On October 15th, Americans are required to declare all off-shore bank accounts. Some estimates suggest that there may be as much as tens of billions of dollars hidden in the off-shore accounts of private citizens.

Many wealthy citizens have already announced their hidden accounts. Approximately 4,000 clients of UBS and other private banks have come forward.  Many others may be weighing the risks of each option. If they declare their accounts, they could be hit with penalties. If they get caught, they may risk going to jail.

United States authorities challenged the long-standing tradition of banking secrecy in Switzerland. The IRS is going to be gentle with those who come forward by Oct 15th, it says. Fines will be 5% to 20% of their tax bills rather than the typical 50%.

Regina E. Dugan, the Director of the Pentagon’s research section(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has began to tour college campuses to build research relationships. With the Bush Administration secrecy was the modus-operandi. The Pentagon must put it’s best foot forward to win back these relationships with the scholarly world.

So far the schools listed on the tour include: University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; Virginia Tech; Texas A&M, and the California Institute of Technology.

Secrecy was not the only reason for the severance of Pentagon / university relationships. Under the leadership of Anthony J. Tether, a number of controversial research projects were the focus of the government, which included the proposed Total Information Awareness system.

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking increased transparency with product endorsement on blogs and social networks. Paid product endorsements on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social websites will need to reveal their sponsorship, otherwise they will be faced with fines, a lawsuit or other penalties.

The new guidelines will come into effect on December 1st. The FTC however has not disclosed how bloggers or product endorsers should reveal their sponsorship.

Although customs has possessed the right to inspect high tech gadgets like laptops and digital cameras, they have not always exercised that right.

From now on, high tech gadgets will undergo inspections from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they pass across the border from Mexico to the United States.

Customs and Border Protection will be looking for cyber threats, terrorist plots, bulk cash smuggling and counterfeited trademarks specifically.

The FBI is using a data-mining system that closely resembles DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program. The purpose of the data-mining system is to uncover terror sleeper cells in the US. The data collected by the system includes travel records, including hotel and airline records.

The FBI has plans to expand the program to help solve cyber-crime investigations.

Ultimately the program is predictive. It can help solve crimes before they help by piecing together data from a vast host of sources and contains more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records.

The US Congress is considering a bill that would make the Federal Reserve subject to Congressional audits.

A bill, entitled the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, would give Congress’ Government Accountability Office (GAO) the ability to audit the Fed’s decisions on monetary policy and its dealings with foreign central banks and foreign governments. Until now the Fed’s decisions with these three subjects exempted from audit by the US legal code.

A government official in Switzerland is demanding that Google turn off its street view map service citing privacy issues. One cause of concern was that numerous vehicle license plates and human faces were not blurred in the street view maps. The official is asking that Google shut down the service until it conforms to Swiss law.

Google’s street-view map displays detailed street-level images of cities worldwide. Currently over 100 cities have been mapped using the street view service worldwide.

Greece’s Data Protection Authority already barred Google from photographing its streets to be included in the service.

Nortel was once the object of hatred for causing the savings of many Canadians to plummet following an accounting scandal and the drop of stock prices. Now the company is a surprising object of nostalgia in protests against its sale to foreign investors.

Many Canadians are asking their government to review the estimated $1.13 billion sale of Nortel’s wireless infrastructure business to Ericsson.

Two months after the massive protests in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn into a second term as president. There were scattered protests in the streets, where Basij militia and armed police patrolled to hush opposition. However, the “million strong” protest, organized by the opposition, failed to materialize. Even within the government there was open protest, with most of the Parliament’s reform faction boycotting the Ahmadinejad’s speech.

If deemed legal, an Iowa school system may purchase cell phone jamming equipment. Earlier this month, the school system passed a motion to allocate 5000 dollars to purchase technology to block cell phone signals at school.

The school would require that the cell phone jamming equipment would need to be capable of turning off easily and instantly should there be an emergency.

In 2005, a Federal Communications Commission law banned sale and use of transmitters that block cellular or personal communications signals.