PK'S NOTE: Here's a couple articles on how to somewhat get around cleaner. Personally, I think that horse has already left the barn but there are ways to "not help" the process from this point forward. It may be "legal" but I still think the government doing this is unconstitutional.

The big flip-off: Company doesn't give feds data

'World's most private search engine' won't betray you to Obama

The federal government may be secretly accessing Americans’ online videos, emails, photos and search histories – with the help of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and Skype – but “the world’s most private search engine” is staunchly defending its users’ privacy and civil liberties.

StartPage.com and its sister search engine, Ixquick.com, were launched in 2006 to provide a private way for Americans to conduct Internet searches. StartPage provides a private portal to Google results, and Ixquick allows users to retrieve private results from other search engines.

WND reported in 2010 when Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard-trained privacy expert who helped develop StartPage, warned, “It would blow people’s minds if they knew how much information the big search engines have on the American public. In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy of the KGB.”

It happens every day, Albrecht explained. When an unfamiliar topic crosses people’s minds, they often go straight to Google, Yahoo or Bing and enter key terms into those search engines. Every day, more than a billion searches for information are performed on Google alone.

“If you get a rash between your toes, you go into Google,” she said. “If you have a miscarriage, you go into Google. If you are having marital difficulties, you look for a counselor on Google. If you lose your job, you look for unemployment benefit information on Google.”

Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts with search engines, serving up snippets of deeply personal information about their lives, habits, troubles, health concerns, preferences and political leanings.

“We’re essentially telling them our entire life stories – stuff you wouldn’t even tell your mother – because you are in a private room with a computer,” she said. “We tend to think of that as a completely private circumstance. But the reality is that they make a record of every single search you do.”

The search engines have sophisticated algorithms to mine data from searches and create very detailed profiles about Americans. She said those profiles are stored on servers and may fall into the wrong hands – for example, the federal government’s detailed files on unwitting U.S. citizens.

Just recently, the Washington Post reported it obtained a top-secret document on a government program in which the NSA and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.”

The program, code-named PRISM, was utilized to obtain information that has become a critical part of President Obama’s daily briefing, according to the Post, which added, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.”

And McClatchy recently reported, “Privacy policies for Google, Yahoo! and other Internet service providers explicitly state that the companies collect users’ data, such as names, email addresses, telephone numbers, credit cards, IP addresses, search queries, purchases, time and date of calls, duration of calls and physical locations.

“The policies say that companies may use that information to send you targeted advertising or, if necessary, to comply with requests from government authorities.”

In a December 2009 interview with CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt divulged that search engines may turn over citizens’ private information to the government.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt said. “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject to the United States Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities.”

However, StartPage and Ixquick say they have neither participated in PRISM nor shared Americans’ data with the federal government.

“The privacy of our users rests on three important foundations,” explained StartPage and Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. “We are based in the Netherlands, we use encrypted connections, and – most importantly – we don’t store or share any of our users’ personal search data.”

A statement from StartPage and Ixquick explained:

No user data stored: StartPage and Ixquick never store user data, including IP addresses and search queries, so government agencies have no incentive to ask for these. This privacy is so complete; the company doesn’t even know who its customers are, so it can’t share anything with Big Brother.

Encrypted (HTTPS) connections: StartPage and Ixquick were the first search engines to use automatic encryption on all connections to prevent snooping. When searches are encrypted, third parties like ISPs and the NSA can’t eavesdrop on Internet connections to see what people are searching for.

Not under U.S. jurisdiction: StartPage and Ixquick are based in the Netherlands, so they are not directly subject to U.S. regulations, warrants, or court orders. They can’t be forced to participate in spying programs like PRISM. The company has never turned over a single bit of user data to any government entity in the 14 years it has been in business, which is not surprising since there is no data in the first place.

“Unfortunately, it takes a scandal like PRISM to wake people up to the erosion of privacy, ” Albrecht said. “As people get fed up with being spied on, they look for alternatives. We already serve nearly 3 million private searches each day, and we expect that number to grow as people seek shelter from search engines that store and share their private information.”

This summer, the company plans to launch a new email service called StartMail, which will provide a paid and heavily encrypted private email application. Anyone interested in being a StartMail beta tester can now sign up.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/this-company-doesnt-share-your-online-info/?cat_orig=politics

5 Ways to Thwart the NSA and Gov’t from Spying on You

Those concerned about their communication privacy — be it over the phone or on the Web — may then be wondering: Is there anything to be done? Is full privacy even possible?

We went searching and found a few answers. Here are a few tips:

1. Go off the grid: Although the most extreme measure, not communicating electronically would prevent such data from ever being available for collection in the first place. If you want to know what it’s like to go at least without the Internet for a year, check out Paul Miller’s column on The Verge after he did just that.

But as Elad Yoran, CEO of the IT security company Vaultive, told TheBlaze “the choice of not communicating electronically is not one that’s real for us.”

One choice people do have though, Yoran said, is being conscious of what they post online. “Choosing to post a picture on Facebook or to tweet is an action we take deliberately and that we control,” he said.

