hack that teenagers use to note that they are best friends with someone.

Mr. Wolfram compared the data from his research to the United States census data, and found that the two were almost identical, with Facebook users and the real world marrying in their mid-20s.

Using the Facebook data, researchers were also able to determine that although Facebook’s users now total 1 billion, the majority of people on the service are young.

The research also highlights other relationship information â€" including how people tend to meet and tag friends into grouped clusters around school, work or personal settings, and how the geographic location of friends changes for 18-year-olds as they begin to leave their hometown and head off to college.



Looking at Facebook’s Friend and Relationship Status Through Big Data

Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine, released a detailed report Wednesday about people’s friendships and relationship habits on Facebook.

The research is corralled from the details of more than one million people who have signed up for a free feature on the Wolfram Alpha Web site, Personal Analytics for Facebook, that uses complex algorithms to answer questions and generate reports about the social network.

The research found that, on average, people have 342 friends on Facebook. This has continued to grow rapidly in recent years. But that number does not include everyone on the service, as “there are significantly more people who have almost no Facebook friends.”

The differentiating factor between people who are ultra popular on the site, and those who are Facebook loners, seems to come down to age.

“After a rapid rise, the number of friends peaks for people in their late teenage years, and then declines thereafter,” wrote Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur. “Why is this? I suspect it’s partly a reflection of people’s intrinsic behavior, and partly a reflection of the fact that Facebook hasn’t yet been around very long.”

The report also showed the relationship status of people across Facebook. People begin to change their relationship status to “in a relationship” in their early 20s, and then at around 27 begin to tag themselves as “engaged.” The next step, of course, is letting the world know they are married. The marriage relationships status continues to grow slowly for people in the late 20s all the way to age 60.

One curious addition to the relationship aspects of the research found that with age, “the fraction of people who report themselves as single continues to increase for women, while decreasing for men.”

A number of teenagers tend to muddy the statistics slightly by tagging themselves as “married” at a very young age. This is often a result of a strange Facebook hack that teenagers use to note that they are best friends with someone.

Mr. Wolfram compared the data from his research to the United States census data, and found that the two were almost identical, with Facebook users and the real world marrying in their mid-20s.

Using the Facebook data, researchers were also able to determine that although Facebook’s users now total 1 billion, the majority of people on the service are young.

The research also highlights other relationship information â€" including how people tend to meet and tag friends into grouped clusters around school, work or personal settings, and how the geographic location of friends changes for 18-year-olds as they begin to leave their hometown and head off to college.



News Web Site in Egypt Abruptly Shuts Down

Egypt Independent, the country’s premier independent English language news source, ceased publication on Thursday after four years during which its staff chronicled the waning days of the Mubarak regime, the outbreak of revolution in their own country and across the Arab world, military rule and most recently the administration of the first democratically elected Islamist leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi.

Investors behind the paper cited financial difficulties as the reason for the closure, but the newspaper’s editorial staff, and many of its supporters, said they suspected a political motive behind the closure of the left-leaning outlet, which has been stridently critical of Mr. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood-backed political party.

On Thursday, the editorial staff released the final issue on the Web site and as a fully downloadable document on Scribd.com after investors “ordered a last-minute stoppage” of the presses “after scrutinizing the issue’s content,” said the editorial staff in an online statement.

In an essay published on the Web site Tahrir Squared, prominent activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah extolled the paper as a “revolutionary” voice and attacked its closure as a political move meant to silence dissent.

“Today the owners decided to kill the paper, they claim financial trouble, but in reality the big business behind Al Masry Al Youm is no longer interested in a true revolutionary voice,” he wrote.

Egypt Independent had to be killed, you might think that an English paper in Arabic speaking revolutionary Egypt cannot be that dangerous, but where else do you find a paper run by young women? A paper that became home for an amalgam of misfits and radicals without compromising them, no one had to wear a suit, not physical or metaphorical. Hell, even when the editorial team was forced to deal with the business side and prove the paper could be a profit center they did it without compromising on their radicalism.

