Washington DC police are launching a new voluntary program to reduce the number of guns in the city after the US Supreme Court ruled last month that a city ban on private handgun ownership violated the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Under the Safe Homes Initiative, police will ask residents for permission to search their homes for guns and residents will receive amnesty from prosecution for any weapons confiscated under the program. Critics allege that the program could amount to a violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure if homeowners are intimidated into allowing the searches. The Washington DC chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has distributed flyers advising DC residents of their constitutional rights.

Other cities are considering similar programs following the Supreme Court ruling. Gun ownership advocacy groups have filed lawsuits in Chicago and San Francisco seeking to overturn laws which ban handguns within those cities. In September 2007, Washington DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and DC Attorney General Linda Singer ormally appealed a March 2007 federal court ruling which invalidated the District of Columbia's handgun ban . The Supreme Court affirmed a March DC Circuit holding that the city's 30-year-old ban on private possession of handguns was unconstitutionally broad.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed papers in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida Monday asking the court to force a Swiss bank to hand over the names of American clients suspected of hiding funds from tax collectors. The DOJ is requesting permission for the Internal Revenue Service to issue "John Doe" summons against UBS to obtain information about unidentified American bank patrons accused of tax fraud. A former UBS banker pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the IRS last month, after he admitted that UBS employees assisted US citizens in hiding approximately $20 billion in taxable assets. IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said:
Today's action sends a strong, unequivocal signal to anyone thinking of short-changing the nation and their fellow citizens by evading the tax laws.

Offshore accounts harbor billions of dollars, and people should take notice that the secrecy surrounding these deals is rapidly fading. The information we would gather from this action would help us detect wealthy individuals who don't pay their taxes as well as provide details about how advisors facilitate this abuse.

Owners of Swiss bank accounts have traditionally enjoyed great privacy, but Swiss banks have recently released information on certain clients. In 2006, the Swiss Justice Ministry granted US investigators access to information about bank accounts of terrorism suspects. Prosecutors in the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia requested the information in a four-year old investigation into money laundering to support terrorist activities. The same year, the Swiss Supreme Court denied a Russian request for the transfer of bank documents to Russia which were relevant to an ongoing investigation into Russian oil giant Yukos.

Immigrants who claimed they were illegally detained at the U.S. border because they wrongfully appeared on the Department of Homeland Security's watch list should pursue their constitutional claims against the government individually and not as a class, the 7th Circuit ruled.

Judge Easterbrook reversed class certification for a group of immigrants whose re-entry into the United States was delayed because they showed up on the watch lists as potential terrorists or otherwise dangerous individuals and were carefully screened. Some of the plaintiffs said they never belonged on the list in the first place, because they posed no threat of terrorism or other violent behavior. Others said they are not actually on the list, but have been mistaken for a listed person with a similar or identical name.

All claimed the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security need to find a better system of classifying potentially threatening individuals and removing those who do not belong on the list.

They sued for damages, claiming government agents violated their rights by delaying their re-entry and by pointing weapons at them.

Easterbrook called the latter claim "questionable" and pointed out that the nation has an inherent authority to protect its borders. Even so, he rejected plaintiffs' request for an injunction covering "just about every aspect of entry procedure," including the degree of suspicion required for inquiry, the way officials confirm a person's identity, and how the FBI closes its investigations. They sought to strip the executive branch of its role in reshaping the system and to make the necessary reforms through an injunction covering larges classes: one for detained travelers and another for the relatives and travel companions of detained travelers.

"It isn't hard to see problems with these class definitions," Easterbrook said, launching a list of bulleted issues, including that the classes "grow or shrink with the plaintiffs' contentions as the case progresses," and that the word "detention" could mean "anything from 'stopped for 60 seconds to present a passport' to 'held incommunicado for more than a day.'"

The court concluded that the plaintiffs' claims are "best handled by individual suits for damages."