Texas residents will have a little more protection from the prying eyes of local law enforcement than the rest of America starting in September. A law that takes effect in the fall ends warrantless email searches by state law enforcement officials, in a step that might have implications for email snooping laws around the country.

The new law cancels out a Texas provision that had allowed state, county, and local cops to access emails stored on third-party services like Gmail or Yahoo under certain circumstances without requiring a judge's finding of probable cause.

It was passed by the Texas statehouse long before the recent string of disclosures about the National Security Agency allegedly snooping on U.S citizens, but signed into law on Monday by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The Texas law is very limited, however: Federal law enforcement officials can still access some Texas residents' third-party emails by issuing a simple subpoena to the companies where the information is stored.

But the action in Texas, the first such anti-email-snooping legislation in the nation, might create momentum for a proposed update to similar provisions in federal law.

Privacy advocates cheered the measure.

"Given the central role that email plays today in business and personal communications, and given the reasonable expectation of privacy that Americans have when it comes to those emails, judicial review should be required before law enforcement obtains the content of any citizen’s email," said Rob Douglas, a former Washington D.C. prosecutor and privacy law expert. "The federal government – along with all other states – should follow Texas’ lead and require warrants before the police can seize the content of any email."

How both Texas law and federal law came to allow warrantless email searches is a tortured tale that has largely been ignored during the current NSA controversy. Much of the discussion in the wake of leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures has surrounded the distinction between access to information about communications — metadata — and the content of those communications — which generally require a wiretap order to obtain. (See previous story on the hazy distinction between listening and watching.)

There is another way that law enforcement can legally obtain the contents of communication, such as email, without a search warrant, however. It's permitted by the Stored Communications Act of 1986, which is part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This part of the law only makes sense to people who recall the days of computer time sharing, when users at terminals remotely connected to centralized computers on a temporary basis.

In general, federal law holds that citizens who give information to third parties surrender their expectation of privacy for that information. That means in some cases that while government officials can't demand that you or your email recipient reveal contents of private messages without a warrant, those officials can ask Gmail or Yahoo for that data.

The Stored Communications Act draws a distinction between "Remote Computing Services" and "Electronic Communications Services." Basically, when citizens are temporarily using a remote computer to deliver a message, that data is protected the same way the contents of a letter are protected while in transit at the post office. But when emails leave their data on the servers of these third parties, they are now considered an electronic communication service and fair game for subpoena-wielding law enforcement officials.

(For specifics, such as the 180-day distinction, click here.)

Most states — including Texas, until now — have copycat provisions which grant the same access to local law enforcement.

This made some sense in 1986 when no one dreamed of storing thousands of emails on remote servers. Today, that's common. And while efforts to change federal law have been sluggish, federal courts have already taken steps in that direction. In 2010, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in U.S. vs. Warshak that this part of the Stored Communications Act was unconstitutional. Other courts have upheld the Stored Communications Act, meaning there is a court split that has yet to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, so it's unclear if the law applies nationally.

Google, however, currently acts as if the Warshak decision is law of the land. It announced after the circuit court ruling that it would require search warrants before handing over Gmail account contents requested under the Stored Communications Act.

There is little argument that the law, and the entire Electronic Communications Privacy Act, requires updating. Several updates have been proposed, most recently ECPA 2013, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

But until Congress acts on the legislation, and the president signs it, those concerned about the prying eyes of law enforcement might consider relocating to the Lone Star State.

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The debate about the NSA spying program feels like a bad game of charades. Members of Congress and leaders of three-letter agencies keep saying how much they welcome public debate about spying, then immediately regretting that they're unable to talk in public about it. Winks and ear pulls follow. But one phrase has permeated the discussion over and over.

“Nobody is listening to your phone calls.”

It’s a rare statement of clarity in an otherwise murky discussion. President Obama said it in his first comment about the NSA scandal, and it’s been echoed by members of Congress and law enforcement agency officials for days, with good reason. U.S. surveillance law has long drawn a distinction between the content of communication and information about that content, the “metadata.” For example, government agents can read the address on a piece of U.S. mail without much legal wrangling; opening the envelope technically requires a judge-approved warrant.

By drawing a hard line around this distinction — you might call it "watching" vs. "listening" — when it comes to phone calls, email and other digital interactions, NSA defenders think they are on high legal ground. But they also understand what most of the public does not: In the age of Big Data, collecting information about our conversations yields more intelligence than observing the content of the conversations themselves. And it has the added benefit of sounding less intrusive.

As my NBC News colleagues and others have persuasively argued, big data crunchers can play the “six degrees of separation” game with metadata, using, for example, a huge database of email transactions to connect you with potential suspects, something transcripts of emails might never yield. Phone call patterns reveal your whereabouts and life habits in a way that a conversation never could.

This is why some argue the disclosure that Verizon is sending lists of millions of phone call records daily to the NSA (reportedly along with other telecom firms) is the most disturbing revelation of the recent flurry. Some privacy advocates go so far to say that the legal distinction between content and metadata is now meaningless.

But it wasn’t always that way. The distinction evolved logically enough, through legislation and debate, long before anyone could fathom the potential value of 100 million phone call records.

Wiretaps and warrants
The Fourth Amendment stems from a simple idea: Law enforcement officials can observe your home from the street, but in most cases they can't barge in unless they prove to a judge they need to. In the digital world, the line between knocking on your door and barging in is much more complicated. And as the analogy breaks down, so too it seems has Fourth Amendment protection.

Telephone calls were the first technology to attack the notion. Are calls passing through wires inside or outside your home? Back in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified this issue and ruled that information about telephone calls — such as numbers dialed, or the length of phone calls — was distinct from the content of phone calls, and thus was not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Phone call information has come to be known as "pen register" data, a term that reaches back to the time of the telegraph, when records of transmissions was kept with ink on paper.

When the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act essentially codified these findings, Congress clarified that law enforcement officials can obtain data kept by a pen register with a simple subpoena, which doesn’t require a judicial review. Listening in on the content of phone calls — using a wiretap — required a finding of probable cause from a judge.

