DealBook: Facebook to Offer More Shares to the Public

Bits Blog: Following Public Dots to a Missing Phone

In retrospect, I should have checked the cab seat when I got out. I should have taken the receipt. And maybe I should have had more empathy for those people, like my daughters, who have lost their smartphones.

Because there I was, at 1 a.m. on a recent night, just back from the airport with a sinking feeling that I’d left my iPhone in the taxi.

No immediate solution appeared, so after a fitful few hours of sleep, I began my quest to find my phone. Along the way, I was reminded, in this time of debate about how much personal information the government secretly keeps about us, just how much information is already publicly available.

My hunt started with a trip to the Apple store to get into my iCloud account (I didn’t know my password) and use the Find My iPhone service that I had turned on for my iPhone. I learned just how critical it is to have the program activated, although there were still several caveats.

A screen shot of the Find My iPhone app showing location of the writer’s iPhone on Thursday.

Because of that feature, locating the phone was the easy step. The trick was getting it back.

The tracker showed the phone at a house at the entrance to a cul-de-sac a little east of Queens in Nassau County. But I didn’t have the house number. The police there told me they could assist me if I showed up at the location, but that they wouldn’t go to the house on their own. I needed to talk to someone in that house.

I initially didn’t have much luck searching online for a free reverse directory, and a librarian at a nearby branch would not give out resident information if they could find it in their reverse directories. But Zillow.com, the real estate site, let me identify the house number, which gave me enough information to look up county records. Those told a lot about the property — Colonial, two-family home, built in 1962, 2,150 square feet, last sold in 2004 for $430,00 — but had no owner information. A call to the assessor’s office turned up the homeowner’s name, and the white pages provided the phone number. It went to a generic voicemail.

While I waited for a call back, I searched the Open Data service on NYC.gov for a taxi driver with the resident’s name. One seemed to show up, though the first name started with a different letter. That gave me a taxi license for that driver, though not the coveted medallion number.

To triangulate, I turned to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. I wasn’t expecting much here, since when I called the night before I heard the after-hours recording, which made it clear that the commission has lots of drivers and lots of lost property reports, and that you have to fill out a form online. I got through to a helpful employee who was soon digging into the case. She took the license number and within a couple minutes had the driver on the line. But the person she had on the phone was not the right one — it was a woman, not a man. So the records showing a slightly different first name were indeed accurate.

But there was another option: because I paid with a credit card, the staffer told me, the medallion number of the driver would show up in that transaction. But it hadn’t yet been fully processed and there was no medallion number, according to my online statement and my credit union. But we did have the amount, $36.43, and the pick up and drop-off locations, so the staffer was going to see what she could do.

In the meantime, I called the house again and a man picked up. Though he wasn’t my driver, he said a taxi driver did live there and he gave me a cellphone number.

When I called that number, a man picked up and he said he had my phone. I got his name and medallion number and called the clerk at the taxi commission. She, too, had come up with a medallion number. They matched.

Less than 24 hours since his cab drove off with my phone on the back seat, the driver was outside our apartment again.

It is said that the chances of getting a phone back are not so good after someone hops into the cab you exited. As a tractor-trailer honked behind the cabby and I gave him $30 bucks for the effort and he handed me the phone, he told me we had been his last passengers after that airport run.

So in the end, it helped to have a little bit of luck, and a lot of data, on my side.

Bits: Facebook Adds Hashtags to Organize Public Conversations

Facebook users will be able to click on a hashtag and see a feed of what other people and users are saying about that event or topic.

4:42 p.m. | Updated Added more explanation of how hashtag searching works.

Facebook has joined the hashtag revolution, introducing a tool on Wednesday that allows users to add the # symbol before a word to signify its topic. The topic would then be easily searchable by other users of the social network.

Of course, anyone who has used the microblogging service Twitter is familiar with hashtags, which have long been used there to organize public conversations. Right now, for example, #manofsteel is a popular hashtag on Twitter because of the coming Superman movie. Search for that hashtag on Twitter and you can see the global conversation about the topic.

Tumblr, Pinterest and other social networks also use hashtags, and Google announced last month that it was adding hashtags to its Google Plus service.

In a blog post, Facebook said it, too, wanted to make it easier for its users to participate in a common conversation.

“Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them. Whether it’s talking about a favorite television show, cheering on a hometown sports team or engaging with friends during a breaking news event — people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world,” Greg Lindley, a Facebook product manager, wrote in the blog post. “To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people and topics.”

