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Bits Blog: Tech Companies Escalate Pressure on Government to Publish National Security Request Data

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Twitter Yields to Pressure in Hate Case in France

The case shows how challenging it is for Silicon Valley companies to champion the free speech rights of users while complying with the laws of countries where they do business. It also highlights Silicon Valley’s Europe problem: the Continent represents a large and lucrative market, but its lawmakers, regulators and courts have hounded the industry in recent months on issues as varied as privacy and antitrust law.

For months, Twitter had fought a court order obtained by a private French citizens’ group demanding that the company turn over the user information. But on Friday, the company said it had handed over the information to a prosecutor in Paris, in response to a law enforcement request. By turning over the information, Twitter said, it had ended a lawsuit related to the court order brought by the private group.

In a statement Friday, the company said: “in response to a valid legal request, Twitter has provided the prosecutor of Paris, Presse et Libertés Publiques section of the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance, with data that may enable the identification of certain users that the Vice-Prosecutor believes have violated French law.”

The statement took pains to note that Twitter was providing the information to law enforcement through a legal request, not to the private group.

The case has important implications for Twitter users worldwide, as governments increasingly try to extract user information from the service. Legal experts say Twitter could have insisted that the French authorities seek to extract the user data by filing a claim in the United States, where the company is based.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said that while Twitter had demonstrated its commitment to protecting free speech on many occasions, it was under pressure to meet nations’ demands for information on their citizens, both in America and abroad. Many companies face this pressure, and Twitter is all the more vulnerable now that it has an office in Paris, making its employees and assets there subject to French law.

“Governments have an unquenchable thirst for more information about their citizens, and Internet companies, as repositories of data, are going to be on the list of targets,” Mr. Goldman said. He added: “We are in no position to criticize another government for demanding data on users. Our government is doing that about us every day.”

The French Union of Jewish Students and SOS Racisme had sought the identities of the users, who had used pseudonyms, and in January a French court ordered Twitter to hand over the data. Twitter appealed, and lost, in June. The French student union filed a $50 million civil suit against the company, saying that it had failed to comply with the court order. On Friday, Jonathan Hayoun, president of the group, said that “Twitter has finally accepted its responsibility for hate prevention as a prominent player on the Web.”

In the second half of 2012, Twitter received over 1,000 requests from government agencies in the United States and abroad, from Australia to Turkey. It complied to varying degrees: 69 percent of the time with respect to requests from American authorities, 33 percent from the Dutch, and never in the case of countries like India, Israel or Turkey. Twitter on Friday said it did not have a uniform policy on how it treated law enforcement requests. “Requests for Twitter user information, whether domestic or international, are evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” the company said in a statement.

“There was more fighting Twitter could have done and chose not to,” said Christopher Wolf, a partner at Hogan Lovells who represents American technology companies, including in Europe. He added: “It is an episode that gives me some pause over the potential breadth of jurisdiction by a European government over a U.S. Internet company.”

Twitter’s legal feuds with foreign governments could muddle its expansion overseas. Running afoul of the law in any country potentially makes it vulnerable to having its assets seized and its employees arrested.

Complicating matters, Twitter, like other similar companies, has a sort of jurisprudence of its own, laid out in its Terms of Service. It does not explicitly address hate speech, but stipulates that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

The French case was prompted by a spate of anti-Semitic posts late last year. There were also jokes about the Holocaust and comments denigrating Muslims. Holocaust denial is a crime in France, and the country has strict laws against hate speech. Twitter removed the posts in France after the complaints.

Under Pressure, China Measures Its Impact in Myanmar

China’s ambition of transporting energy through the Indian Ocean and across the mountains of Myanmar seems close to fulfillment. Natural gas is scheduled to start flowing in July from wells deep in the Bay of Bengal through a 500-mile pipeline. Oil will run in a parallel pipe at the end of the year.

But for China, the cost of the pipelines has been far greater than the several billion dollars that the China National Petroleum Corporation, China’s energy giant, has spent on construction. With its projects challenged more than ever by activists energized by Myanmar’s democratic opening, China has been trying to repair its tarnished reputation among residents here, and in the country at large.

Farmers and fishermen in this remote coastal region — who made little headway while objecting to lost lands and diminished catches under Myanmar’s repressive military junta — are winning some concessions. In central Myanmar, monks have joined with ancestral landholders to stop a Chinese-led conglomerate from leveling a fabled mountain embedded with copper.