Staff members of Egypt Independent spoke often of the paper’s “vision,” a term that denoted an institutional commitment to professionalism and civil rights in a country emerging from generations of dictatorship, and where newspapers more often than not serve as mouthpieces for the state, political parties or powerful men.

Editor in chief Lina Attalah posted an update to Twiitter on Thursday announcing the end of the newspapers’ four year run.

In an editor’s letter, Ms. Attalah described the paper as an “intellectual laboratory” committed to challenging “the plague of self-censorship” and venality that afflicts so many Egyptian newspapers.

While Ms. Attalah said the staff was told two months ago that changes were needed to keep the paper afloat, she described the final decision to close its doors as a shock: in the form of a note left with the office receptionist.

Abdel Moneim Saeed, the new chairperson of the Al-Masry Media Corporation board, said closing Egypt Independent, which he argued had only constituted a financial burden on the institution, was a measure of his capacity as “a surgeon who has to conduct the fine operation of letting go of the child in order for the mother to survive.”

It is a fine operation indeed, if only Al-Masry was indeed our mother, and if only its survival was conditional on our closure, and not a much-needed reinvigorating and rigorous review of its institutional practice.

But it is also only a fine operation if closure is given its due attention, as much as openings are. In other words, a closure transcends a letter announcing it on hard copy left with the receptionist for the Egypt Independent team.

As Egypt struggles to emerge from the shadow of president Mubarak, overthrown by street protests in 2011, and move into a more democratic future under the rule of its new Islamist leaders, Ms. Attalah wrote that she considered one of the key questions for professional journalists to be, “How do we become active mediators as opposed to silent vehicles of information?”

As Egypt has gone through an extended period of political turmoil, the paper has been a go-to source of news for international readers hungry for detailed news about the country. On Thursday, there as an online outpouring over news of it’s closure from Egyptians, foreign journalists and Middle East analysts.

Kristen Chick, a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, expressed her concern for the fate of the newspaper’s Web site - an invaluable journalism archive of four critical years of Egyptian history - in an update she posted to Twitter.

In her editor’s letter, Ms. Attalah said the fate of the Web site and its archives was an open question, and argued that the collected works of her staff should remain available online.

“The archive transcend the legality of copyrights and follow the promise of the Internet as a democratic and open medium,” she wrote. “Not only should it stay online, it should also be an active site of memory and production, constantly linked and relinked to new content.”

Egypt Independent is the second independent English-language publication to shut down in Egypt in the last twelve months. One year ago this week, The Daily News Egypt abruptly closed after a seven year run when investors also claimed unbearable financial losses. Several laid-off reporters from that paper found their way to the Egypt Independent. In an article published in the last issue, editor Amira Salah Ahmed joked, “History is supposed to repeat itself but not this soon, right?”

In her final letter, Ms. Attalah said that she and her staff “strive to continue and reincarnate in a new configuration,” and vowed that their work would continue in some new form. Their readers, she said, had not seen the last of them. “We leave you with the hope of coming back soon, stronger and unbeaten, ready to incessantly travel to uncharted territories of storytelling.”



Lil Bub Hits the Tribeca Film Festival

Mike Bridavsky and Lil Bub at the Tribeca Film Festival.Robin Marchant/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival Mike Bridavsky and Lil Bub at the Tribeca Film Festival.

If you are the type of person who is inclined to watch YouTube videos of cute animals doing even cuter things, you’ve probably encountered Lil Bub: the adorable walleyed kitten with a perpetually protruding strawberry pink tongue.

Videos and photos of Lil Bub bounding around a living room or eating yogurt have earned her countless global fans, and the feline was even considered a celebrity at the inaugural Internet Cat Video Film Festival. So it was probably only a matter of time before there was “Lil Bub & Friendz,” a documentary about famous felines showing Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Over the weekend, the movie was screened in the spring chill outdoors at the Tribeca Drive-in, behind the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan. The sun was just beginning to slip behind the cityscape when Bub made an appearance, lovingly carried out by her suited-up owner, Mike Bridavsky, who gently set his star on a podium and invited attendees to pet and take pictures with the cat.