Even if you have your social media sites set to private, that information is still being collected by the site itself and could be obtained legally through a court order.

2. Keep your browsing quiet: If you’ve been freaked out when shopping online for a Father’s Day tie and found that ads about menswear are cropping up on unrelated sites afterward, you might consider secure browsing. Although what to get dad might not be a controversial search, users could have their reasons to wish to keep searches private or just don’t want their searches to be recorded in cyberspace. TheBlaze has reported on secure Internet browsing before (Here’s How You Can Browse the Web Without Being Tracked), but here’s a bit of a recap.

Private mode: most Web browsers have the ability to allow you to search privately, without cookies being enabled to track your movements. There are also browser extensions like Ghostery, Abine’s Do Not Track and AVG’s Do Not Track that prevent “invisible” entities from tracking searches as well.

Hide your IP address: an even higher level of security hides your computer’s IP address entirely. There are several services that do this including Hot Spot Shield, which is VPN (virtual private network) software, and the search engine StartPage.

Go hard core with ‘Tor’: CNET called the Tor Project “hard core” and potentially even “overkill” when it comes to secure browsing. Tor is free software that enables not only browsing that is anonymous but it encrypts data transport and doesn’t reveal a user’s location or how long they were browsing. How? It reroutes your IP address several times before connecting.
Encryption for data transmitted over an Internet connection, would “take thousands of years to break, and even if the NSA had quantum computers, it would still take them years to decode,” Peter Zaborszky, the owner of BestVPN.com, told TheBlaze.

3. Encrypt. Encrypt. Encrypt.: Yoran’s biggest piece of advice for companies using cloud computing is to encrypt their data. After it’s in the hands of a cloud service provider, like Microsoft, Google and many others, if they receive a court order for information, they might be obligated to turn it over.

Here are tips for encryption from Yoran, who is a member of the FBI Information Technology Advisory Council and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Board for Command, Control and Interoperability for Advanced Data Analysis:
Encrypt data before it goes to the cloud.
Encrypt data persistently in all three states. Data exists in three states: transit, at rest and in use.
Hold onto encryption keys yourself. Data can only be made usable with keys.

When it comes to the individual cloud users, encryption packages available for companies are not quite there yet, according to Yoran. (The encryption mentioned in the secure browsing section above addresses encryption of data transmitted over an internet connection).

“I believe this kind of encryption technology will one day be available for consumers, but it’s not yet,” he said.

For now, individuals could avoid using cloud services like Dropbox and Google for information storage or transport that they wish to keep secure.

4. Secure phone conversations: Unless you want to be old fashioned and use a pay phone (if you can even find one), there are fewer options to keep phone conversations secure. Gregg Smith, the CEO of Koolspan, a company focusing on mobile-encryption, detailed some of the products that can encrypt conversations, texts and other information sent from mobile devices between users.

Smith described the technology as a TrustChip, which is placed into the micro SD slot of the device and is “all-in-one key management, authentication and encryption,” according to the company’s website.

Koolspan partners with companies like AT&T, Samsung and other wireless carriers around the world to offer devices with this technology.

AT&T, for example, calls it “encrypted mobile voice,” and offers it as a service for a $24.99 monthly fee.

It is important to note that for such communication to truly be secure, all people involved would need to have their devices enabled with the technology.

What about calls made online? Last year, Skype was accused of online wiretapping. Google Talk hosts information on Google’s servers, which means content, like other information on its products, is subject to compliance with U.S. laws. The Washington Post recently pointed to online telephone service Silent Circle, which has been independently verified to have end-to-end encryption of information without any backdoors for wiretapping.

The Post also pointed to RedPhone, an app for Android phones, that claims to allow end-to-end encryption of conversations.

5. Avoid cellphone tracking: The ability of law enforcement to triangulate the position of a cellphone based on cell tower connections has been discussed recently from a legal standpoint, but is there a way to prevent this from happening in the first place? Yes, but you probably won’t like it. You have to turn your phone off and can even remove the battery for extra protection.

Location data is taken by the cell company every time you make a call, so that’s unavoidable. But Smith offered a clue to look for to see if your phone has been hacked in any way, which could open it to vulnerabilities, such as turning on the microphone remotely. Looking where the signal bar is and the letter/number designation showing connectivity, Smith said it usually shows a few bars and 3G or 4G LTE. If it shows 2G or GPRS, “that’s an initial sign you might be hacked,” he said.

If you see this sign, Smith explained, someone has pulled you into a lower level of connectivity where there is generally less security and might allow them to access information or features inside your phone.

Is full privacy even possible?

Tech experts say even some encryption services have left backdoors for law enforcement purposes. And Smith said completely preventing metadata being collected from phone communications isn’t entirely possible either. The tips mentioned above are just a few ideas to increase privacy.

