Bits Blog: 3-D Printing the 19th Century

Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century

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 — or bizarrely, e-mails that have already been opened — with just a subpoena and no judicial review.

The law governs the privacy of practically everything entrusted to the Internet — 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.

Advertising: FleishmanHillard Rebrands Itself, With a 21st Century Focus

Fleishman-Hillard, which was founded in 1946 as Fleishman, Hillard & Associates, will rebrand itself this week as FleishmanHillard, with elements that include a new logo and a new slogan, “The power of true” — no relation, presumably, to “Truth well told,” the slogan of McCann Erickson Worldwide, or “Truth and design,” the slogan of MediaVest.

Truth be told, the changes at FleishmanHillard — with worldwide revenue of more than $500 million and 2,500 employees in 84 offices — are meant to signal how it is striving to become an integrated marketing communications agency that offers services like advertising and social media marketing in addition to public relations.

“ ‘True’ is the central concept we’re rebranding on, to deliver on our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices,” said Dave Senay, president and chief executive at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which since 1997 has been part of the Diversified Agency Services division of the Omnicom Group, the world’s second-largest agency holding company after WPP.

“It’s not that we’re going to become an ad agency,” Mr. Senay said, adding: “We’re moving into a different space. The vision is to be the most complete communications company in the world. Somebody’s got to be able to put it all together.”

FleishmanHillard will seek to be “channel agnostic,” Mr. Senay said, an industry term meaning to be objective about the various forms of communication, whether paid, owned, earned or shared, to reflect “how the public consumes media today.”

To that end, the agency is hiring a former longtime journalist, Pat Wechsler, as senior vice president and director for editorial and corporate content strategy, working in realms like content marketing, which provides consumers editorial and entertainment articles and video clips that marketers sponsor.

He was hired after FleishmanHillard had brought in scores of the types of employees who are more typically found at consultancies, brand identity businesses or ad agencies, among them analytics specialists, planners, copywriters and art directors.

FleishmanHillard “wasn’t even on my radar,” said Nick Childs, an executive creative director in the agency’s New York office who arrived in 2011 after working at ad agencies like Grey.

“I had a chance to take a risk and do something unique at a big agency that could be a key partner to brands,” he added, “not just pushing out at an audience what a brand wants to say.”

Richard Dale, senior vice president, senior partner and global planning director, who also joined FleishmanHillard in New York in 2011, said that after working for ad agencies like Leo Burnett “I was looking for something different” and became intrigued by the concept of FleishmanHillard’s “transforming into a total communications resource.”

Although “the journey is just beginning at FleishmanHillard, and we still have a lot to do,” he added, “the firm is being given the tools, and it’s proving so game-changing.”

Reflecting the broadening of the services offered by FleishmanHillard beyond public relations, the agency last year placed more than $1.2 billion worth of ads in paid media, compared with $250 million in 2011.

“A lot of things have changed in consumer product marketing, especially the multiplicity of channel options,” said Mike Brooks, executive director at the William K. Busch Brewing Company in St. Louis, which hired FleishmanHillard to create television, radio, outdoor, online, retail and social-media ads to introduce two beers, Kräftig Lager and Kräftig Light.

Asked to assess the work, Mr. Brooks paused to declare, “I’m not on a P.R. campaign for FH,” then said: “I am happy to report thumbs up in every regard. The creative and the messaging are well received. And we have one quarterback of all the disciplines, Tom Hudder, an executive creative director, ensuring everything is consistent.”

FleishmanHillard is, of course, not the only agency reassessing its operations in light of the profound changes in marketing and media. Large competitors like Edelman, part of Daniel J. Edelman Inc., and Weber Shandwick, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies, are also reworking their service offerings.

“It’s exciting if we look at it as different opportunities, new opportunities, to be creative,” said Mark O’Brien, president at the DDB North America division of DDB Worldwide, an Omnicom ad agency. “Persuasion is an art, not a science.”

Because of innovations like social media, the model has evolved from “trying to connect people with brands” to “trying to connect people with people to connect with brands,” he added. “Agencies that have made an effort to bring in fresh talent are getting hotter.”

Mr. Senay said rough patches are likely during the transition. For instance, referring to the employees who have worked on public relations assignments at the agency, he said, “about a third are turned on by” the new vision, “about a third will go along with it and about a third will not get it.”

To promote its new identity, FleishmanHillard is introducing a quarterly digital magazine, FleishmanHillard True. And a television, print, outdoor and online ad campaign that is being created internally, with a budget estimated at $750,000, is to begin this week. “Be as you wish to be seen,” a 15-second commercial proclaims.

Updating an E-Mail Law From the Last Century

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 — or bizarrely, e-mails that have already been opened — with just a subpoena and no judicial review.

The law governs the privacy of practically everything entrusted to the Internet — 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.