“She’s so cute!” wailed one little girl, as she angled her cellphone to get a better shot. Children and adults alike pressed against waist-high steel police barricades to get a glimpse of Bub’s face. Bub was dazed or unfazed, possibly a combination of both. She rested on her paws, tongue out as always, while dozens of little hands smoothed her fur.

Cats have long been a popular Internet phenomenon, with Maru the box cat and others leading the charge. They are ripe for parody, the film explains, as owners and fans enjoy analyzing their seemingly ungovernable behavior and relish projecting comical personalities onto their expressive faces and bizarre behavior.

But the Vice Media documentary, directed by Andy Capper and Juliette Eisner, also suggests that the rise of Bub along with Grumpy Cat, whose markings convey a very salty attitude, and Nyan Cat, a pixelated animation of a flying kitten with the body of a Pop-Tart, represents a turn in popular culture: rather than offering a few seconds of enjoyment, they are now on par with well-known and loved characters in movies, video games and television shows.

“No one cares about Bart Simpson anymore,” Ben Lashes, a “meme manager” who helps Internet celebrities broker appearances and sell shirts and stickers, says in the documentary. ”This is it. This is popular culture.”

If this documentary is a mile-marker in the continued migration of niche Internet fads into the mainstream consciousness, then it also highlights the seediness that can be found during any boom, online or otherwise.

The cat owners featured in the documentary seem to genuinely adore their animals. Still, the unsavoriness of the media tours and the relentless merchandising â€" stickers, books, shirts, calendars and stuffed animals made in their likeness â€" is difficult to shake. Then there are the profits from ads that run alongside the popular videos. In Bub’s case, the entrepreneurship is particularly unsettling because her lovability hinges on severe genetic deformities, including stunted bone growth, a misshapen jaw and a lack of teeth. The severity of her condition is a running theme in the film: Bub can barely walk without falling over and when she does move, she creeps along in a military-like crawl.

But Mr. Bridavsky offers one gem in explaining the popularity of Bub and his desire to share her with fans, when he calls her “therapeutic” and says that spending time with her relieves the stress and aggravation from his regular life. “She’s like a daughter to me,” he said. “Bub means more to me than any of this Internet stuff.”



New Xbox Console Will Be Revealed on May 21

Microsoft invited journalists to a May 21 event at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters where it will unveil the latest version of its Xbox video gaming console.

For Congress, a Question of Cellphone Tracking

While the Senate considered an overhaul of a sweeping quarter-century-old law governing e-mail privacy, a House Judiciary Committee panel received dueling arguments on Thursday over when and how police can track the location of Americans carrying a cellphone.

For investigators, knowing where a suspect is and at what time can be crucial to an investigation. Cellphones have become a powerful tool for establishing those facts â€" one detective scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill Thursday described them in prepared remarks as a “witness” to a crime. Less clear is the law on how authorities can extract that information from cellphones.

Law enforcement officials say procuring a search warrant, based on probable cause, is too time-consuming and slows down an investigation.

“Geolocation evidence is essential to obtain in the early stages of investigations when probable cause has not been established,” Peter A. Modafferi, chief of detectives in Rockland County, N.Y., said in his written testimony posted on the committee’s Web site. “Requiring probable cause to get basic, limited information about a person’s historical location would make it significantly more difficult to solve crimes and seek justice for victims.”

The law is vague on what information cellphone carriers must turn over to law enforcement and whether the officials require judicial review. Under what circumstances can police obtain a “tower dump,” meaning identify cellphone users whose devices pinged off a particular cellphone tower? Should a warrant be required to monitor the location of an individual with whom a known suspect is communicating? Should a warrant be required for specific location information of a known suspect?

There is no consensus in the law on these questions. In the confusion, the police across the country follow a wide range of practices, and courts have ruled in vastly different ways.

Pending legislation seeks to tighten privacy protections around the location data captured by cellphones. Thursday’s hearing aired a range of opinions on this.

Catherine Crump, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, described in her written remarks the modern cellphone as an “invasive yet inexpensive” way to track the movement of ordinary Americans. She said that the police should be required to obtain a search warrant to demonstrate they have a good reason to track someone’s whereabouts. “The warrant and probable cause requirements,” she said, “ensure that an objective magistrate determines that there is a good reason to believe that a search will turn up evidence of wrongdoing before mobile phone location data is disclosed.”