And last week, in a new ominous sign for the Chinese, guerrillas of the Shan State Army attacked a compound belonging to the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, a partner with the Chinese oil company, not far from the pipeline and close to China’s border.

In response to the broad opposition, Beijing has ordered secretive state-owned Chinese companies to do something they have rarely done before: publicly embrace Western-style corporate social responsibility practices and act humbly toward the people who live near their vaunted projects.

The grass-roots protests against Chinese projects disturb Beijing because they come amid a scramble for influence in Myanmar between China and the United States.

Official visits give a glimpse of the diplomatic jockeying. President Thein Sein of Myanmar, who heads the quasi-civilian government, will visit the White House on Monday in what will be the first encounter in Washington between an American president and a leader of the country formerly known as Burma, since 1966.

A member of the military junta that China backed for decades, Mr. Thein Sein met President Obama in November during what was the first visit by a sitting American president to Myanmar. Mr. Thein Sein has visited China twice in the past six months. The leader of the opposition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was at the White House earlier this year and is expected in Beijing soon.

“It is in China’s self interest to think about the impact of their investments,” said Thant Myint-U, a Myanmar historian and author of “Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia.” “In the long term, it is difficult to see a Myanmar where China is not important. But there is a chance that China will no longer be the dominant actor in Myanmar, and that is worrying for some people in China.”

That concern has prompted Chinese officials, worried about losing Myanmar to the Americans, to push back. When a veteran Chinese diplomat, Wang Yingfan, was appointed several months ago as special envoy to Myanmar, he immediately flew there and spoke about the social obligations of Chinese state-run corporations.

And Gao Mingbo, the head of the political section at the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, said: “The companies must retain the support of the local communities. That has been the consistent message of the embassy: to be open, to be engaged.”

He created the embassy’s Facebook page; although Facebook is blocked in China, it is a tool that Chinese officials in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital and main city, are using to reach citizens.

“If you don’t walk the walk and just talk the talk, you won’t win the hearts and minds of the local people,” Mr. Gao said.

Whether China’s outreach efforts will quell anti-China protests is an open question.

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Workstation: Deadline Pressure, the Great Motivator

During my Googling I found out that Dan Ariely is an expert on deadlines, and I forced myself to contact him because I had promised to get this work done.

Making that declaration was a good move, as it turns out. Publicly committing to meeting a deadline is a powerful motivator because it puts your reputation on the line, said Mr. Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of “Predictably Irrational.”

Workers who fail to meet deadlines risk the disapproval — and sometimes the wrath — of their managers and colleagues. Still, some people will blow a deadline, rationalizing that there is both a “deadline” and a “real deadline.” They will use whatever devices and excuses they can muster to buy more time.

But what about assignments that don’t have clear deadlines? Or projects that are so large that they must be done in increments, so that pulling an all-nighter isn’t an option? Or creative goals that no one much cares about, except you?

I know people who, through boundless narcissism, single-minded obsession or unfathomable self-discipline can complete big projects without deadlines. Many of us, though, need a looming threat to finish major work.

People respond well to deadlines because meeting them provides a distinct feeling of having achieved something within a time frame. “It’s a good way to keep score,” Professor Ariely said.

It is possible to motivate yourself, he said, by announcing a deadline to others — perhaps on Facebook or on Twitter. Not meeting the deadline would then feel like breaking a promise, he said: “It does say something about your character.”

A mere announcement on Twitter, though, would hardly be enough for die-hard procrastinators. If you are one of them, consider creating a situation that has real consequences, Professor Ariely said. Give a friend $100 and say, “If I don’t meet my deadline you can keep this.” Or, he said, try the prospect of public humiliation. Make a bet with your friends: if you don’t meet the deadline, you must run through the streets naked.

Perhaps Professor Ariely has friends who really would force him to run naked through the streets of Durham, N.C. My friends are warm and supportive and would say “that’s O.K.” if I didn’t meet my self-imposed deadline, which, of course, makes them wonderful friends but not good enforcers.

I have always wanted to write a book, however, and it occurs to me: Why not hire someone to hector me? Services like TaskRabbit have sprung up to help people with all manner of tasks, including fixing their computers and doing their laundry. Surely a stranger would be willing, for a small fee, to call or text me and say: “Have you written those 500 words you said you would write by 8 a.m.?” It’s worth a try. A shaming e-mail if I don’t do my assignment should be included in the price.

Here may be the secret to meeting a big self-imposed deadline: First, divide the work into smaller tasks and set deadlines for every one of them. Then find a tough and reliable person to hold you accountable for meeting each one. Make meeting the big deadline — not achieving perfection — the ultimate goal. Voilà. You’re making no guarantees of quality, but perhaps your work can be improved later.