Starting Wednesday, users can click on a hashtag in Facebook and see a feed of what other people and organizational users are saying about that event or topic.

Facebook said users would also be able to click on hashtags that originated on other services, like Instagram, a photo-sharing service owned by Facebook that already uses the tool. Searching a hashtag will bring up posts with that tag made by friends and other users who have chosen to make their posts public.

The new hashtag service is immediately available to about 20 percent of Facebook users, with the rest getting it gradually over the coming weeks.

The company said it would roll out additional features, including trending hashtags, in the near future.

DealBook: Nasdaq Is Fined $10 Million Over Mishandled Facebook Public Offering

Bebeto Matthews/Associated PressNasdaq said it has put measures in place to prevent problems like the Facebook I.P.O. last May.

Nasdaq’s parent company will pay the largest fine ever levied against an exchange for “poor systems and decision making” both before and after the bungled Facebook initial public offering.

In the minutes after Facebook’s initial public offering spun out of control last year, executives at the Nasdaq stock exchange received an e-mail pleading for a pause.

“We are all trading blind,” said the message, which was sent by the chief executive of the trading firm Knight Capital, according to people briefed on the details of the e-mail. “Should you stop trading for some period of time so we can all catch up and actually understand our exposure?”

The confusion on the morning of May 18, 2012, had been caused by errors in Nasdaq’s computer programming, but executives at the exchange decided to ignore the request for a break and proceed with trading, leading to mounting confusion.

The back-and-forth is one of many details to come out on Wednesday when the Securities and Exchange Commission released the results of its investigation into the bungled Facebook I.P.O. The S.E.C. announced that the Nasdaq OMX Group will pay $10 million, the largest fine ever levied against an exchange, to settle accusations that it had violated numerous rules before and after the I.P.O.

The settlement helps Nasdaq put behind it an episode that hurt its reputation and damaged investor confidence in the stock market. But the investigation also suggests that Nasdaq’s shortcomings were, in some ways, much deeper and more widespread than previously understood.

The head of the S.E.C.’s market abuse unit, Daniel M. Hawke, said in a statement that there has been too much of a tendency to write off incidents like the Facebook I.P.O. as “technical ‘glitches.’ ”

“It’s the design of the systems and the response of exchange officials that cause us the most concern,” Mr. Hawke said.

Robert Greifeld, the chief executive of Nasdaq, wrote in an open letter on Wednesday that the company had put new safeguards in place to prevent future problems. But he also defended the company’s overall performance.

“While we prepared extensively for the Facebook initial public offering, including thorough tests of our systems with member firms, the challenges we encountered that day were unprecedented,” Mr. Greifeld wrote.

The mishandled Facebook I.P.O. was among a series of breakdowns that rocked the United States stock markets last year and led to questions about the safety and soundness of an increasingly complex and computer-driven system.

In addition to the $10 million fine, Nasdaq has already agreed to pay $62 million to the brokers who lost money because of the problems. Even that has not been enough to placate the firm that was hurt the most, UBS, which contends that it lost $356 million because of Nasdaq’s errors. UBS has said it plans to seek more money from Nasdaq through arbitration.

The S.E.C.’s findings could aggravate some of the remaining tensions over the Facebook I.P.O. because it reveals numerous and previously unknown ways that the exchange executives fumbled the incident.

The problems began before the I.P.O. when Nasdaq tested its computer programs, but only on 40,000 orders, according to the S.E.C. When it was time to begin actual trading, at 11 a.m. on May 18, the system was overwhelmed by 496,000 orders.

The deluge of orders sent Nasdaq’s computers into a continuous loop that made it impossible to establish a correct opening price for Facebook stock, which had priced at $38 a share the night before.

Nasdaq executives were immediately aware of the problems and summoned a “Code Blue” conference call, but they decided to proceed with the opening after making a few temporary fixes to the computer code and switching to an untested backup system, the S.E.C. found.

Once Facebook started trading at $42 soon after 11:30 a.m., numerous brokers contacted Nasdaq to complain that they still did not know how many shares of Facebook they had purchased. At 1:50 p.m., Nasdaq executives realized they had failed to execute tens of thousands of orders that had been sent in.