Fast forward 25 years, and the "pen register" vs. "wiretap" distinction remains a critical element of all surveillance debates. The pen register metaphor has been extended — most specifically by the original Patriot Act in 2001 — to cover a lot of other digital-age "metadata,” including email headers and cellphone location information. Law enforcement has come to expect liberal, easy access to metadata, evidenced by research last year from the American Civil Liberties Union, which revealed that even local cops make thousands of requests for the information every year. Cellphone companies have even set up self-serve Web portals so cops can easily obtain the data.

The Supreme Court explained its pen register vs. wiretap distinction in 1979 by calling on the "third-party doctrine." Americans lose their expectation of privacy, the court reasoned, whenever they voluntarily give information to a third party, such as a phone company. Telling the phone company who you call by dialing a number is enough to surrender your expectation of privacy that you are contacting that person, the court held. It did, however, preserve the letter analogy from law governing U.S. mail. That is, only what's on the envelope's outside is fair game.

But emails sent and stored on services such as Gmail seem to fall in between these two legal categories. Is the email content, like a call conversation or a letter sealed in an envelope? Or it is data freely given to a third party? Congress tried to split that baby with the Stored Communications Act back in 1986. The law’s messy subtleties are still the subject of debate in federal court, but suffice it to say it created some situations under which law enforcement officials can peek at any data given to third parties, including email, without needing to show probable cause.

This means law enforcement officials are sometimes not required to ask before they barge into your virtual home.

Foreign threats, domestic calls 
Enter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, first passed in 1978. Its basic premise is simple: It made clear that U.S. security agencies didn't have to worry about the Fourth Amendment when surveilling foreign nationals overseas.

Over time, as the legislation has been updated, that definition has expanded to mean U.S. spies can monitor any communication, as long as they have good enough reason to believe that one of the parties involved is a foreign national on foreign ground. A 2006 update to FISA, renewed in January, explicitly permits warrantless electronic wiretapping of foreigners for up to one year, among other broadened powers.

Depending on circumstance, some FISA monitoring requires prior approval of a special, secret FISA court, and some only requires after-the-fact notification. The distinction appears moot, however. In its annual report to Congress on April 30, the Department of Justice said it made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance in 2012. None were denied, although 40 were "modified."

The 1986 laws don't apply to requests that come before the FISA court, but politicians often defend the NSA using the pen register vs. wiretap logic. Americans have — like it or not — tolerated the easy release of metadata for some time. Lawyers have always been more concerned with wiretaps, and the public has been conditioned, say privacy advocates, to think that the release of metadata has no impact on our Fourth Amendment rights.

That might be a mistake.

It’s almost certainly true that no one from the federal government is listening to your phone calls, or reading your emails. But this assurance should provide you with only cold comfort. The NSA has millions, and probably billions, of pieces of information about you and your neighbors filed away — that much is clear from the leaked Verizon FISA court order. Technology has long outgrown 50 years of U.S. surveillance law designed to protect you. Who cares if no one is listening? They are most certainly watching.

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When consumers call companies asking for a break, they don't always get the right answer the first time. That's why persistence can pay off.

A DirecTV customer service representative gave out the wrong information to a Colorado wildfire victim this week, telling Jeremy Beach that he would have to pay $400 to the firm after a fire that destroyed his home, including his TV equipment. The fires have raged for days, claiming 379 homes, killing two people. 

Beach was told he'd have to pay an early termination fee, and he should try to recover the payment through his own insurance.

Soon, DirecTV had its own fire to put out.

News of the demand spread quickly, and by Thursday, the local Gazette Newspaper and the Denver Post published "shame on you" stories about the incident.

On Friday, DirecTV told NBC News that its operator had made a mistake and it is working to set things right.

"The agent who spoke with Mr. Beach was wrong, and we are contacting the customer to apologize and assure him and his family that we will do everything we can to help them through this difficult time," said DirecTV spokeswoman Jade Ekstedt said.

She added that the firm often helps customers who suffer through natural disasters by suspending their accounts or waiving cancelation fees.

Happy ending, one hopes, for the Beach family's DirecTV fees.

But the firm has a well-earned reputation for drawing a hard line on its cancelation fees, which work much like those charged by cell phone companies. In exchange for deeply discounted equipment -- in this case, a satellite dish, receiver boxes, and installation -- the firm makes consumers commit to one or two year contracts. Breaking those contracts can cost consumers up to $480 in fees.

Consumers have alleged repeatedly in the past that the fees come as an unwelcome surprise, and are levied even when the service doesn't work correctly at their homes because of signal interference. A lawsuit filed by all 50 state attorneys generals, which included complaints about the fees, was settled in 2010. A private class-action civil case filed in California is ongoing.

Like many cell phone firms, DirecTV now pro-rates early termination fees, charging $20 for every month a consumer cancels service prior to the end of their contract.

RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS

The message to consumers here: Don’t take that first no for an answer, particularly if your request for relief includes special circumstances. It’s also important to know that many front-line customer service representatives aren’t empowered to help you. Like a cashier at a grocery store who needs a manager’s key to open the cash register after an error, many operators can’t waive $400 fees.  When making your request, make sure the other person has the power to say yes. Ask for a manager, and then another manager. And if that doesn’t work, telling a journalist often does.

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Bobby Yip / Reuters

Photos of Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency, and U.S. President Barack Obama are printed on the front pages of local English and Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong in this photo illustration.

How does Prism work? We have precious few details about the technical workings of the National Security Agency's global surveillance program, despite all the leaks and all the media coverage. That leaves the public and the technology community much like the blind men and the elephant.

Details matter. Depending on which part of the elephant you touch, Prism is either a system that lets the NSA read, see and hear anything online at any time or a tool that streamlines the legal process by which federal agents execute court orders to obtain digital evidence while hunting foreign enemies.

A hazy digital line separates these two possibilities, but the distinction matters both politically and legally. Congress will be unable to defend a program that allows U.S. spies to copy everything Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft know about us and store it forever in its new, super-secret Utah facility for later fishing expeditions. But there are well-established precedents that clear the way for federal agents to ask private companies to turn over their data specific to investigations.