The A.C.L.U., through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2010, discovered how long telecommunications carriers retained the location data of their users. Verizon reported at the time that it stores cell tower data for “one rolling year,” Ms. Crump told members of Congress; T-Mobile kept it “officially four to six months”; Sprint and Nextel for 18 to 24 months; and AT&T since July 2008.

The Supreme Court’s most important decision on location privacy came in January 2012, when the justices unanimously ruled that police had violated the Constitution’s protection from unreasonable search when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car. They were divided on their rationale for the decision, but a majority suggested they were ambivalent about other forms of digital surveillance, including location data from cellphone towers.



Daily Report: Fisker Automotive Captured Imaginations but Failed to Deliver

With technical problems, management turmoil and mounting losses, Fisker offers a cautionary tale of alternative-fuel vehicles and government subsidies, Bill Vlasic reports in The New York Times.

Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century

Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century

Steven Warshak, a Cincinnati businessman who built an empire selling male sexual enhancement drugs, was convicted of wire fraud several years ago, based in large part on his e-mail correspondence, which authorities had extracted via a subpoena under a 1986 law governing electronic privacy.

Senator Patrick Leahy said overhauling the law is his top priority this year.

But a federal appeals court in Ohio later found that the government had violated Mr. Warshak’s constitutional right to privacy. The court said investigators should have convinced a judge that there was probable cause and obtained a search warrant, as though his messages had been stashed in a desk drawer. Although the court let the conviction stand, the case highlighted the conflicting legal rules that govern electronic privacy.

Congress is now set to clarify those rules, bringing that quarter-century-old law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or E.C.P.A., in line with the Internet age.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will start deliberating a measure that would require the government to get a search warrant, issued by a judge, to gain access to personal e-mails and all other electronic content held by a third-party service provider.

The current statute requires a warrant for e-mails that are less than six months old. But it lets the authorities gain access to older communications â€" or bizarrely, e-mails that have already been opened â€" with just a subpoena and no judicial review.

The law governs the privacy of practically everything entrusted to the Internet â€" family photos stored with a Web service, journal entries kept online, company documents uploaded to the cloud, and the flurry of e-mails exchanged every day. The problem is that it was written when the cloud was just vapor in the sky.

Silicon Valley companies as well as advocacy groups from the political left and right have been lobbying for change for many years, and reform legislation seems to be gaining broad political support. Even the Justice Department appears to have approved one major change: requiring law enforcement to get a search warrant for all kinds of electronic content, no matter how long it has been in electronic storage or what exactly electronic storage means.

“Changing the law has become more of an imperative because of the growth of cloud computing, because everyone including members of Congress are storing sensitive info with third-party providers and they want it to be protected,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, which is financed partly by Silicon Valley companies and which is part of a coalition pushing for reform. “The technology is advancing and people realize the law has to keep pace.”

Updating the bill could have a broader impact on civil cases as well, clarifying who can gain access to e-mails, photos and Facebook posts in corporate litigation and divorce court.

And it could lay out clearer rules for government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service to follow to gain access to private citizens’ e-mails. The agency told Congress recently that it seeks search warrants before reading taxpayer e-mails, though its written policy says otherwise, according to an information request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Courts across the country, apparently baffled by how to apply the existing law, which applies to content held in “electronic storage,” have ruled in sometimes contradictory ways over the privacy of electronic material in both civil and criminal cases.

In one prominent case, Lee Jennings sued a relative of his wife who had broken into his Yahoo account and ferreted out e-mails describing an extramarital affair that were later used as incriminating evidence in divorce proceedings.

Mr. Jennings claimed a violation of his privacy under the electronic privacy act, but the highest court in his home state of South Carolina held that his e-mails, which sat on Yahoo’s servers, were not held in “electronic storage,” and therefore were not covered by the statute. A federal court in California years earlier had ruled differently in another case, interpreting “electronic storage” far more broadly.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century.

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