Secret Weapon in Mall Battle: Parking Apps

She checks the parking lots on her ParkMe smartphone app “so that I can see what I’m up against, or if I need to change my plans.” If a lot is below 90 percent full, the trip is on. Her favorite, not far from her workplace, is a garage at the Santa Monica Place mall, where sensors and lights guide her to a specific open space.

“It’s a daily battle,” said Ms. Scott, 29, the founder of Laudville, a social technology start-up. “Anything to make it easier makes a really big difference.”

The fight for a mall parking spot, long a necessary evil of Black Friday, is growing easier thanks to the proliferation of new technologies, from apps and sensors to color-coded lights and electronic boards.

It’s one way that malls and shopping districts are trying to lure customers away from their computers, into the realm of their brick-and-mortar stores.

“What happens when there’s no spots? People drive around and become frustrated,” said Kathy Grannis, a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation. “Who wants to start their shopping experience frustrated?”

ParkMe, which tracks more than 28,000 locations worldwide, has emerged as a mainstay app for mall customers navigating the nation’s parking lots. With the app, they can find the closest and least expensive lots, as well as alternative garage entrances. The app’s user base surged 97 percent in the past year, and it is adding hundreds of garages to its database.

“If there’s a way to get in off the beaten path, you can reduce stress,” said Sam Friedman, ParkMe’s co-founder and chief executive.

The app’s technology is simple enough: a magnetic loop at the garage clocks the number of times the gate lifts to admit or release a car, Mr. Friedman said. ParkMe also lets a customer reserve a spot in certain locations, like the Shore Hotel down the road from Santa Monica Place. Ms. Scott said she used that service during busy summer months.

Other parking apps are gaining traction as well. Parkopedia, which is linked to 26,000 lots in North America, also allows users to search parking sites, availability and prices using their smartphones. QuickPay plans to start in hundreds of malls in the United States next year to help shoppers pay for garage and metered spots and valet services from their smartphone.

“Parking is the gateway to the shopping experience,” QuickPay’s founder, Barney Pell, said. “It can mean the success or failure of your whole business.”

Customers expect more than they did 10 years ago, said Casey Jones, a vice president for institutional services at Standard Parking, the Chicago-based provider of parking facility management services, and a past chairman of the International Parking Institute.

“They want real-time information, they want price choices and they want to be directed to an open space,” Mr. Jones said.

Jessi Molohon, a 23-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, is one such customer. She said she uses the ParkWhiz app when traveling to stores in downtown Houston or at the Houston Galleria to help find garages and compare prices.

“Parking can be anywhere from $6 to $12 on the same street, so I want to make sure I’m not overspending on parking when I’m going to overspend on shopping,” Ms. Molohon said.

An app called A Parking Spot lets Ms. Molohon pin her favorite parking spaces on a Google map so that she can navigate there next time.

“I have it down to a routine,” she said. “There are some spots I know of that are just easy to get in and out of that will help me save time and avoid the holiday traffic just a little.”

There is no data available on the number of mall garages outfitted with sensors to help keep track of vacant spots, but analysts say the rate of adoption for mall infrastructure and the number of parking apps is doubling or tripling year over year.

Taubman Centers, which owns and manages 22 malls in the United States, installed sensors in the garages in two of its centers to show shoppers on which floors they could find open parking spots. Installation costs $50,000 to $100,000 per location.

But parking is only half the battle. When a customer is ready to leave, there is the matter of finding the car.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly the name of one app. It is ParkWhiz, not Parking Whiz.

Sam Jackson Joins The Secret Service

Director Matthew Vaughn has crossed comic-book universes to nab Nick Fury himself, Samuel L. Jackson, to play the bad guy in his upcoming The Secret Service.

Variety has the report on the film, which is based on the comic by Kick-Ass writer Mark Millar. Colin Firth and Taron Egerton have previously been cast in the project.

"Vaughn had always intended to have a big star as his main antagonist, having already pursued Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio," says the trade.

Next up will be finding the female lead, with Emma Watson and Dark Shadows' Bella Heathcote reportedly under consideration.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.

Bits Blog: Motorola’s Not-So-Secret Secret Smartphone

Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, with what appeared to be Motorola Mobility’s next flagship smartphone on July 11.

4:42 p.m. | Updated to add information about Motorola event on Aug. 1.

Motorola Mobility’s efforts to keep secret the details of its first flagship smartphone since the company was bought by Google have run up against reality.

Rumors about Motorola’s smartphone, usually called Moto X, have leaked all over the Web, from small tech blogs to mainstream news outlets. And Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, has even been out in public using what appeared to be the new device.