At that point, Nasdaq caused more problems by selling many of these shares into the market, leading to a sharp drop in Facebook’s share price. It closed at $38.23 after Facebook’s bankers stepped in to help support the stock. The company’s stock has never risen above its opening price of $42.05 and was trading down 3.2 percent on Wednesday, at $23.32.

The S.E.C. also reported that shortcomings in Nasdaq’s technology hit the stock of game-maker Zynga on the day of the Facebook I.P.O., causing big price swings in Zynga shares.

The S.E.C. said Wednesday that Nasdaq had broken market rules two other separate times. In October 2011 and August 2012, programming errors caused Nasdaq to mistakenly execute some customer orders below the publicly listed price.

Although the settlement could put to rest some of the speculation surrounding the exchange, it does not shine a positive light on Nasdaq and its management, said Patrick Healy, the chief executive of the Issuer Advisory Group, a capital markets consulting firm.

“It sure looks like the guy who couldn’t shoot straight,” Mr. Healy said. “There’s no question that it’s an embarrassment.”

In Crisis, Public Officials Embrace Social Media

It is usually Mr. Cuomo’s aides, not the governor, typing the messages. But he and his staff recognize that social media “is a highly effective method of communicating information in a time of crisis,” said Joshua Vlasto, Mr. Cuomo’s deputy communications director. The governor’s followers have increased to 50,000 from 20,000 last Friday

Although phone service has been spotty in some places across the Northeast, people with working signals have been reliant on texting and social networking to a degree not seen during previous disasters.

In turn, governors, mayors and emergency workers from North Carolina to Maine have fully embraced Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, knowing that constituents unable to watch television can still receive texts and Twitter messages.

Political leaders are still having “Voice of God” news conferences, of course, but aides now tend to post their words on Twitter at the same time, trying to spread accurate information and convey a sense of control amid the chaos and confusion.

“Twitter makes it possible for a public official to create a round-the-clock press conference, simultaneously informing their staff, the public and the press,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum. Praising the effectiveness of the Web during the recovery from the storm, he said, “We can now separate public officials’ embrace of social media as either pre- or post-Sandy.”

Even before the storm, states showed newfound creativity in getting the word out. Maryland’s emergency management office promoted a Pinterest page with resources and photos of past floods to prod people to get ready. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a county manager posted videos to YouTube about preparations before the storm passed by, and videos of damage afterward.

Political campaigns big and small started realizing the effectiveness of these tools several years ago — and now the lessons learned are being applied by the winning candidates.

“Social media is an integral part of an emergency communication plan,” said J. Tucker Martin, the director of communications for Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was elected in 2009. “I think a few years ago, it would have been considered a nicety, where it is now considered essential.”

Shortly after Connecticut’s governor, Dannel P. Malloy, was inaugurated in 2011, a couple of big snowstorms quickly showed how useful social media could be in delivering emergency information, said David Bednarz, a deputy communications manager who operates Mr. Malloy’s Twitter account.

Then came Hurricane Irene in August of last year, followed by a freakish October snowstorm. As more and more citizens lost power, the number of Mr. Malloy’s Twitter followers soared.

“Perhaps a sign of the times, we have found that many people do not own battery-operated radios anymore and can’t listen to the governor’s live news briefings,” Mr. Bednarz said. “Using their cellphones, Twitter was the last resource they had available to them to find out what was happening while they were stuck in their homes with no power.”

Across Manhattan’s powerless areas this week, people with smartphones tended to huddle around the few remaining Wi-Fi hot spots rather than battery-operated televisions or radios.

Some agencies have also used the Web to correct news outlets that provided misleading information. On Wednesday, when The New York Post reported on its Web site that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg planned to ban all passenger cars in Manhattan, the mayor’s press secretary posted a Twitter response in capital letters, “NOT CORRECT.”

The Post deleted the story, which overstated the car restrictions that were announced an hour later.

Social media styles vary. Power utilities tend to be matter-of-fact, keeping emotion to a minimum. Mr. Cuomo is data-driven; Mr. Vlasto said the staff treats his Twitter page “very much like a news operation.”

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, on the other hand, is oftentimes personal. (“The rides I took my kids on this summer are in the Atlantic Ocean,” he wrote Tuesday night.)

Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, a pioneer of Twitter politicking, replies to more people than most public officials. When a woman who lives around the corner from Mr. Booker asked on Thursday morning, “Why don’t we have our power back?” he replied that he did not know.