Zaborszky said unless one isolates oneself from how the rest of society uses technology, it’s not possible to avoid all snooping. “But it is important to know that it’s not the technical side of things that is the weak link, but the legal side and the fact that most of these companies are based in the USA and are bound by US laws,” he noted.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/11/5-ways-to-thwart-the-nsa-and-govt-from-spying-on-you/

Even if You Have Nothing to Hide You Have Something to Fear

...Our nation was built on the principle of the rule of law; the notion that people are most free if they cede only a minimum of their natural rights to government, limited by a written Constitution, in order to secure liberty.

Yet now we are witnessing a government unbridled by the rule of law, which has become subservient to the whims of its leaders; and based not on the goal of ensuring liberty and justice, but on constructing arbitrary conditions of "security."

In this paradigm, the Fourth Amendment no longer carries any real significance for we are asked to accede to the principle that a president and his administration posses “inherent power” -- superseding any other authority or limitation -- to secretly gather, store, and analyze an infinite amount of information gathered from the private communications of millions of law-abiding citizens.

Distressingly, the failsafe on such unbridled power, supposed to be exercised by the Congress through its oversight responsibilities, has been sorely lacking. Instead, we have the spectacle of senior Senators like Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defending actions by the NSA as beneficent because -- as we are asked to accept on faith -- they have "kept us safe." We are admonished to resist the urge to limit such extreme power because, in their Orwellian worldview, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

This is the childish solipsism to which our cherished, constitutionally guaranteed rights have been reduced.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Democrats faced a moral crisis as the Obama Administration turned the liberal vision of Big Government into an omnipotent police state in which citizens' rights are pre-empted by the collective and over-arching need for “security.” However, Republicans, too, face this identity crisis. The people of the United States, for the first time as a result of these leaks, are becoming privy to the true scope of government snooping.

Our country truly is at a crossroad; one defined by philosopher Ayn Rand some seven decades ago, when she correctly observed: “When you take away a man’s privacy, you gain the power to control him absolutely.” "Control" -- that is what this is really all about.

Will we take the "constitutional road" (to use James Madison's description of the form of limited government laid out in the Federalist Papers), and muzzle the humongous, "security" driven Surveillance State that threatens to engulf us? Or, will we meekly succumb to it; complacent in the comfort that comes from a benign but all-powerful federal government? The next few months may very well answer that crucial question. Liberty itself hangs in the balance.

http://townhall.com/columnists/bobbarr/2013/06/12/even-if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-something-to-fear-n1618353/page/full

7 Reasons to Worry About Federal Surveillance

With leaker Edward Snowden revealing to the world that the National Security Agency has been both monitoring phone records for all Americans and obtaining emails, videos, voice chats and other private communications between American citizens and those outside the United States under the so-called PRISM program, controversy has broken out over the scope of government surveillance.

Many on the right and the left have argued that these programs are necessary to curb terrorism. Both Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio have proclaimed that Snowden is a traitor for revealing the existence of the programs. Both Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers of Illinois and President Barack Obama say that the programs have stopped terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, others argue that these programs do not threaten basic civil liberties at all, and that Americans have nothing to fear. David Brooks of the New York Times says that the real threat to Americans isn't surveillance, but cynicism: "Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric ..."

The truth is far less black and white than all of this. These programs may stop terror attacks; it is likely they have done so. But are they necessary to stop terror attacks, or are they merely the most convenient means for the government to do so? We all want Americans to be safe. But we also would like our emails to be private. Are those two goals mutually exclusive?

Here are the top seven reasons to worry about these federal surveillance programs.

1. It's the federal government, and the federal government cannot be trusted with unlimited personal information. As we've seen from the IRS scandal, actors at any level of government can use information to target political opposition. Distrust of government isn't baseless cynicism. It's realism. The government is filled with human beings -- 1.4 million, at last count, who have top secret security clearances. Some are bound to be nasty. After all, if Boehner and Feinstein are right, and Snowden is a traitor, he had access to all that information, too.

2. Blanket surveillance does not mesh with the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on the notion that search and seizure must not be unreasonable. It is difficult to think of something more unreasonable than searching the private phone records and digital information of citizens who are suspected of nothing.

3. Where does government power stop? What information does the government not have a right to see at this point? Obamacare has made the government part of our health care decisions. The IRS controls all of our financial information. The NSA apparently sees everything else.

4. The anti-terror rationale for violation of rights is identical to the rationale for gun control. Many of the same folks on the right now defending NSA surveillance object to blanket gun laws that affect the rights of hundreds of millions. The argument on the left is simple: To save one life, we'll take as many guns as we have to. Flip this argument to terror, and suddenly many on the right make that exact argument. It's bad policy on both fronts.

5. It's an excuse to treat terror in politically correct fashion. There are many who say that we have accepted blanket screening at airports and should therefore accept blanket screening of personal information. That presumes that blanket screening at airports isn't asinine. It is. Profiling behavior and associations should be the basis for law enforcement. The government argues that a panopticon national security apparatus keeps Americans safest. But that ignores the fact that panopticon capabilities do not necessarily translate into panopticon effectiveness.