THIS column, for example, is nowhere near as good as it was as a vague idea in my mind’s eye. There’s so much more I wanted to cover, including the etymology of the word “deadline.” (O.K., I’ll throw it in: It was formerly “a boundary around a military prison beyond which a prisoner could not venture without risk of being shot by the guards,” according to Dictionary.com.)

I wanted to discuss the link between death and deadlines, and whether death awareness affects people at work, a topic that has been explored by Prof. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

But I ran out of time, and that’s the point. This column — inferior though it is to what I had imagined — is done, and it’s done because I had a deadline.

Japan Leader Keeps Up Pressure on Central Bank to Stimulate Economy

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Pig Farmers Face Pressure on the Size of the Sty

Other sows in the pen sported abrasions, torn ears and bloody tail stumps — all souvenirs of her attentions.

It was that kind of behavior that led hog farmers like Tom Dittmer to isolate sows in individual stalls called gestation crates that are barely bigger than the pigs themselves.

“The reason the industry switched to crates wasn’t because we wanted to harm our animals,” Mr. Dittmer said. “We did it because we thought it was what was best for the animals.” The move also kept the price of pork reasonably low for consumers, he said.

This year, however, Mr. Dittmer and fellow hog farmers are under increasing pressure from corporate pork buyers and animal rights groups to return to the old way of doing things: putting sows in group housing. In the last week of September alone, three companies — Dunkin’ Donuts, ConAgra Foods and Brinker International, which operates Chili’s — announced that over the next decade, they would no longer buy pork derived from pigs housed in gestation crates.

This week, the Bruegger’s bagel chain joined them. That brought the number of fast-food companies and food retailers that have made such commitments this year to 32 — a stunning victory for the Humane Society of the United States, which has worked for years to persuade pork producers to make the change. The National Pork Producers Council said it did not know how much pork these companies bought but estimated it might be about one-fifth of the pork produced.

Farmers like Mr. Dittmer resent the tactics, saying they worry that the move will be unsustainably costly for them and result in soaring pork prices for consumers.

“What I don’t like is some big restaurant chain in Chicago that knows nothing about raising animals is telling us how to raise pigs,” said Glen Keppy, a retired pig farmer whose sons finish raising Mr. Dittmer’s pigs for market, referring to McDonald’s, which promised in February to stop buying pork from pigs born in gestation crates. “Would they tell Microsoft how to make computers?”

Research is mixed about which type of housing is best for the animals’ welfare, according to a review done by a task force convened by the American Veterinary Medical Association. But the Humane Society and other animal advocates maintain that housing sows in gestation crates is cruel.

Earlier efforts to convert the pork industry have had mixed success. Cargill, the nation’s third-largest pork processor, owns about one-quarter of the sows that produce pigs for the company and began putting them in larger group pens about a decade ago. Smithfield Foods recommitted to transitioning to pens last year, after first promising it would do so in 2007 and then changing its mind. Tyson Foods and JBS, the two other large processors, have refused to budge.

So the Humane Society — armed with graphic videos of workers abusing dead piglets and of sows in gestation crates so small they cannot turn around, suffering from shoulder lesions and nervous disorders — took its case to the big consumer brands. It accomplished in months what it had been unable to achieve in years of prodding the major processors.

But now some of the independent farmers who supply those processors are fighting back.

Pat Hord and his family have put windows in some of their barns in north central Ohio to let visitors see for themselves how their 18,000 sows fare.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about what we do and how pigs get bred in crates,” Mr. Hord said. “It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just that no one is on the farm anymore.”

Mr. Dittmer recently invited a reporter for a tour of Grandview Farm, which was founded by his great-grandfather in 1917 and is now home to 6,000 sows that he often calls “my girls.”

“I’m nervous about this, I have to say,” Mr. Dittmer said as he began the tour. “I’m afraid of becoming a target for the animal rights people. But if I’m going to hand this on to the next generation, which is the plan, I feel like people need to understand why we do things this way.”

When Mr. Dittmer began farming with his father in the 1970s, he said, their 150 sows lived in pastures like most pigs at the time, taking shelter under individual huts in the glaring heat of summer and wintering in barns.

DealBook: T-Mobile Deal for MetroPCS Adds Pressure on Sprint

By clinching a deal to buy MetroPCS, T-Mobile USA is aiming not only to survive but also to turn up the pressure on its larger rival, Sprint Nextel.