Given that Prism’s self-identified leaker Edward Snowden worked in information technology (he was fired from his job at Booz Allen Hamilton Tuesday), it's disappointing that he has not yet managed to leak more technical specifics about how the program works. Here's what we know so far:

• Snowden told The Guardian in his video interview that the NSA could access anyone's email, and even reach far back in time when necessary, strongly suggesting the agency is copying massive amounts of data.
• A slide from the presentation Snowden gave The Guardian says the NSA gets data "directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers," suggesting an agent can somehow log into Google, Yahoo, etc., computers and use a self-service tool to obtain user data.
• The tech companies named in the Prism story deny that the NSA has direct access to their networks — and are now lobbying for more public disclosure of the data that is requested from them by security agencies.
• The New York Times described a "locked mailbox" process in which the NSA installs its own servers at a company's server farm. Upon request, target companies move data from their servers into the lock-box, giving the NSA quick access.

Ashkan Soltani is an independent privacy consultant and consumer advocate and former Federal Trade Commission investigator. He says it's possible all these assertions are correct. Depending on what data the NSA needs, it employs some or all of those methods to get it.

"It probably varies from company to company, based on what the company is willing to do," he said. "But the way I think it works is agents issue a directive to the company, and someone at the company, or a contractor on site, or a (computer program) collects those records and loads them into a box the NSA can access."

No technologist interviewed for this story believes the NSA simply vacuums up every piece of data from all tech companies. Despite advances in storage and transmission speeds, that would still be technically challenging and probably unnecessary. Why recreate Google when the agency can just ask Google for the data it wants? 

Early versions of the Prism story asserted that the tech giants involved voluntarily participated in the program and were unaware of the queries made by agents. But most of the firms said they'd never heard of Prism, and that they don't allow unfiltered access to data. Both can be true, Soltani said.

"The NSA doesn't want companies to know the targets of their investigations, so I think they issue broad directives to the companies," he said. For example, rather than saying, “Give us all Bob Sullivan’s emails from last month,” the NSA hides its true intentions by saying “Give us all email written by someone with the initials B.S. last month.”

It's also possible that Prism is an internal code name the NSA uses, and firms that installed locked mailboxes had no idea they were participating in Prism.

"Assuming everyone is telling the truth, this is how I think it works," Soltani said. "And while we may disagree, there's certainly a way to imagine Prism is perfectly legal, based on the laws Congress has passed."

There's plenty of precedent for technology companies giving streamlined data access to law enforcement. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union released a study showing that wireless firms give thousands of location records to local and federal investigators; some even have website portals where the records can be ordered in bulk.

It's uncomfortable seeing such mass surveillance in action, and it might be enough to stir renewed public debate on the topic, but Prism is the logical conclusion of laws Congress has passed and the natural tendency of law enforcement to push the envelope when investigating crimes.

“Prism didn't shock me at all. When I read the FISA Amendment Act ... I see Prism with my eyes," said Chris Soghoian, privacy rights expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.

If companies must act on each data request the government makes, they have the opportunity to step in and object. That might be a weak protection, but it is a protection. And it's a far cry from NSA agents simply rooting around Google at any time for anything.

Soghoian and Soltani are concerned that leaks about Prism have directed attention away from an earlier leak showing the NSA has obtained millions of phone records detailing U.S. users' calls from Verizon. A leaked secret court order indicates Verizon is giving the NSA details about every call placed in the U.S.

"When I look at the Patriot Act, I don't see that. That shocks me. It’s terrifying," Soghoian said. "What really matters, the million dollar question, isn't who has direct access to the data. It's the scale and volume of information being shared."

Still, if Prism is as broad-reaching as some have suggested, that's a concern for Soltani.

"The American public had previously, maybe unknowingly, relied on technical and financial barriers to protect them from large scale surveillance by the government," Soltani said. "However, these implicit protections have quickly eroded in recent years as technology industry advances have trickled down to the intelligence agencies, and as a result, changed the delicate balance of power.”

The argument we are now having, pitting civil liberties advocates against law enforcement, probably should have happened in 2008, when the FISA law was substantially revised to clear the way for tools like Prism. As the costs associated with massive surveillance and data storage continue to drop, experts warn that it’s inevitable that privacy invasions will rise, unless unchecked.

“We need to remember that this is a trend with a firm lower bound — once the cost of surveillance reaches zero we will be left with outdated laws as the only remaining barrier,” Soltani said.

Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter.

Related stories:

• Leaked secrets pose a risk for Booz Allen, where secrecy means billions
• Edward Snowden, professed NSA leaker, may have few safe havens
• Girlfriend of self-professed NSA leaker blogged that she felt 'lost at sea'

Steve Cannon / AP

Powerball winner Gloria C. MacKenzie, 84, left, leaves the lottery office escorted by her son, Scott Mackenzie, after claiming a single lump-sum payment of about $370.9 million before taxes on June 5, in Tallahassee, Fla.

Before lottery regret and mathematical misunderstanding puts another dent in civility everywhere, know this: It's OK to let a senior citizen step in front of you when buying a ticket. Please, continue being polite to older folks.

When Gloria MacKenzie purchased her $590 million lottery ticket in Florida last month, a much younger woman allowed her to cut in line, according to published reports. Many of those indicated that the woman's random act of kindness cost her $590 million. It didn't. 

Before lottery ticket buyers start boxing out little old ladies at convenience stores everywhere, let's examine this issue from a mathematics point of view. Could letting someone cut in line at the lottery counter hurt your odds of winning? To use the language of statistics, let’s call this the "risk of being nice."

It would feel strange — wistful, certainly — to learn that someone purchased the winning lottery ticket at your store. (It coulda been me!) It would probably plunge you into full-fledged regret to learn the winner was right in front of you, had taken your place in line, and had purchased the same kind of Quick Pick machine-generated lottery ticket you did. (It shoulda been me!) But random acts of kindness are indeed safe, because random numbers don't work that way.

Random means random
Some lottery ticket buyers arrive with a pre-determined set of numbers in their heads — their children's birth dates, perhaps — and purchase tickets with those fixed numbers. Others let the lottery machine generate numbers, called "Quick Pick" in many states.

Even so, Quick Pick numbers could theoretically be generated in batches of, say, 10 million at time, by a central computer, and then doled out to local machines. Or maybe they could be generated 25 at a time in convenience stores, then handed out. If either were true, your place in line certainly would matter.