6. Centralization of information is a magnet for foreign hacking. Reportedly, much of this NSA information will be kept at a centralized location in Utah. Recently, the Chinese government has been hacking into American governmental installations including the Federal Reserve and the Pentagon. Keeping our information available for download by a creative foreign government is a recipe for disaster.

7. The nature of Americanism is changing in very nasty ways thanks to growth of government. The debate about rights versus safety is a valuable one. But too many Americans are now thinking in terms of "needs" vs. rights. We have heard politicians ask whether we truly need to be free from government surveillance; these same politicians often ask whether we need a certain level of income, or need AR-15s. We may not need those things, but we have a right to them. The moment America becomes a "needs" country in which the government unilaterally decides what we need and regulates everything else we cease to be America.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2013/06/12/7-reasons-to-worry-about-federal-surveillance-n1618073/page/full

Why NSA Spying on All of Us Doesn't Get the Job Done

Barry Rubin, terrorism expert and author of thirteen books on the Middle East mess, lays out the clear case over at PJ Media, that to uncover jihadi threats the NSA has to target the bad guys. It is not helpful to flood themselves with records of 3 billion phone calls a day, trampling on our Constitution in the process. Our problem isn't lack of information; it is the political willingness to follow up on leads. We enable Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadis to dictate the training of our military, FBI, Homeland security and State Department policy, which leads us to a paralysis of politically correct thinking that leads directly to loss of American lives.

This must read article has a number of hair raising examples I was not familiar with before.

Rubin writes:

Isn't it absurd that the United States - which can't finish a simple border fence to keep out potential terrorists; can't stop a would-be terrorist in the U.S. Army who gives a PowerPoint presentation on why he is about to shoot people (Major Nidal Hasan); can't follow up on Russian intelligence warnings about Chechen terrorist contacts (the Boston bombing); or a dozen similar incidents - must now collect every telephone call in the country?

Isn't it absurd that under this system, a photo-shop clerk has to stop an attack on Fort Dix by overcoming his fear of appearing "racist" to report a cell of terrorists?
That it was left to brave passengers to jump a would-be "underpants bomber" from Nigeria, because his own father's warning that he was a terrorist was insufficient?

Isn't it absurd that terrorists and terrorist supporters visit the White House, hang out with the FBI, and advise the U.S. government on counter-terrorist policy, even while - as CAIR does - advising Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement? And that they are admiringly quoted in the media?

Meanwhile, a documented, detailed revelation of this behavior in MERIA Journal by Patrick Poole - "Blind to Terror: The U.S. Government's Disastrous Muslim Outreach Efforts and the Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy" - a report which rationally should bring down the government, does not get covered by a single mass media outlet?

Imagine this scene:

"Sir, we have a telephone call about a potential terrorist attack!"

"Not now, Smithers, I'm giving a tour of our facility to some supporters of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood."

How about the time when the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem had a (previously jailed) Hamas agent working in their motor pool with direct access to the vehicles and itineraries of all visiting U.S. dignitaries and senior officials?

Rubin's article concludes:

Compared to the time Obama came to office, the Islamists who support violence against America now rule Egypt, Tunisia, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and perhaps soon Syria. Offenses have been stepped up in Somalia and Yemen; are being maintained in Iraq; and still rule over Syria and Iran. In Turkey, an Islamist terror-supporting regime has been embraced by Obama.

This represents a massive retreat, even if it is a largely unnoticed one.

So the problem of growing government spying is three-fold.

- It is against the American system and reduces liberty.
- It is a misapplication of resources. Money is being spent and liberty sacrificed for no real gain.
- Since government decision-making and policy about international terrorism is terrible, the threat is increasing.

If you don't get value or enhanced security while freedom is being reduced and the enemy is getting stronger, $1 trillion certainly isn't a bargain.

Which Database: OFA or NSA?

In the wake of the explosive NSA data-mining revelations, Breitbart TV reminded us of an interesting Rep. Maxine Waters bombshell from February. In an interview, Rep. Waters described a very powerful database that "no one has ever seen before in life," "put in place" by Obama, that had "information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before." [sic]

The Breitbart piece was titled "Breitbart Flashback: Maxine Waters Reveals Obama's Secret Database Filled with Voters' Private Info."

Although what Rep. Waters described seems eerily similar to the recently leaked NSA secret database, she was not referring to the NSA, and not necessarily to anything "secret."

Waters and her interviewer specifically identified the keeper of the "powerful" database that she described as "Organizing for America" ("OFA") -- Obama's campaign machine, which at the time was being restructured as a 501(c)4 and renamed "Organizing for Action."

That database began as a massive voter "list" for the 2008 campaign -- the brainchild of Obama advisor David Plouffe, who was "instructed" by Obama to turn it into a "new lever of government." A second successful election later, that list evolved into a database that was the subject of a November 2012 Washington Post article that opened with this:

If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters' magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection. And although the election is over, Obama's database is just getting started. Democrats are pressing to expand and redeploy the most sophisticated voter list in history.