Motorola won’t confirm details about the new device. But all the early exposure, some of it the company’s own doing, makes it seem like this pseudo-secrecy could just be a way to prime the hype pump.

Last month, Motorola’s chief executive, Dennis Woodside, made it known during an onstage interview that Moto X devices would be made in the United States. He coyly admitted that the phone was in his pocket, but shook his head when asked to show it off.

No matter: Mr. Schmidt apparently took care of the visual while at a business conference packed with reporters, holding a new Motorola phone to his ear. “I’m not allowed to comment on the nature of this phone,” Mr. Schmidt said, according to Rachel C. Abrams of Variety.

Mr. Schmidt didn’t need to say much. A day before Independence Day, Motorola advertised the phone in newspapers. The ad hinted that the device would be customizable — “The first smartphone that you can design yourself.” Joanna Stern of ABCNews was quick to clarify that customers would be able to choose the colors of the phone case and add an engraving.

But what can the phone do exactly? Google executives have offered some clues that future Motorola phones would include artificial intelligence and sensors that recognize people’s voices in a room. Spoiling the surprise, the tech blog Ausdroid spotted a video on the Web from Rogers Wireless, a Canadian carrier, showing the Moto X.

The video, which Rogers asked Ausdroid to take down because of copyright infringement, suggested several details, like that the phone constantly listens for a user’s commands and reacts to them. The initiating command is “O.K., Google Now,” similar to the “O.K., Glass” command to control Google Glass. The video also said that the phone would be released in August.

On Friday afternoon, Motorola sent invitations to the press for an event to be held Aug. 1 in New York, where Moto X will most likely get its official introduction.

Bits Blog: Secret Court Declassifies Yahoo’s Role in Disclosure Fight

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Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a request authorized by the Stored Communications Act.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 15, 2013

An article on Friday about technology companies’ discomfort with and challenges of government surveillance programs misstated the type of order to remain silent about an information request successfully challenged by Twitter in 2011. It was an order authorized by the Stored Communications Act, not a National Security Letter.

Bits Blog: Secret Surveillance Court May Reveal Some Secrets

The secret court that adjudicates national security-related information requests lifted the veil on its operations a tiny bit on Wednesday, ruling that portions of one of its earlier opinions could be disclosed to the public.

The ruling came in a case by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. It had pressed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow one of its opinions to be disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request. The government argued that there is good reason to keep the case sealed.

The court said it saw no reason to prohibit disclosing the documents sought under the Freedom of Information request. It left it to a federal court in the District of Columbia to make a ruling on the specific Freedom of Information Act litigation.

In other words, the court said it would not stand in the way of another court, if it ruled in favor of the organization’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“The victory today was a modest one,” E.F.F. wrote in a blog post announcing the decision.

The actions of the court have been the subject of fierce public debate ever since last week’s disclosures, first reported in The Guardian and The Washington Post, of widespread telephone and Internet surveillance efforts authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. On Tuesday, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the Senate calling for the Attorney General to declassify portions of the surveillance court’s opinions, at least its interpretations of the law.

“It is impossible for the American people to have an informed public debate about laws that are interpreted, enforced, and adjudicated in complete secrecy,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, one of the co-sponsors of the bill said in a statement.

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, earlier this year asked the court to summarize its major opinions, at least explaining its legal reasoning, while excising the classified facts of the case. The court’s chief justice, Reggie B. Walton, wrote back, explaining why that was not feasible. For one thing, the judge said, summaries would miss out on “the more nuanced or technical point of a court’s analysis.” He added, “For FISC opinions specifically, there is also the very real problem of separating the classified facts from the legal analysis.”

Bits Blog: Secret Court Ruling in 2008 Put Technology Companies in Bind

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional, Claire Cain Miller reports in The New York Times.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

Secret Recording Grows Safer as ‘the Wire’ Grows Tinier

“I run the Queens County Republican Party. Nobody else runs the party,” the politician, Vincent Tabone, says, according to a criminal complaint unsealed last week.

Then, Mr. Tabone, 46, a baby-faced veteran of local and state politics, appeared to grow cautious. Just before accepting a $25,000 bribe, he patted down the agent, ostensibly to check for a recording device, federal prosecutors allege in the complaint.

The moment was reminiscent of the 1970s and ’80s, when undercover agents recorded conversations with mobsters using a bulky tape recorder strapped around their waists, and wires — connected to a microphone — secured to their chests with an adhesive. Today, in an age when technology has gone wireless, the phrase “wearing a wire” is a largely allegorical term of art.