But it’s not true. Computers are particularly good at generating random numbers, which have been important to computing since the very beginning. Random numbers are needed any time a programmer wants to surprise a user, such as in video games. Even the most basic computing machines have a built-in ability to create fairly random numbers, often utilizing their internal clocks to make them even more random. So every millisecond matters to a random number generator.

In other words, there is no "risk of being nice." Stopping to sneeze before buying a Quick Pick ticket could just as easily cost someone a winning number as trading places in line. 

What's more, every number generated is independent of every number before it. There are no numbers ticked off a master list, leaving you with more limited possibilities. If the odds are 1 in 100,000,001 when you step in line, your odds remain 1 in 100,000,001 when you let someone else step in front of you.

Naturally, lottery administrators don't advertise precisely how their machines work — random number generators aren't perfect, and lotto machines are a constant target for attackers — so we must engage in a little speculation. But plenty of descriptions can be found that suggest that this is the way they work. For example, here's a description from the Texas Lottery's FAQ. 

"The Quick Pick random number generator for our online games has no built-in memory. Once a set of numbers is picked in one play, the random number process starts fresh for the next play. The fact that a number is picked in one play has no influence on the chances of it getting picked in following plays. Each set of numbers generated by the Quick Pick feature is unrelated to any other Quick Pick selection."

(You can almost feel the frustrated mathematician behind this repetitive explanation, no?)

Of course, other factors make the "risk of being nice" flawed logic. People were buying lottery tickets at locations all around the country. In the time it would take to push a little old lady out of line, thousands of people in other locations would "step in front of you."

Powerball isn't a raffle
One can conjure up a game of chance where the "cost of being nice" could be real. A church raffle that sold tickets with sequential numbers might seem to qualify. Imagine you let a senior cut in line, and he bought winning ticket number 1065, leaving you with a worthless 1066 ticket. Of course, if the winning number was truly picked at random, that wouldn't matter, either, but it certainly would "feel" bad. (Note: feelings and mathematics rarely get along very well).

On the other hand, imagine a church raffle with a finite number of tickets, where this little old man bought five, and you could only buy four tickets because the supply was exhausted. By limiting your chances of winning, you have a true "risk of being nice."

Sadly, Powerball has an unlimited supply of tickets for fools with money, so that scenario doesn’t apply.

Lotteries have often been called a tax on the mathematically disinclined, so it's no surprise that math logic can be in short supply when discussing lotteries. After all, anyone using logic would take their investment in lottery tickets and put it to good use — betting on this weekend's Belmont Stakes, for example.

But here's a happy thought. Because both the winning numbers and the Quick Pick numbers are randomly generated, the "reward of being nice" is of equal value to the "risk." That is, you are equally likely to end up with a winning ticket because you let someone step in front of you. Think about that the next time you consider being polite ... doing so could win you $590 million!

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In Rochester, N.Y., city court is a busy place – for debt collectors.

Plaintiff’s lawyers seeking judgments against alleged debtors consume 89 percent of the court docket -- 7,148 of the 8,032 lawsuits heard in city court during 2011 involved debt collection, a remarkable number.

But not unique. In Buffalo, 76 percent of cases involved debt collection. In the Capital District near Albany, 77 percent did. Even in Nassau County, just outside New York City, where nearly 20,000 civil cases were filed, almost 9,000 involved debt.

“Debt collectors are flooding the courts, overrunning the courts,” said Susan Shin, staff attorney at an advocacy group, the New Economy Project, based in New York. The group is issuing a scathing report on what it calls abuse of civil courts on Thursday. “There are courts that are basically doing almost nothing else.”

It's a growing problem, say consumer advocates around the country: courts that seem to behave like assembly lines, clogged with debt cases that sometimes consume an entire day’s legal action. The New Economy Project report is among the first to quantify the issue.

"I think people should be shocked that in some places almost 9 out of 10 cases are these debt collectors trying to collect on debts," said Shin.

The debt collectors blame the volume on the huge number of cases that have arisen since the recession and the subsequent tepid recovery.

It's not just the volume that concerns Shin, however. The study found something missing from the majority of these cases: the defense.  Nearly half the debt cases were settled by "default judgment,” meaning the defendant was a no-show. Often, courts simply accept the debt collectors' suggested remedy, giving them the ability to garnish the consumers' wages or to access their bank accounts. 

Brian Pindell says he was one of them. He didn’t know a debt collection company had sued him and won two judgments against him in court back in 2007, until he was denied aid in the weeks after Superstorm Sandy. The Rockaway, Queens, resident applied for a $4,500 Small Business Administration loan to replace damaged computer equipment for his web design company in December. The judgments doomed his application, he says.

"I had no idea what those cases were. I was never served (with legal papers)," says Pindell. "In fact, I still don't know what the debt is."

Courtesy Brian Pindell

Brian Pindell says he never knew he lost a lawsuit to a debt collector in 2007.

Flooding courts
Similar debt cases are overwhelming U.S. courts, says the consumer advocacy group, formerly called the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project.

Like Pindell’s case, many lawsuit targets don’t find out they’ve lost their case until months or even years later.

The report also found that legal representation in the debt collection cases examined was nearly nonexistent; only two percent of the defendants across the state were represented by a lawyer. That's important because, in many cases, the debt allegations would never hold up in court if disputed, the group says.

Collection agencies that file the cases often engage in the same kind of "robosigning" tactics made notorious during the housing crisis, Shin says -- incomplete paperwork, filing so frequently that the signer couldn’t possibly comprehend what was signed, and agency employees signing documents asserting facts they couldn't possibly know. 

"Debt collection lawsuits—particularly those brought by debt buyers—wreak havoc across New York State, depriving hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of due process and subjecting them to collection of debts that in all likelihood could never be legally proven," the report concludes.

Robosigning and other questionable legal strategies employed by debt collectors are starting to get more attention nationally. In December, the Minnesota attorney general settled a case with Midland Funding, one of the nation's largest debt buyers, after accusing the firm of robosigning. It had filed 15,000 cases in the state from 2008-2012. Midland admitted no wrongdoing, but paid $500,000 to the state and agreed to change its practices.

In California last month, the state's attorney general sued JPMorgan Chase, alleging the bank improperly sued 100,000 Californians between 2008-2011, using practices that sound similar to those found in New York.

A spokesman for Chase said the bank couldn't comment on the case.