The Post piece was written before the startling revelation that the list would no longer be maintained by the DNC. An American Thinker column covered OFA's reorganization, noting that many Democrat strategists seemed not only surprised, but also uncomfortable with the idea that Obama's massive campaign organization would not be folding back into the DNC as it did after the 2008 election. As Politico noted, other Democrat-supporting groups and wealthy donors apparently folded into it (or are at least closely "affiliated"), such as mega-contributor George Soros, Media Matters, and the Center for American Progress. In addition, besides Plouffe, other familiar names in the OFA circle came from the inner circle of Obama's administration: David Axelrod, Stephanie Cutter, Jim Messina, Robert Gibbs, and Jon Carson.

The National Journal noted some Democrat "grumbling" about a potential "power struggle between the national party, which aims to elect Democrats above all else, and the new group, which aims to build the president's legacy[.]" The Atlantic Wire summed up all the fretting by "detractors and the media" over the new OFA in three parts: its debatable "promotion of social welfare," Obama's "permanent state of political campaigning," and the appearance of "selling access to the White House."

The Huffington Post observed: "OFA's close ties to the West Wing and its control over the former campaign's resources has raised questions about where the nonprofit group ends and the White House starts." The New York Times called OFA's restructuring unprecedented and "an extension of the [Obama] administration."

Interesting points all (besides coming from the mainstream media): an administration linked to an amply-funded nonprofit group that controls a massive database and operates as an unprecedented extension of a campaign that never seems to end.

And if that circle of relationships isn't disconcerting enough, Fox News's Catherine Herridge presented a special report on June 7 titled "Inside the World of Big Data and Big-time Politics" that noted the interesting connections of Google chairman Eric Schmidt and the Obama White House. According to a recent article in Businessweek, Schmidt, who was actually in the Obama campaign "boiler room" on election night, has invested millions in a new firm, Civis Analytics, staffed by former OFA team members. The firm is expected to "work for Democrat campaigns, and only Democrats -- next year." Justin Brookman of the Center of Democracy and Technology observed the potential for political targeting and "data mining of political opponents." Jim Harper of the Cato Institute expressed concerns for the potential "hand-over of data" to "a political operation or to the government."

With the news that Obama has overseen the NSA's secret collection of a huge database of information, while at the same time maintaining "close ties" to other organizations that operate massive databases dedicated to promoting his own policies, we should be alarmed at the potential such relationships could provide. Did we see but a hint of that potential in the recent actions of the IRS?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/which_database_ofa_or_nsa.html#ixzz2W1Wg1R3e

Obama's Definition of "Smarter Enforcement": None

Welcome to Opposite World again. As the U.S. Senate geared up yesterday for the Gang of Eight illegal alien amnesty bill debate, President Obama goaded Capitol Hill to pass what he called "smarter enforcement, a pathway to earned citizenship and improvements to the legal system" of immigration. Bullcrap. The White House has already bulldozed a traffic-jammed superhighway for immigration law-breakers by executive fiat.

Obama and his open-borders pals pay lip service to fairness and the rule of law for the cameras. But behind closed doors and beyond the reach of public accountability, they've already paved the way for mass deportation waivers. Read their actions, not their lips. The official White House operating policy is: No illegal alien left behind. "Smarter enforcement" means no enforcement.

Remember: Exactly one year ago this week, the president announced he would halt all deportations and start granting work permits to an estimated 2.1 million illegal aliens who entered the country as children.

This blanket amnesty through administrative non-enforcement has been plagued by questions of fraud from the get-go. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show that the feds have rubber-stamped applications at a whopping 99.5 percent approval rate. And fraudulent use of Social Security numbers is no problem for the so-called "DREAM"-ers. The feds reassured them last fall that they wouldn't have to disclose how many and which phony or stolen Social Security numbers they've used.

"Smarter enforcement"? Tell that to the rank-and-file Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who refused to look the other way at Obama's executive subversion of the law. ICE agent Christopher Crane and eight other officers filed suit against the White House over the DREAM deportation waiver program's usurpation of their ability and authority to do their jobs. The Gang of Eight plan would provide the executive branch "virtually unlimited discretion" to cut off immigration enforcement officers at the knees. As Crane testified in a searing statement on Capitol Hill in April:

"Lawmaking in our nation has indeed taken a strange twist. Senators invite illegal aliens to testify before Congress ... but American citizens working as law enforcement officers within our nation's broken immigration system are purposely excluded from the process and prohibited from providing input. Suffice it to say, following the Boston terrorist attack, I was appalled to hear the Gang of Eight telling America that its legislation was what American law enforcement needs."

In April, a federal judge in Texas agreed with the ICE agents that King Obama could not order them to ignore immigration laws at his whim. A decision on their motion for preliminary injunction is expected any day now.