“In the old days, they would say, ‘Let me pat you down for a wire’ and boom, everybody would just open their shirt and say, ‘I’m not wearing a wire,’ ” a retired undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Joaquin Garcia, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Now there is no need to wear a wire. It’s become extinct. It’s all gone digital. But what are you going to say, ‘I’m wearing digital,’ instead of ‘I’m wearing a wire’? It’s just become part of the parlance of law enforcement.”

Technological advances aside, the methods have remained the same, with federal agents and undercover officers using covert recording equipment to ensnare would-be criminals, sometimes with the help of a well-placed informer or cooperating witness.

“Technology has made it so easy to plant a device that is much less detectable,” Richard B. Zabel, deputy United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview last week. “Yes, people are conscious of being recorded, but as you’ve seen, in some cases they are not able to find the recorder anyway.”

Nowadays, recording equipment is miniaturized. “Your options have increased a lot because the devices are a lot smaller,” Mr. Zabel said. “They can really hide them now in buttons, in pens, at the point of a pen, in a cuff link or the edge of a tie clip.”

And frisking an undercover agent for a wire, as Mr. Tabone allegedly did, can be as fruitless as finding a pay phone and “dropping a dime” to call the police.

“That is sort of an antiquated way to look for a device,” Mr. Zabel said.

Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, with bribery and wire fraud for allegedly taking cash in exchange for using his influence to secure a ballot spot for State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a Democrat, in the Republican primary for mayor. Mr. Smith, along with a Republican city councilman, Daniel J. Halloran III, and a Republican Party leader from the Bronx, Joseph J. Savino, were also charged. The criminal case was built, in large part, on secret recordings.

It was the first of two instances last week where federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against New York political leaders, using their own words against them.

On Thursday, two days after the corruption case centered on Mr. Smith’s mayoral aspirations became public, the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced new charges in an unrelated bribery case. In that case, cooperating witnesses, including Assemblyman Nelson L. Castro, who has since resigned, wore devices to record conversations that led to the arrest of Eric A. Stevenson, a Democratic state assemblyman who was accused of accepting more than $22,000 in bribes to help developers open adult day care centers in his district in the South Bronx.

In one recording, officials said, Mr. Stevenson invokes previous scandals in Albany and openly worries about being taped. “Be careful of those things, man, the recorders and all those things,” Mr. Stevenson says to a cooperating witness, according to the criminal complaint.

Mr. Zabel and other federal officials declined to reveal exactly how the recordings in the two recent cases were made. “We don’t want people to know what we can do, but we don’t mind people thinking that we can do all kinds of things,” an F.B.I. spokesman, James Margolin, said last week.

As for the recordings of Mr. Tabone and other suspects in the two cases, Mr. Margolin said, “I presume that it wasn’t the kind of devices that we used in the 1980s,” similar to the one depicted in movies like “Prince of the City,” the 1981 film starring Jerry Orbach and Treat Williams, who plays a New York City narcotics detective who wears a wire to expose police corruption.

Bits Blog: 'Gossip Girl' Secret: Don't Google It

Photo Eric Liebowitz/The CW The cellphones in “Gossip Girl” are now Windows phones.

Monday night’s mystery is whether “Gossip Girl,” in the series finale, will finally reveal the identity of Gossip Girl herself. Less of a mystery is what kind of device she probably uses to send her scandalous blasts.

Chances are that it’s Windows.

Microsoft’s products — most recently Windows phones and tablets, with their telltale colored tiles directing you to apps, folders and social networking conversations saved on your device — have been slipping into the Upper East Side, as props and even lines in the scripts.

Microsoft pays for the product placement as a sponsor of the show. It turns out that the company has an astute understanding of one of the tag lines of “Gossip Girl”: “You’re nobody until you’re talked about.”

Young women copy the characters’ schoolgirl blazers and ankle boots, and fashion designers have paid to have their clothes featured in the show. So it only makes sense that Microsoft hopes people will also copy the characters’ technology choices.

And technology has been crucial to certain plot developments — whether it is an intimate moment recorded on a cellphone that comes back to haunt those involved, a character’s breaking into her friend’s Web site or e-mail account or the frequent Gossip Girl text message blasts.

A couple years ago, the characters started saying, “Bing it” when they wanted to search online — although sadly for Microsoft, that phrase did not become a runaway trend the way that, for instance, Serena’s tousled hair has.