But he added that anyone in the neighborhood “can come to my house” to warm up and charge their cellphones. A few hours later, the woman said on Twitter, she was at his home, charging her phone and watching the movie “Happy Feet.”

Sidebar: Sidebar: Public in the Dark About Surveillance Orders

That is hard enough. What he has trouble understanding is why all this is kept from public view.

“Courts do things in public,” Judge Smith said in an interview. “That’s the way we maintain our legitimacy. As citizens, we need to know how law enforcement is using this power.”

But most court orders allowing surveillance are so secret, he wrote in a provocative new article, that they might as well be “written in invisible ink.” The article chronicles the rise of a secret docket on a scale that has no parallels in American history.

Gathering the information was frustrating, Judge Smith said. “Even judges have difficulty finding out what other judges are doing,” he said.

What we do know, as my colleague Eric Lichtblau reported a couple weeks ago, is that cellphone carriers responded to at least 1.3 million requests for subscriber information last year.

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, officials do not need to establish probable cause to obtain various kinds of phone and e-mail records if they are not seeking the content of the communications. If all officials want to know is whether someone was near a cellphone tower on a given date, say, or whom that person called or e-mailed last month, the law says the government need only demonstrate to a judge that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the information sought is “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Given that low bar, it is not surprising that such requests are routinely granted. What is surprising is how little we know about the orders granting them.

In Judge Smith’s article, to be published in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, he describes a secret docket that dwarfs that of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which considers warrant applications in national security investigations. Using data from 2006 and not a little extrapolation, Judge Smith estimated that there were about 30,000 sealed surveillance orders in federal courts that year, surpassing in a single year the entire output of the national security court since 1978.

By way of comparison, he wrote, there were more surveillance orders in 2006 than the total of all antitrust, employment discrimination, environmental, copyright, patent, trademark and securities cases filed in federal court.

That is but a dated glimpse of a vast expansion of government monitoring of electronic communications with light judicial oversight and vanishingly little public information. Surveillance has since exploded with the rise of smartphones and other digital technologies. And many law enforcement surveillance requests do not require court orders, and those that do often come from judges in state courts.

Some temporary secrecy is surely warranted — to make sure that suspects are not tipped off, that evidence is not destroyed and that investigations are not disrupted.

“The problem is that these surveillance orders remain secret long after the criminal investigations come to an end,” Judge Smith wrote. Unless criminal charges are filed, he went on, “law-abiding citizens will never know that the government has accessed their e-mails, text messages, Twitter accounts or cellphone records.”

By long tradition and under the First and Sixth Amendments, what goes on in criminal proceedings is presumptively open to public scrutiny. The federal courts generally take pains to make this so.

But the practice is different under the 1986 law. “The problem is that temporary sealing orders almost always become permanent,” Judge Smith wrote. From 1995 to 2007, magistrate judges in Houston alone issued 3,886 orders concerning electronic surveillance. As of 2008, he found, 99.8 percent of them remained sealed.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Judge Smith is on to something.

“You can put in place substantive limitations on the collection and use of this data, which is always a good idea,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “But regardless of substantive limitations, you also need much more transparency.”

For his part, Judge Smith has proposed some modest fixes. At some point, people whose records have been inspected should be told. At some point, secret court orders should be unsealed. Comprehensive data should be collected, he wrote, to “allow the press and public to better understand the extent of government intrusion into our digital lives.”

He was in a way echoing an observation by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in 1980, before the dawn of the Internet era. “People in an open society do not demand infallibility from their institutions,” he wrote, “but it is difficult for them to accept what they are prohibited from observing.”

Pornography in Public Causes Some to Gasp, Others to Shrug

The library has been stung by complaints about the content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. To address the issue, the library over the last six weeks has installed 18 computer monitors with plastic hoods so that only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen.

“It’s for their privacy, and for ours,” said Michelle Jeffers, the library spokeswoman. The library will also soon post warnings on the screens of all its 240 computers to remind people to be sensitive to other patrons — a solution it prefers to filtering or censoring images.

It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.

The subject can put personal media on a collision course with personal morality. This is an era, after all, that celebrates people’s ability to watch what they want, when they want, but it also forces bystanders to choose whether to shrug, object or avert their eyes.

Some legislators battle against public displays of pornographic content, at least on the roadways. A bill is pending in the New Jersey legislature to criminalize the playing of obscene material in cars — say, on seat-back DVD players or in party buses — that could viewed by, and distract or offend, others on the road. State Senator Anthony Bucco, who sponsored the bill, said people who view such videos in public “don’t care what anybody around them thinks.”