Kansas Secretary of State and immigration enforcement legal eagle Kris Kobach broke it down for me yesterday:

"The federal judge in Crane v. Napolitano has ruled that the ICE agents are likely to prevail in their argument that the Obama administration is ordering them to violate federal law. Think about that: This administration is ordering career law enforcement personnel to break the law. Now, the administration is pushing for an amnesty bill that contains almost nothing to improve immigration enforcement. All that the American citizens will get in return for the amnesty is the promise from the Obama administration that they will try harder to enforce the law. The administration has already shattered that promise, doing exactly the opposite. This is a stark warning to Congress. I sincerely hope that they hear it."

Will they listen? Suicidal Republicans have supported illegal alien amnesties dating back to the Reagan era. They have paid a steep, lasting price. As bankrupt, multiculti-wracked California goes, so goes the nation. The progs' plan has always been to exploit the massive population of illegal aliens to redraw the political map and secure a permanent ruling majority.

Now, in the wake of nonstop D.C. corruption eruptions, SchMcGRubio and Company want us to trust them with a thousand new pages of phony triggers, left-wing slush-fund spending and make-believe assimilation gestures. Trust them? Hell, no. There's only one course for citizens who believe in upholding the Constitution and protecting the American dream: Stop them.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/06/12/obamas-definition-of-smarter-enforcement-none-n1617828/page/full

Wake Up!

In 2007, John McCain’s “comprehensive” immigrant-legalization bill failed after opponents flooded the Senate with calls, shutting down the switchboard. Despite considerable press hype, the bill didn’t even muster a majority on the crucial cloture vote.

It won’t be that easy this time. For one thing, they have a better switchboard, I’m told. For another, the Republican consultants–e.g. Gillespie, Rove–who helped Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election have taken their own failure as an excuse to push what they’ve wanted all along–a business-pleasing immigration policy guaranteeing a supply of inexpensive labor from abroad and a stream of campaign donations to pay Republican consultants. It beats rethinking the rest of the GOP agenda.

In fact, despite all the talk of polarization and Citizens United, the big money in the immigration fight almost unanimously favors a bipartisan, legalization-first bill. Kochs included. The GOP donor class is asserting itself, Ross Douthat has noted. It’s spotted what it thinks is an intersection of crude self-interest, high-minded tolerance, partisan strategy and libertarian philosophy.

One of the more influential members of this “donorist” class is Rupert Murdoch, which means that FOX News has for all intents and purposes switched sides, giving immigration “comprehensivists” a monopoly in the MSM–five networks to none. As goes Murdoch, so goes Hannity.

If you are a Republican who worries that a flood of low-skilled immigrants would drive down wages and make America an uglier place, where the rich have cheap servants but even diligent unskilled work doesn’t afford a life of dignity–well, we’re sorry. We’ve booked our Republican for the panel this week–Senator McCain! A member of the famous Gang of 8! He always puts on a good show, don’t you agree? (If you are a Democrat who worries about immigration and low wages, you probably don’t exist, and certainly don’t hold elective office. In 2007, populist Dems like Senator Byron Dorgan still walked the halls. Now they’ve been driven out–or underground–by the lure of ethnic identity politics).

Worst of all are distractions that weren’t around in 2007. Probably through sheer bad luck, a series of dramatic scandals has captured the attention of both the press (which would ordinarily be celebrating the Gang of Eight’s epic achievement) and conservatives, who would ordinarily be kicking up a fuss. The distraction factor applies with special force to right-wing talk radio hosts, who instead of mobilizing opposition are pontificating in a daze of either overconfidence (i.e., ‘Democrats want this bill to fail’) or fatalism.You’d think Rush Limbaugh–a rare non-Fox conservative star, who understands what is at stake– might have a good deal of time to spend on the Gang of 8 bill the day before its first test vote in the Senate. You would be wrong. Rush talked mainly about the NSA.

If the conservative public were paying attention, the flaws and crude deceptions of the Schumer-Rubio bill would be common knowledge. They are so obvious, especially in the border enforcement area, that even Sen. Rubio pretends to be dissatisfied with his own bill. Byron York reports that many conservatives are shocked when they learn that Rubio’s bill doesn’t secure the border before legalization. It doesn’t! ”First comes the legalization,” as Rubio boasted yesterday. That’s been obvious for months, but now it’s news. (The border security requirements, themselves evanescent, would only prevent legalized illegals from moving to upgrade from legal status to getting green cards and citizenship.)

It’s time to wake up! Conservatives–while you are (rightly) excited about NSA snooping and partisan IRS corruption, the Congress is about to change America in a more profound, permanent way right under your noses. In the process it will hand President Obama the major second term achievement that will help him overcome the very scandals that are distracting you–or, rather, make his survival or re-ascendance unimportant. He will have won. Democrats will have shaped the future electorate to their own liking. They’ll have transformed what America is.

You have one weapon in your arsenal that can trump the big money behind the Gang of 8 bill (S.744). That weapon is fear. It’s not as if the Republican elite has suddenly been persuaded that an amnesty-first immigration bill is a good idea, after all. They’ve always preferred amnesty. They were just too scared to pursue it. What stopped them was the prospect of swift retribution from the electorate, not limited to the Republican primary electorate.