Today's Economist: Uwe E. Reinhardt: The Mid-20th Century Infrastructure of the U.S.

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times An Amtrak train navigates a turn near Baltimore.

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton.

Europeans visiting the Northeastern United States – and many parts of the East Coast — can show their children what Europe’s infrastructure looked like during the 1960s.

Perspectives from expert contributors.

In New York, they can take taxis bumping over streets marked by potholes. European children might find it funny. They can descend into a dingy and grimy underground world to ride New York City’s quaint and screeching subway system, if they can figure out where trains go.

They can take the children for a ride with Amtrak from New York to the nation’s capital, giggling as the train slowly heaves and rolls, often in fits and starts, along the rickety tracks. Passengers can be heard joking that the Navy trains its sailors on this railway system, because anyone who can make it through two or three cars without bumping into seated passengers or spilling food on them is fit to go to sea.

If they departed from Pennsylvania Station in New York, they would not have known until 5 to 10 minutes before departure from which track the train would leave. And it might not leave on time. In their home country, the children would have learned that the track from which a train departs is printed in the train schedule. It is the same every day.

At Pennsylvania Station, hundreds of passengers wait in suspense for the announcement of the track and dash to it in a mad rush, running along the train in a frantic search for a seat. In Europe, one would have booked a seat in a rail car that stops at a spot shown on a poster on the track.

Unlike Europe or Asia, where trains typically adhere to the minute to scheduled times, the departure times in Amtrak’s schedules merely represent a promise that the train will not leave before then. The actual getaway might be many minutes or even more than an hour after the scheduled departure time, with any of dozens of different excuses offered. Brakes on the train stuck. Signal switches malfunctioned. Electricity was not available to the train for some reason. A train ahead, on the same track, broke down. And so on.

Arriving at a destination on time, something Europeans take largely for granted, is relatively rare on Amtrak. Furthermore, the train in Europe or Asia is likely to have traveled at much higher speed. The tracks there are so smooth that one could easily carry an open cup of coffee along several cars or work on the computer.

Why and how Americans, who pride themselves on being fussy consumers, have put up with this mid-20th-century rail system is a mystery.

Even more wondrous than the archaic subway and rail system and the potholes in the streets is the system of distributing electric power to households and factories in large parts of the Northeastern United States. Power is often still carried on lines that hang in graceful catenaries of various depths from poles that lean left or right randomly but rarely stand straight. And which are vulnerable to powerful storms, like Hurricane Sandy.

When a German high-school classmate visited me, we came upon the intersection below, less than a mile from the center of Princeton, N.J. My friend burst out laughing at the abundance of wires in every direction, something he had seen only on his travels to the developing world.

Uwe E. Reinhardt

In my youth, electric power in Germany’s countryside, where I grew up, was carried on power lines strung from very tall and straight poles. But for decades now, power lines have been buried underground in Germany and most of the rest of Europe.

Malte Lehming, opinion-page editor of the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, noted in his essay “Welcome to America. Take a Number” in The New York Times:

I spent half a day hunting for a store with flashlights in stock, because a storm had knocked out our power. In five decades in Germany I have never experienced a single power failure, because the power lines are usually underground and well maintained.

Imagine that – life without power failures! In much of the Northeastern United States – and perhaps in many other parts of the country as well – lengthy power disruptions are part of the American way of life. In Princeton, they occur somewhere in the township after almost every thunderstorm or snowstorm, as branches snap from trees and take down vulnerable power lines.

Last fall, for example, after a brief storm dumped wet snow on trees, many parts of New Jersey, Princeton included, were without power for about a week. Parts of Connecticut were without power for more than two weeks.

In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith drew attention to America’s neglect of its infrastructure in his famous book, “The Affluent Society.” Alas, his call for a better balance between private and public infrastructure has gone largely unheeded in this country in the ensuing half-century.

Our country reminds me of the old tale of a frog that allowed itself to be cooked to death after it was put in a pan of cold water that was very gradually heated to the boiling point. Although apparently there is no scientific basis for that tale — biologists say the frog would jump out — we do seem to act like that frog, as our infrastructure ever-so-gradually steadily decays around us.

Instead of setting about to bring our infrastructure up to 21st-century standards – which might, alas, involve more of the much detested public-sector investment — we angrily and yet meekly suffer for days or weeks without light, heat and transportation, verbally shaking our fists at the power companies but leaving it at that.

We are, at most, prepared to stock our households with flashlights and candles and, if we have the money, buy portable generators that can produce a modest amount of electricity, albeit at great expense. How can this be an efficient way of bringing electric power to households?

In so many ways the United States is a great country. The American people are innovative and hard-working, more so than most Europeans. It amazes me that they put up so fatalistically with this old-fashioned and decaying infrastructure.