Reality of a tough economy
Mark Schiffman, spokesman for debt collectors trade association ACA International, says his members work to maintain high standards, and no one condones filing lawsuits against debtors without having the proper paperwork. But he cautioned against criticizing collectors for filing a high volume of lawsuits, saying that was merely a reality of a tough economy. If consumers ignore debt collectors, they have few other options outside filing lawsuits, he said.

"It may be something that is going to be stunning to people, but it doesn't mean collectors are doing anything wrong," he said. "As long as they are following the rules just because there's an increase doesn't equate to bad behavior."

To compile its research, the New Economy Project obtained data from the New York State Office of Court Administrators covering 195,105 debt collection cases filed against New Yorkers in 2011. When debt buyers, as opposed to original creditors, sued alleged debtors, the default judgment rate around the state was 62 percent, the report found.

The advocacy group also picked 90 cases at random and reviewed them in detail. It found a series of irregularities in those cases.

"Not a single one went to trial or was resolved on the merits," the advocacy group says. 

In 9 out of 10 of those cases, an employee or debt buyer who had no connection to the original creditor  testified to facts that only an original creditor could know, the report says. And in 4 out of 10 cases, the paperwork was filed out of order -- the affidavit in support of a default judgment was completed before the defendant's time to answer the lawsuit had expired, an easy-to-spot procedural error.

Nevertheless, the court rejected the improper paperwork in only 2 of the 90 cases; and in nearly every case where the debt collector sought a default judgment, it was granted.

Lawsuit targets never find out about the case because plaintiffs routinely engage in so-called "sewer service," by hiring firms that fail to properly serve notice to defendants that they have been sued and should appear in court, the report alleges.

It also claims that minorities suffer disproportionately from debt collection robosigning.  In the 10 zip codes with the highest default judgment rates in New York, 75 percent of the population is nonwhite.

Pindell said his application for a $4,500 SBA loan has been completely sidetracked by two court judgments which now appear on his credit report. Both cases were filed by Midland Funding -- one for $802, and one for $1,042 -- though he believes they are different lawsuits representing the same underlying claim.

"I spent five days going back and forth between the two courts trying to find out about this. No one could tell me why there were two cases," he said. "It's still a little mind-boggling...towards the middle of this month I should know, when their lawyers get the paperwork to me, if there is any paperwork."

The SBA is reconsidering his loan application now, he said, and he’s hopeful it will be approved soon.

Greg Call, senior vice president and general counsel, Midland Credit Management, said in an e-mail that the firm could not comment on individual cases, but said the firm follows proper legal procedures.

"We are confident in our processes, including those related to notification of the debt and working with the consumer to satisfy his or her obligation to repay it," he said.

He added that lawsuits are a last resort for the firm, and said only 5 percent of accounts reach litigation.

"We reach out to consumers multiple times on the phone and through the mail. Unfortunately, if they choose not to respond, the only option we are left with is legal action," he said.

But Shin, the consumer advocate attorney, says the U.S. court system has been essentially turned into an arm of the debt collection industry -- and we are all paying the price.  The “glaring and pervasive” errors her group found show that the collection industry has a cavalier attitude about the legal system, she said, and that courts are making "rubber stamp" judgments.

"This really is part of an assembly-line process," she said.  "They are so sure of their sewer service, so sure of their default judgments, from  A to Z, this is how they do it."

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Matt Rivera / NBC News

Brain scans at the University of Pennsylvania show which parts of the brain light up when volunteers answer questions about money -- and when they use their imagination.

Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there will be sun, Little Orphan Annie sang. Recent neuroeconomics research suggests she was onto something. 

The key to saving money for the future might not be self-discipline, but rather the ability to imagine that tomorrow, indeed, is coming.  Having a good imagination can be linked to healthy eating habits, resistance to drug use, even avoiding divorce, say researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joe Kable is a specialist in the field of neuroeconomics at the Ivy League school, where he is imagining better ways to understand why people do what they do with money.He spends his days getting volunteers to lie down in a machine that maps brain activity. He asks them questions about money and studies which parts of their brains light up.

Recently, his research took an inspirational turn. He found that subjects whose brains show added activity when imagining the future also make better decisions about money. Kable suspects that consumers who can really, viscerally imagine how great that new car will smell when they drive off the lot, or how excited they will be when getting the keys to a new home, have a much easier time saving money. Conversely, those who have dull imaginations tend to live in the present, and blow their cash on payday.

The discovery could change the way we teach people to save, Kable said.

"These findings invert an old idea about delaying gratification," Kable said.  "Right now, we are trying to to tamp down the immediate temptations. But instead, it's better to ramp up the desire for that future outcome."

Kable says there's high correlation between imagination brain activity and skill at discounting,which is the ability to make proper trade-offs between money and time. In a typical discounting question, subjects are asked if they would prefer to get $10 today or $20 in two weeks.  Consumers who are poor at discounting take the money and run.

"Brain activity when engaged in future thinking predicts who will defer for the delayed reward in a choice path," he said. "The richness or vividness of the scene that people are imagining, or the valence (positive or negative feelings) associated with it, increases the likelihood that someone will pass on immediate gratification."

His initial findings on imagination are included in a paper that is currently under peer review, and his research projects continue. But Kable isn't the only one using a vivid imagination to analyze saving patterns.

Hal Hershfield, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, has found that the more subjects are able to imagine themselves in the future, the better they are at saving for retirement today.

Most people treat their future selves as strangers, Hershfield says. To them, putting money into a retirement account feels about the same as donating to a charity. In other words, they don't take saving personally.

"What our research has been showing is that if people think of their later selves as a different person altogether - one who they're not at all close to - then that has deep implications," he said. He calls this a lack of “self-continuity.”   “Some of us think of the future self as a different person to whom we feel close, like a best friend, and others of us think of our future selves as a different person who feels distant and estranged, like a co-worker you barely know. It's the latter case that presents a problem.” 

To change that, Hershfield uses computer simulators to show people versions of themselves 20 or 30 years into the future -- he calls it an "imagination age." Consistently, they get religion about planning for the future, he says.

"If you can somehow boost their connectedness with that person in the future, they save more," he said.

Skill in imagining the future has implications that range far beyond money choices, Kable says.