This fear hasn’t disappeared. The elites were scared of voters before and they can be scared again. This applies to red state Democrats like Mark Pryor and primary-able Republicans like Lisa Murkowski. It applies to fence-sitters like Lamar Alexander. It even applies to those like Kelly Ayotte who have now committed to supporting instant legalization (despite having campaigned against it). If voters now make their displeasure with Ayotte known–well, politicians at the top have a way of backtracking from unpopular stands. That’s how they got to the top. At the very least Ayotte’s difficulties would serve as a cautionary example to others.

There will probably be several big votes–most likely on a House-Senate conference bill–before any amnesty can become law. Speaker Boehner will have to make a crucial decision on whether to break the “Hastert Rule” and try to pass a bill in the teeth of his own caucus’ strongly held views. In every case, fear will be the crucial factor. If Senators fear losing their office if a bill becoming law–and they tend to be highly risk-aware–it often has a way of dying without any fingerprints on it (which is arguably what happened in 2007).

There’s a list of Senate phone numbers and emails here. Numbers USA has a handy page that lets you send a fax here. The Capitol switchboard is 202 224-3121.

Ignore the f—ing scandals for a few days and save the country from Chuck Schumer.

PK'S NOTE: This, and that he has a Soros drone working for him so this says to me that he's got Progressivism in him or has been compromised.

Marco Rubio is Dead to Me

Young, handsome and Hispanic, Marco Rubio was once hailed as one of the new faces of the Republican Party. But now we learn that he actually brings two new faces to the GOP.
One that says one thing one moment and another that says a different thing at a different moment.

After all, while Rubio appeared in this deceptive ad touting the supposed conservative nature of his amnesty bill, The Examiner tells us the following:

In a Spanish-language interview Sunday with the network Univision, Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform group, made his strongest statement yet that legalization of the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants must happen before any new border security or internal enforcement measures are in place, and will in no way be conditional on any security requirements.
"Let's be clear," Rubio said. "Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence."

And then comes the death of the nation.

The Gang of Eight (GOE) scamnesty bill would grant legalization to more than 30 million migrants - and the number could be far higher - over the next 10 years, who will then have further access to taxpayer-funded services, programs and handouts. Moreover, demographic electoral analysis clearly shows that virtually all these new "Americans" would vote for socialist politicians (read: liberal Democrats), just as they did in their native lands. So I understand why GOE-Scam authors Dick Durbin (D-IL), Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) consider the bill a good idea. I understand why Mexico considers it a good idea. I understand why China, Russia and any other nation that wanted American power and culture neutralized would consider it a good idea. But why, Senator Rubio, do you consider the bill a good idea? You and your politics keep some very strange and alarming bedfellows.

So I have something to say, and this isn't just for Rubio. Any politician - Democrat, Republican or independent - who supports amnesty in any form or by any name is dead to me.

Dead.

Immigration is a deal-breaker issue because it involves forces with the power to reshape your land into a different nation altogether. Thus, I would say that there can be no compromise on it, except that compromise isn't even on the horizon. That is to say, imagine the powers-that-be didn't have the will to punish the current crop of apprehended bank robbers; instead, they wanted to grant them amnesty and let them keep their ill-gotten gains. But they promised that if we agreed to this plan, they would increase police presence and reinforce bank-vault doors in the future. Would you consider this compromise? Would it even be that if we granted amnesty to only 20 percent of bank robbers?

Agreeing to facilitate law-breaking isn't compromise - it's capitulation. In a sane world, you don't allow criminals to reap the benefits of their law-breaking; you punish them. Compromise would be if we were discussing ending all immigration - as we should do - but then agreed to settle for a mere reduction in the numbers.

But it appears that some so-called "conservatives" have taken a high-dose stupid pill. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Ronald Reagan got bitten by his 1986 amnesty (which he called a "mistake") when he agree to legalize the law-breakers in return for a Democrat promise of border enforcement, a promise that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. And since then we've had six more amnesties.

Fact: the Democrats have never secured the border.

And they never will.

Oh, if the new arrivals had a history of voting GOP, the border would be locked down so tight a bacterium couldn't breach it. There'd be a wall with a fence on top of it, military patrols and Star Wars-type drones with heat-seeking technology buzzing about. But the Democrats have no intention of rejecting their main constituency: anyone who isn't Americanized.

And that's the point. Allowing immigration doesn't just invite new people into your nation - it invites new voters into your nation. And any Republican who believes that the Hispanic voting bloc can be wooed with Rubioesque pandering is far too ignorant and dangerous to hold office.

If Marco Rubio and his fellow travelers want to hasten the death of traditional America, they are dead to me. Let's ensure that their political careers rest in peace long before the republic does.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/marco_rubio_is_dead_to_me.html#ixzz2W0o1bKpT

Energy Dep't Spending Millions So You Can Buy a $50K Hydrogen-Powered Car

- See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/energy-dept-spending-millions-so-you-can-buy-50k-hydrogen-powered-car#sthash.ZG1avQwi.dpuf

The Energy Dept Spending Millions So You Can Buy A 50K Hydrogen-Powered Car

The Energy Department has $9 million more taxpayer dollars to spend on projects that may make a very expensive car less expensive and more acceptable to consumers.

