The Future Will Be Silent-OMD

IRS believes it can read your emails, chats, and more without a warrant

Looks like the IRS believes it can read your emails, Facebook Chats, Twitter Direct Messages, SMS messages, and more without needing to obtain a search warrant beforehand. However, a ruling in the 2010 case, U.S. v. Warshak, by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals states that accessing someone’s email messages without obtaining a warrant first violates the Fourth Amendment. According to an IRS 2009 Search Warrant Handbook discovered by the American Civil Liberties Union, the IRS says,

“Emails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.”

Slash Gear

Amazon Secretly Removes "1984" From the Kindle

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

i09

The future is now: Navy to deploy lasers on ships in 2014

The Pentagon has plans to deploy its first ever ship-mounted laser next year, a disruptive, cutting-edge weapon capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles with a blast of infrared energy.
Navy officials announced Monday that in early 2014, a solid-state laser prototype will be mounted to the fantail of the USS Ponce and sent to the 5th fleet region in the Middle East for real-world experience.

Fox News