"Those who chose the delayed reward are less likely to use drugs. They are likely to be lower weight, and make better diet choices...and have other positive health outcomes. They don't smoke," he said. "There is an association with school performance...even things like they are less likely to get divorced, even less likely to be under water on their mortgage."

RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS

Both Kable and Hershfield believe imagination skills are partly predetermined by genetics and environment, but they also think people can improve this critical skill.

Hershfield says consumers can try one of the various free apps that allow users to upload pictures and see aged versions of their face, but these often aren't accurate enough to have a deep impact.

Other ideas:

• When making a big purchase, spend 30 seconds thinking about how your future self will react to it. 
• Write a letter to your future self that you imagine you'll read later; or write a letter from your future self to be read today, like this: "Bob, this is you at age 65. I know a convertible would be fun, but if you saved the money instead, I could buy a cabin in the Poconos."

Recent college graduates who score their first job might be tempted to splurge on a new car or an apartment that's a little out of their price range. But 20-somethings are in an incredibly unique position to set up their financial future, if only they could teach themselves to think backward about retirement savings.

It sounds like a math trick, but it's really just harnessing the power of time: Someone who saves for retirement during their 20s and completely stops a decade later will have more at age 62 than someone who starts saving in their 30s and spends the rest of his or her adult life trying to catch up. Yes, 10 years of savings can be worth more than 30 years of savings. This may be the only time when something that sounds too good to be true really is true.

If you know someone who's recently graduated or started a first job, sit them down and show them what personal finance advisers call "The Parable of the Twins."

Liz Weston, in her book “Deal with Your Debt,” offers this simple illustration. One twin puts aside $3,000 every year in a Roth IRA starting at age 22, and stops at 32. She never adds another penny. Her brother starts saving $3,000 annually at 32, and continues until age 62. Who has a larger retirement kitty?

Assuming an average 8 percent return annually, the twin sister wins rather handily. She has $437,320, compared to her brother's $339,850, even though she contributed two-thirds less of her own money than her brother ($30,000 vs. $90,000).

Of course, different assumed returns would change the grand total, but lower or higher rates don't change the fundamental principal: Dollars saved in your 20s are worth a lot more than dollars saved later in life.

"It's counterintuitive for people to open up their time horizons, but the difference it makes is incredible," Weston said. "We focus on our immediate past and present at the expense of the future."

And that can get pretty expensive. Thanks to compounding returns, every $1,000 that someone in their 20s doesn't save costs them more than $10,000 at retirement. 

‘Hard to catch up’
"You rob the money of time to earn returns, and time for those returns to earn returns," she said.  "If you put it off, it gets increasingly hard to catch up."

Not surprisingly, U.S. workers often have it backward. Most people save a little for retirement when they are young, and increase participation and contributions as they get older. A study by Aon Hewitt in 2010 found that Generation Y workers (under age 30) average 5.3 percent contributions to their 401(k) plans, as compared to 6.8 percent by Gen X workers (31-45) and 8.4 percent by older workers. Those older workers are trying to catch up, but probably wish someone had told them the Parable of the Twins when they were younger.

No one who tells the parable thinks it’s a good idea to stop saving for retirement at age 30, of course. But it does happen. When young adults start families, take on mortgages, and face other life hurdles, sometimes retirement contributions are the first to go overboard.  Workers who have saved a lot in their 20s are in a much better position to weather a storm and still have a retirement savings cushion.

Weston is among those personal finance experts who think young adults and families focus too much on paying off debt at the expense of saving for retirement. Debt payments and retirement savings should be balanced, she believes.

The instant payoff of paying down a 15 percent interest credit card balance is obvious, but in the long run, $1,000 saved for 30 years in an IRA can be far more valuable ($10,935) than the cost of carrying $1,000 in debt for an extra year or so ($150).

That outlook holds for student loan debt, too. Pay down the debt, of course, but don’t neglect retirement savings just to pay extra to reduce a student loan balance, Weston says.

She thinks the best thing recent graduates can do is avoid the urge to splurge.

"Continue living like a broke college kid for a few years and save the money. You will be amazed at what the difference is," Weston said. 

Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter. 

Spanish police via EPA

Two Spanish police officers detain Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky at Barajas airport in Madrid, Spain on Tuesday. Budovsky is being held as part of money-laundering investigation involving the United States.

Liberty Reserve was the financial glue that held together a massive worldwide network of cybercriminals, but the network that enabled $6 billion to change hands has been ripped apart, U.S. prosecutors said Tuesday, leaving thousands of criminals wondering where the money is.

One of the world’s most widely used digital currencies, Liberty Reserve was used as a secret money system for credit card thieves, identity thieves, Ponzi scheme peddlers, hackers for hire, child pornographers, even drug dealer websites, federal officials claim in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court. The virtual money system allowed perhaps a million criminals to anonymously move money around the world.

The scope of the crime is "staggering," federal officials allege in the indictment: Liberty Reserve had a million users and serviced 55 million transactions since 2006. Some are calling this the largest money laundering prosecution in history.

"(Liberty Reserve is) a criminal business venture...designed to help criminals conduct illegal transactions and launder the proceeds," the unusually colorful indictment says. "(It was) a financial hub of the cyber-crime world."

The founder of Liberty Reserve, Arthur Budovsky, is now in custody in Spain, while co-founder Vladimir Kats was arrested in Brooklyn; other men named in the indictment are still at large around the world. The Liberty Reserve website now reads simply: "This domain name has been seized by the U.S. Global Illicit Financial Team."  Meanwhile, alleged criminals with "deposits" at Liberty Reserve already are screaming on other websites that their money has been unfairly seized.

Mike Segar / Reuters

Preet Bharara, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, describes charges against Costa Rica-based Liberty Reserve, one of the worlds largest digital currency companies and seven of its principals and employees for allegedly running a $6 billion money laundering scheme at a news conference in New York, May 28, 2013.

"The only liberty that Liberty Reserve gave many of its users was the freedom to commit crimes," said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "The global enforcement action we announce today is an important step towards reining in the ‘Wild West’ of illicit Internet banking. As crime goes increasingly global, the long arm of the law has to get even longer."

