"Most of the sectors that have been targeted in the EU sanctions are ones over which Europeans have a substantial leverage," Mark Fitzpatrick, an Iran specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Reuters. "Not so many other countries can provide the kind of financial services that will be cut off. Few other countries supply technology for liquefied natural gas, nobody else does re-insurance ... The European Union has very wisely found areas over which it has real leverage and cannot be supplanted." Read full article.

"People want more details," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation for American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "They want greater clarity and greater candor than they have gotten up to this point. Wikileaks, in this case, has filled a void left by the Pentagon." Read full article.

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that no one has developed the vocabulary needed to address social networking. “I worry that we’ll end up with solutions that are familiar but not correct if we start from the wrong metaphor,” she said. “And I’m not sure there is a good metaphor for Facebook.” Read full article.

“We’re at a very delicate juncture now,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy group. “We’ve only got a certain number of weeks left before the November election.” Read full article.

Indeed, both the India-US deal and Chinese nuclear help to Pakistan help the two rivals expand their weapons programme by providing vital fuel, says Daryll G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based think tank. "Nuclear trade with either country would indirectly contribute to their weapons programmes by freeing up domestic uranium reserves for the production of enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes." Read full article.
 

The bill would not curb the department's stop-and-frisk policy. But as Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, noted on Monday, it would stop the continued expansion of the database, which is one of the policy's objectives. She also said, ''It would send the message, loud and clear, that whatever pass the Police Department has gotten from city government on these policies, the state is being much more attentive.'' Read full article.

Folks such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been railing against the evils of such patents for years. "The patents can be so broad that they cover a lot of activity that people have been doing for a long time," said Michael Barclay, an attorney and EFF Fellow. "The result is a lot of patents that get allowed that shouldn't get allowed." Read full article.

China devotes “enormous manpower to censorship, filtering out material based on keywords,” said Eddan Katz, international affairs director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other countries that share such practices are Thailand, Turkey, Malaysia and Afghanistan. They also advance censorship by “pressuring third parties, Internet service providers (ISPs) and search engines, to do the work.” Read full article.

Jeff Abramson, a senior analyst at the Arms Control Association, a private group in Washington, said the new policy “sets the stage for progress in space arms control — without getting into specifics.” Read full article.

"Digital authentication has been the holy grail of Internet security policy since the early '90s," said James Lewis, cyber security expert and senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. This latest effort, he said, has a better chance of succeeding than previous tries, "but we need to see how much opposition it runs into and whether people will actually use it even if it gets deployed.".. Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the unfettered openness of the Internet is what allowed it to grow and prosper but also created security gaps that need to be addressed. But any move to improve identity systems raises many concerns. "The whole thing is very difficult to do and privacy is one of the more difficult pieces of it," said Schwartz, adding that the system has to balance efforts to maintain privacy while still finding out enough about someone to ensure his identity. Read full article.