Similar laws have passed in the last decade in Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia, and one failed last year in Pennsylvania, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

An antipornography group, Morality in Media, has in recent months launched a “no porn on the plane” campaign, and has contacted most major airlines to argue that they should commit to policing what people watch.

The group took up the cause after its executive director, Dawn Hawkins, was on a flight in January and noticed a man in the row in front of her looking at images on his iPad of naked women whipping each other.

She complained to the flight attendant, who told her he was powerless to force the man to stop, she recalled. The man eventually turned off the images, but Ms. Hawkins continued to press him on why he was looking at those images in public.

She said a woman then came up to her and said, “Be quiet, nobody cares.”

“The fact of the matter is nobody did care,” Ms. Hawkins said. “I couldn’t believe people didn’t care that someone was watching pornography in public. I couldn’t believe society has come to this.”

For its part, Delta Air Lines says that it does not allow people to view “offensive content of any kind,” but also said that flight attendants are trained to make case-by-case assessments depending on circumstances and concerns of other passengers.

A spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants said the issue is a bit of a “gray area,” handled case by case, adding that its members want to avoid offending passengers or playing the role of censors.

One reason the issue is so thorny is that not everyone agrees on what might be considered offensive. That is the case even within Morality in Media, where Ms. Hawkins said people should also be careful with public viewings of violent content.

But that’s not the view of the group’s president, Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department official in charge of prosecuting child and adult pornography. “It’s not the same situation with violence,” he said, noting that graphic war scenes from a movie like “Saving Private Ryan” can provide a powerful history lesson.

Some people develop their own sliding scales for what is acceptable.

Pornography in Public Causes Some to Gasp, Others to Shrug

The library has been stung by complaints about the content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. To address the issue, the library over the last six weeks has installed 18 computer monitors with plastic hoods so that only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen.

“It’s for their privacy, and for ours,” said Michelle Jeffers, the library spokeswoman. The library will also soon post warnings on the screens of all its 240 computers to remind people to be sensitive to other patrons — a solution it prefers to filtering or censoring images.

It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.

The subject can put personal media on a collision course with personal morality. This is an era, after all, that celebrates people’s ability to watch what they want, when they want, but it also forces bystanders to choose whether to shrug, object or avert their eyes.

Some legislators battle against public displays of pornographic content, at least on the roadways. A bill is pending in the New Jersey legislature to criminalize the playing of obscene material in cars — say, on seat-back DVD players or in party buses — that could viewed by, and distract or offend, others on the road. State Senator Anthony Bucco, who sponsored the bill, said people who view such videos in public “don’t care what anybody around them thinks.”

Similar laws have passed in the last decade in Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia, and one failed last year in Pennsylvania, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

An antipornography group, Morality in Media, has in recent months launched a “no porn on the plane” campaign, and has contacted most major airlines to argue that they should commit to policing what people watch.

The group took up the cause after its executive director, Dawn Hawkins, was on a flight in January and noticed a man in the row in front of her looking at images on his iPad of naked women whipping each other.

She complained to the flight attendant, who told her he was powerless to force the man to stop, she recalled. The man eventually turned off the images, but Ms. Hawkins continued to press him on why he was looking at those images in public.

She said a woman then came up to her and said, “Be quiet, nobody cares.”

“The fact of the matter is nobody did care,” Ms. Hawkins said. “I couldn’t believe people didn’t care that someone was watching pornography in public. I couldn’t believe society has come to this.”

For its part, Delta Air Lines says that it does not allow people to view “offensive content of any kind,” but also said that flight attendants are trained to make case-by-case assessments depending on circumstances and concerns of other passengers.

A spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants said the issue is a bit of a “gray area,” handled case by case, adding that its members want to avoid offending passengers or playing the role of censors.

One reason the issue is so thorny is that not everyone agrees on what might be considered offensive. That is the case even within Morality in Media, where Ms. Hawkins said people should also be careful with public viewings of violent content.

But that’s not the view of the group’s president, Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department official in charge of prosecuting child and adult pornography. “It’s not the same situation with violence,” he said, noting that graphic war scenes from a movie like “Saving Private Ryan” can provide a powerful history lesson.

Some people develop their own sliding scales for what is acceptable.