Account holders at Liberty Reserve, which was founded in Costa Rica in 2006, were not required to provide proof of their identity when opening an account. Essentially, anyone with an e-mail address could begin moving money within the Liberty Reserve system, making the transactions untraceable and attractive to cybercriminals. 

Criminals had so much faith in the anonymity of the system that some used obvious fake names like "Russia Hackers" or "Hacker Account," the indictment says. 

Liberty made handsome profits by providing the service, charging a 1 percent fee for each transaction, plus an additional 75 cent "privacy fee," according to court documents.

Budovsky has been accused before of facilitating crime through an electronic financial network. He operated a so-called "exchanger" called Gold Age, which was part of the ill-fated eGold system, shuttered in 2009 after concerns about fraud. Exchangers give account holders a chance to convert virtual money into real, or vice versa. Budovsky was indicted in 2006, with federal officials alleging at the time he had illegally transmitted $30 million through Gold Age. While serving probation, he left the U.S. for Costa Rica, and founded Liberty Reserve.

Liberty Reserve also relied on a series of exchangers; no account holder could do business directly with Liberty, adding another layer of anonymity for users. The exchangers were located in Malaysia, Russia, Nigeria, and Vietnam, according to the indictment. But users didn’t have to rely on the exchangers to profit. Customers could swap Liberty Reserve currency with each other; the virtual currency was also accepted by some electronic merchants, such as websites where visitors could "shop" for stolen credit card numbers to purchase.

When Costa Rican officials began expressing concern that Liberty Reserve could be used for money laundering, the firm set up a website that allegedly allowed state banking officials to review transactions in real-time. But it was a ploy: the data used for the site was fake, however, U.S. officials say.

By 2009, Costa Rican officials began seizing some Liberty Reserve assets, grabbing $19 million before the rest of the funds were moved to places like Spain and Hong Kong, and the main operations were shifted to Cyprus, where the service continued operation until this weekend.

Cybercrime expert Brian Krebs, who reported on the demise of Liberty Reserve on his blog on Saturday, said Liberty Reserve users are horrified by the potential loss of the money in their accounts. One told him he stood to lose $25,000. Others seemed in denial that the site had been shut down by government investigators.

"Only update this thread with positive news," wrote one. "Only thing I want to hear is LR will be back soon."

Cyber-criminals have other ways to exchange money, but Krebs said Liberty Reserve was probably the most accepted form of payment in the computer underground. It’s shuttering could disrupt electronic criminal activity, but Krebs said other virtual money systems will probably pick up the slack.

 Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter. 

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Really, dude? The concept of a three-day weekend has gone the way of the dodo. Are companies to blame, or are we?

Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer and all it evokes: vacations, slower workweeks, casual dress codes, getting the pool ready and pulling out the outdoor furniture.

It would seem an ideal time to take a break, but our ability to unplug and relax is under assault. A three-day weekend? We can barely get through three waking hours without working, new research shows. The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation -- or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors’ questions.

There's plenty of debate among economists and psychologists over whether the economy is to blame, or whether we did this to ourselves. There's little arguing that the concept of a Sabbath is in serious danger. 

“It's like an arms race…everything is an emergency," said Tanya Schevitz, spokeswoman for Reboot, an organization trying help people unplug more often. "We have created an expectation in society that people will respond immediately to everything with no delay. It's unhealthy, and it's unproductive, and we can't keep going on like this." 

There's a long list of horribles associated with our new, always-on-digital lives: You are dumber. You are more stressed. You are losing sleep, and more depressed.

People seem to know they need tech breaks, which have plenty of cute names now, like "Digital Detox" or "Tech Sabbath." Consumers pay for software like "Freedom," which cuts their computers off the Net for a pre-set amount of time (really, you could just unplug yours). Reboot even sponsors a National Day of Unplugging, which will occur in March next year. But no one seems to think the problem is getting any better.

It’s easy to blame the economy. Workers competing for too few jobs feel like they can't say no to their boss, even if it's a trivial request during a long weekend. It’s equally easy to blame gadgets, particularly smartphones, which have virtually tethered employees to their desks. It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years.

But those explanations are, at a minimum, incomplete. Some experts think these wounds are self-inflicted. Laura Vanderkam, who recently published the eBook, "What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekends," says that many executives she's worked with have learned they can unplug for a weekend without dire consequences.

"Many of us have an exaggerated sense of our own importance," she said, speaking on the eve Memorial Day weekend. "I can tell you that come Tuesday morning, the Earth will still be revolving, whether you have checked your email or not."

Besides driving each other crazy, we are also robbing our brains of critical downtime that encourages creative thinking when we skip weekends and vacations. At extreme levels of exhaustion, rest-deprived brains experience memory loss and hallucinations. But without regular rest, brains fail at more basic tasks. A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that new experiences fail to become long-term memories unless brains have downtime for review.

Vanderkam also argues that taking breaks makes you more focused when you work. People who work 50 or 60 hours rarely get more done than people who work 40 hours, she argues.

Reboot's vision is a digital-age Sabbath, Schevitz said, but as she explained it on the phone, she was interrupted by a text message. ("Even I struggle with this," she confessed.)

“We need a modern day-rest that brings balance back to life,” she said.

Memorial Day weekend is a good time to start. She urged people to start small. Don't try to go 72 hours without e-mail; begin by promising your family one tech-free meal every day this weekend.

“I think that a three-day weekend provides a unique opportunity for people to unplug and decompress because there is a tradition of people going away. So the expectation by the boss that you will be reachable at a moment's notice is likely to be less," she said. "I do think there's hope. When people are given achievable steps, they start seeing that there's a difference.”

Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter. 

Slideshow: Tornadoes ravage Plains

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Destroyed vehicles lie in the rubble outside the Plaza Towers Elementary school in Moore, Okla., on Tuesday.

Launch slideshow

For many, it's impossible to view the heartbreaking stories coming out of Oklahoma and not feel an overwhelming urge to do something. But following your first impulse to help could just lead to more heartbreak, as many charitable givers often fall prey to scams in the wake of national tragedies.

Authorities are warning would-be donors to think carefully before they donate, and before they click.

"There is always a high probability for con-artists or 'travelers' to pop-up in the state following a storm, pushing quick-fix repair schemes and charity scams," Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a press release. He urged Oklahomans to stay alert.