The merger, formally announced on Wednesday, signals a renewed phase of jockeying among cellphone service providers as they race to draw in more smartphone users and upgrade to the latest high-speed data networks. And by taking one of the most attractive takeover targets, MetroPCS, off the table, T-Mobile may have strengthened its hand at the expense of Sprint.

The cellphone service industry is dominated by the virtual duopoly of Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which together claim 199 million customers, more than their next six competitors combined. That has left Sprint and T-Mobile to scramble, trying to undercut their big rivals on price even as they seek additional wireless spectrum that would support high-speed data networks.

The industry has long looked to consolidation to grow; last year, AT&T unsuccessfully sought to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion, hoping to gain size and spectrum. Growth via merger also underpinned Sprint’s aborted attempt to buy MetroPCS this year, a transaction scrapped at the 11th hour by Sprint’s reluctant board.

MetroPCS represents a potentially big lost opportunity for Sprint. The two companies use the same network technology (CDMA), which would have made for a relatively smooth integration of customers and devices. T-Mobile runs on GSM, so the company will have to convert MetroPCS’s 9.3 million customers to its technology over the next three years.

CLOSING THE GAP If the parent company of T-Mobile USA buys MetroPCS, the combined unit would have the fourth most cellular subscribers.

The newly enlarged T-Mobile will have about 42.5 million customers, compared with Sprint’s 56 million. But the merger could potentially give T-Mobile additional clout to demand popular devices like the iPhone, which it does not now carry. Adding MetroPCS will also help T-Mobile build out more quickly its Long Term Evolution network, the speedy data standard that powers the latest batch of smartphones.

T-Mobile executives argue that the unified operator can offer unlimited data and cheaper prepaid service plans to more customers.

“When you look at this as an industry, we are the alternative choice for consumers,” John J. Legere, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “This can only be good for the industry to think about the competition and consumer.”

T-Mobile’s parent, Deutsche Telekom, and MetroPCS held on-and-off discussions about a merger for years, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions. But after Sprint’s board vetoed a takeover of the smaller service provider, T-Mobile and MetroPCS met early this summer to begin formal discussions about a deal.

Weeks of negotiations ensued, leading to a structure in which Deutsche Telekom would own 74 percent of the combined entity through a complicated stock swap. Existing MetroPCS shareholders will also receive $1.5 billion through a special dividend, worth about $4.09 a share.

And while antitrust officials fiercely opposed AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, people involved in the MetroPCS transaction argued that Wednesday’s deal was more likely to pass regulatory muster. Instead of fortifying one of the country’s biggest service providers, it will bolster one of its weaker ones.

A spokesman for Sprint declined to comment.

With T-Mobile claiming MetroPCS, Sprint is likely to find itself even harder pressed to build out its next-generation network and pitch itself as the dominant low-cost service provider. Sprint’s chief executive, Daniel R. Hesse, has said he expects to participate in mergers within the industry, but few attractive takeover targets remain.

Shares in Leap Wireless International, a smaller competitor often cited as a likely deal partner, plummeted nearly 18 percent on Wednesday, as investors shook off hopes that it would be acquired anytime soon. The company, a prepaid service provider, operates largely in less-attractive markets and is in the midst of a turnaround effort.

“I don’t think that Leap would provide all that much,” Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, said by telephone.

While some analysts have speculated about whether Sprint would try to outbid T-Mobile for MetroPCS, some industry deal makers were skeptical of the company’s will to revisit a target it had already left at the altar.

Sprint is still scarred by the merger that produced its current incarnation: its 2005 union with Nextel Communications, an example still used in business schools as a classic case of a bad deal.

The tie-up was marred by incompatible phone networks and infighting. As a result, Sprint slipped further behind Verizon and AT&T in market share.

Sprint may still pursue deals, especially as a way to add to its stores of spectrum, without resorting to full-on mergers. Analysts and deal specialists say one potential seller is Clearwire, which already helps provides a high-speed data network to Sprint.

Another is Dish Network, which has an abundance of spectrum but has been unable to set up its own mobile phone network. The company’s chairman, Charles W. Ergen, hinted at an industry conference that with T-Mobile out of the running as a potential partner, he would be open to others.

“Sometimes when one door closes, a window opens somewhere else,” he said, according to a report in The Denver Post.

Analysts have floated one more, bolder, possibility: buying the newly enlarged T-Mobile, creating a third major company to combat Verizon and AT&T. Industry bankers disagree on whether such a deal would be opposed by the Federal Communications Commission.

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.