Hewlett-Packard is also a sponsor. After Serena used the HP Envy 14 Spectre laptop on the show before it was available to buy, the network ran a contest to give one away.

In the last few episodes, leading up to Monday’s finale, Nate and Chuck stole the cellphone (a Windows phone, of course) of Chuck’s father’s business manager to eavesdrop on Chuck’s father, and Serena looked up Thanksgiving recipes on a tablet (Windows 8).

It is a stretch that not one member of “Manhattan’s elite” uses an iPhone, but it is a fantasy show.

Maybe Microsoft’s product placement contract had a clause that said evil characters, like Bart Bass, wouldn’t use Windows devices. When a dead man rang the phone of Mr. Bass, who has also recently arisen from the dead (it’s a long story), a close look showed that he carried a BlackBerry.

Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the C.I.A. Chief Couldn’t

In the past, a spymaster might have placed a flower pot with a red flag on his balcony or drawn a mark on page 20 of his mistress’s newspaper. Instead, Mr. Petraeus used Gmail. And he got caught.

Granted, most people don’t have the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through their personal e-mails, but privacy experts say people grossly underestimate how transparent their digital communications have become.

“What people don’t realize is that hacking and spying went mainstream a decade ago,” said Dan Kaminsky, an Internet security researcher. “They think hacking is some difficult thing. Meanwhile, everyone is reading everyone else’s e-mails — girlfriends are reading boyfriends’, bosses are reading employees’ — because it’s just so easy to do.”

Face it: no matter what you are trying to hide in your e-mail in-box or text message folder — be it an extramarital affair or company trade secrets — it is possible that someone will find out. If it involves criminal activity or litigation, the odds increase because the government has search and subpoena powers that can be used to get any and all information, whether it is stored on your computer or, as is more likely these days, stored in the cloud. And lawyers for the other side in a lawsuit can get reams of documents in court-sanctioned discovery.

Still determined? Thought so. You certainly are not alone, as there are legitimate reasons that people want to keep private all types of information and communications that are not suspicious (like the contents of your will, for example, or a chronic illness). In that case, here are your best shots at hiding the skeletons in your digital closet.

KNOW YOUR ADVERSARY. Technically speaking, the undoing of Mr. Petraeus was not the extramarital affair, per se, it was that he misunderstood the threat. He and his mistress/biographer, Paula Broadwell, may have thought the threat was their spouses snooping through their e-mails, not the F.B.I. looking through Google’s e-mail servers.

“Understanding the threat is always the most difficult part of security technology,” said Matthew Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and a security and cryptography specialist. “If they believed the threat to be a government with the ability to get their login records from a service provider, not just their spouse, they might have acted differently.”

To hide their affair from their spouses, the two reportedly limited their digital communications to a shared Gmail account. They did not send e-mails, but saved messages to the draft folder instead, ostensibly to avoid a digital trail. It is unlikely either of their spouses would have seen it.

But neither took necessary steps to hide their computers’ I.P. addresses. According to published accounts of the affair, Ms. Broadwell exposed the subterfuge when she used the same computer to send harassing e-mails to a woman in Florida, Jill Kelley, who sent them to a friend at the F.B.I.

Authorities matched the digital trail from Ms. Kelley’s e-mails — some had been sent via hotel Wi-Fi networks — to hotel guest lists. In crosschecking lists of hotel guests, they arrived at Ms. Broadwell and her computer, which led them to more e-mail accounts, including the one she shared with Mr. Petraeus.

HIDE YOUR LOCATION The two could have masked their I.P. addresses using Tor, a popular privacy tool that allows anonymous Web browsing. They could have also used a virtual private network, which adds a layer of security to public Wi-Fi networks like the one in your hotel room.

By not doing so, Mr. Blaze said, “they made a fairly elementary mistake.” E-mail providers like Google and Yahoo keep login records, which reveal I.P. addresses, for 18 months, during which they can easily be subpoenaed. The Fourth Amendment requires the authorities to get a warrant from a judge to search physical property. Rules governing e-mail searches are far more lax: Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a warrant is not required for e-mails six months old or older. Even if e-mails are more recent, the federal government needs a search warrant only for “unopened” e-mail, according to the Department of Justice’s manual for electronic searches. The rest requires only a subpoena.

Google reported that United States law enforcement agencies requested data for 16,281 accounts from January to June of this year, and it complied in 90 percent of cases.

GO OFF THE RECORD At bare minimum, choose the “off the record” feature on Google Talk, Google’s instant messaging client, which ensures that nothing typed is saved or searchable in either person’s Gmail account.