Scam artists crawl out of the woodwork only hours after the first pictures of death and destruction emerge. Like clockwork, spam emails, fake Facebook pages, telemarketing phone calls — even full-fledged websites that accept credit cards — pop up, all claiming falsely that they are collecting money for victims. Virus writers also get into the act, sending around booby-trapped emails that appear to come from charities, but are designed to invade victims' computers.

Pruitt said people around the country should donate to "reputable" organizations such as the Salvation Army or Red Cross. "The first scam we typically see after devastation like this is charity fraud,” he said

Pruitt also said his department has already sent 30 investigators into the tornado-ravaged area to stop local scams, fraud and price gouging.

For a detailed list of ways to help Oklahoma victims, visit NBC News' How to Help page.

Attorneys general in several other states, from Washington to South Carolina, have also issued charity fraud warnings.

Even consumers who wouldn't normally fall for scams are at risk in the aftermath of major disasters because the overwhelming sadness of the events, and the urgency of the need, can override a giver's natural sense of skepticism. The same urgency force is at play whenever a scam artist insists that a supposedly great deal is only available for a short time.

Federal Trade Commission spokesman Frank Dorman said he didn't believe his agency had received any complaints about Oklahoma-related scams yet, but that's not unusual: victims wouldn't yet realize they'd been scammed, he said.

The agency does offer an extensive set of tips for evaluating charities.

Consumers should beware anyone who:

• Uses high-pressure tactics like trying to get you to donate immediately, without giving you time to think about it and do your research.
• Refusing to provide detailed information about its identity, mission, costs and how the donation will be used.
• Won't provide proof that a contribution is tax deductible.
• Uses a name that closely resembles that of a better-known, reputable organization.
• Thanks you for a pledge you don’t remember making.
• Asks for donations in cash or asks you to wire money.
• Offers to send a courier or overnight delivery service to collect the donation immediately.

Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter. 

Related content:

• National Guard: 'Words can't describe' the Okla. damage
• 'She was always happy': Families grieve tornado victim
• The latest on the aftermath of the Oklahoma tornado
• Tornado victim separated from spouse: 'The house totally disappeared'

Cultura RF / Getty Images stock

A woman checks her phone while at the computer.

Are gadgets making us dumber? Two new studies suggest they might be. One found that people who are interrupted by technology score 20 percent lower on a standard cognition test. A second demonstrated that some students, even when on their best behavior, can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.

Interruptions are the scourge of modern life. Our days and nights are full of gadgets that ping, buzz and beep their way into our attention, taking us away from whatever we are doing.

We've known for a while that distractions hurt productivity at work. Depressing research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, says that typical office workers only get 11 continuous minutes to work on a task before interruption. With smartphones reaching near ubiquity, the problem of tech-driven multitasking — juggling daily tasks with email, text messages, social media etc — is coming to a head.

Multitasking has been  the subject of popular debate, but among neuroscientists, there is very little of that. Brain researchers say that what many people call multitasking should really be called “rapid toggling” between tasks, as the brain focuses quickly on one topic, then switches to another, and another.  As all economics students know, switching is not free. It involves "switching costs" — in this case, the time it takes to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another.

Researchers say only the simplest of tasks are candidates for multitasking, and all but one of those tasks must involve automaticity. If you are good at folding laundry, you can probably fold laundry and watch TV at the same time, for example.

Overestimated abilities
Despite this concern among brain scientists, many people overestimate their ability to multitask, such as the college student who thinks he can text and listen to a lecture simultaneously. He cannot, says brain expert Annie Murphy Paul, who writes "The Brilliant Blog."

"Multitasking while doing academic work — which is very, very common among young people — leads to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning," Paul warned in a recent column.

The two studies mentioned above underscore this point. 

In the first, Alessandro Acquisti and Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction lab recruited 136 college students to take a standard test of cognitive abilities, and invented a controlled method of distraction. Test-takers were interrupted via instant message, which they were told contained important additional instructions, during the exam.

(The research was conducted in concert with research for The Plateau Effect, a book I recently co-authored with Hugh Thompson.)

The interrupted group answered correctly 20 percent less often than members of a control group.

The Carnegie Mellon test might seem a bit contrived, however, because the control group was pretty unrealistic. It's hard to find a group of college students who could take a test without being interrupted by gadgets.

Larry Rosen, a professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, published a study in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior that attempted to quantify how often students of all ages are distracted by technology while studying. Even under ideal circumstances, the results were dismal.

Rosen's observers followed 263 students into their normal study environments — bedroom, library, den — and told them to work on an important school assignment for 15 minutes. Even knowing they were being watched, the students couldn't resist texting or using social media. So-called "on-task" behavior started declining at about the two minute mark, and overall, only 65 percent of the time was used on schoolwork.

"We really assumed we set up a situation where people would try to impress us," said Rosen, an expert in the psychology of technology. "Frankly, I was appalled at how quickly they became distracted."

'Problem built into the brain'
The two studies, published closely together, generated strong reaction, particularly from students.

"Yes, we text in class, but if my grade in that class is and A or a B I don’t see why it’s a problem," wrote one student to Paul.

It's a big problem for both students and adults, Paul counters, for plenty of reasons. Assignments inevitably take longer when learners split their time between tasks, she says. All that task-switching wears out the brain and makes learners more tired and less competent. Most important, several studies have shown that information learned while partially distracted is often quickly forgotten, so the learning is tragically shallow.

The key to transferring new information from the brain's short-term to long-term memory is a process called "encoding." Without deep concentration, encoding is unlikely to occur, explained Nicholas Carr in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” 

So Paul is among a group of researchers who worry that the digital divide is not about the gadget haves and have nots, but rather about those who can resist the constant distracting tug of technology and those who cannot. She compares it to the famous marshmallow test, which shows that children who can delay eating one marshmallow for 10 or 15 minutes on the promise of gaining a second one are the most likely to succeed later in life. In a new "marshmallow" test, educators or employers might test to see how long people can resist "a blinking inbox or a buzzing phone."

"There are those people who think that multitasking is simply the way life is now and we should be focusing on getting better at it ... that we are a bunch of old fogies who don't understand," Paul said. "But scientifically, there is no evidence for that. There are fundamental biological limits to what the brain can pay attention to. This is a problem built into the brain."

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