The latest round of funding is intended to accelerate the development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, backup power systems, and hydrogen refueling stations.

"These investments will strengthen U.S. leadership in cost-effective hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and help industry bring these technologies into the marketplace at lower cost," the news release said.

The cost of making a hydrogen fuel cell-powered car has plummeted, USA Today reported last month. Vehicles that cost around $1 million in past years now cost about $140,000 to produce, and Toyota said it expects the cost to be around $50,000 three years from now, when it plans to begin selling its models in the U.S.

Ironically, the Energy Department credits cheaper fossil fuel with reducing the cost of producing hydrogen fuel cells:

"Recent development of the United States’ tremendous shale gas resources has not only helped directly cut electricity and transportation costs for consumers and businesses, but is also helping to reduce the costs of producing hydrogen and operating hydrogen fuel cells," the Energy Department said.

Hydrogen vehicles emit only heat and water as byproducts. But it takes energy to produce hydrogen, and if that energy does not come from renewable sources, then fuel-cell cars are not as green as they seem, Business Insider reported in May.

The projects selected for the new round of funding will "demonstrate, deploy, and validate" hydrogen and fuel cell technologies in real-world environments.

H2USA

The funding announcement, aimed at industry, academia, and national labs, comes four weeks after the Energy Department announced a new public-private partnership to "deploy hydrogen infrastructure."

Called H2USA, the new partnership brings together automakers, government agencies, gas suppliers, and the hydrogen and fuel cell industries to coordinate research and identify cost-effective solutions to deploy infrastructure that can deliver hydrogen fuel in the United States.

Current members of the H2USA partnership include the American Gas Association, Association of Global Automakers, the California Fuel Cell Partnership, the Electric Drive Transportation Association, the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association, Hyundai Motor America, ITM Power, Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition, Mercedes-Benz USA, Nissan North America Research and Development, Proton OnSite, Toyota Motor North America, and Honda.

The push to develop hydrogen fuel vehicles began under President George W. Bush and has accelerated under President Obama.

Major barriers to mass production include the high cost of production and a lack of infrastructure to support the vehicles.

There also are safety concerns about the possibility of hydrogen leaks stemming from crashes or refueling. Hydrogen gas is extremely flammable.

In 2008, Honda began leasing its FCX Clarity Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle (FCEV) to selected customers in California, where a few hydrogen fueling stations and service centers are located.

Honda says its FCX Clarity has a driving range of approximately 240 miles.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/energy-dept-spending-millions-so-you-can-buy-50k-hydrogen-powered-car#sthash.ZG1avQwi.dpuf

Read: Republican Rep. Notices IRS Agents Training with AR-15s During DHS Tour: ‘I’m Looking Into the Issue Now’

Hot Mic Catches Egyptian Politician Discussing ‘War’ with ‘Enemies’ Israel and America

Just last month, Secretary of State John Kerry quietly sent Egypt an additional $1.3 billion, even though Egypt has failed to live up to democracy standards. That largesse didn’t stop a prominent Egyptian politician from talking about Egypt’s “enemy” the United States in what some pundits are classifying as a classic and embarrassing “hot mic” moment.

President Mohammed Morsi gathered a group of politicians last week who thought they were speaking privately at a parliamentary meeting. But as seen in an Egyptian television video of the meeting — excerpts of which were later translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) — they were actually on live television, cringingly discussing secret ways to stop Ethiopia’s Nile River dam project which threatens water flowing to Egypt.

The New York Times blog reports:

Unaware that their words were being broadcast live on a state-owned television channel, many of those seated around the table said the dam was in fact a secret American and Israeli plot to undermine Egypt that must be stopped at all costs.

The participants learned they were on live TV only after Magdi Ahmad Hussein, chairman of the Islamic Labor Party, suggested that all present vow not to leak any information to the media. Before being told he was on television, Hussein described the U.S. as an enemy [emphasis added]:

I’m very fond of battles. With the enemies, of course – with America and Israel, but this battle must be waged with maximum judiciousness and calm. Even though this is a secret meeting, we must all take an oath not to leak anything to the media, unless it is done officially by sister Pakinam [el-Sharkawy, a Morsi aide]. We need an official plan for popular national security, even if we…

The viewer sees him being handed a note, which presumably points out that his words are not confined to the room. Hussein laughs, then continues with the anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric: “Okay… Fine… The principles behind what I’m saying are not really secret… Our war is with America and Israel, not with Ethiopia. Therefore, engaging in a war… This is my opinion…”

President Morsi says out for the benefit of all in the room, “This meeting is being aired live on TV,” a comment which prompts laughter all around.

In damage control mode, as if he knew all along that he was on camera, Hussein followed up by saying, “I am not presenting a secret plan or anything. All the countries do what I am saying and what has been said by others. All countries with regional conflicts do that.”

“I say to the Egyptian people: Nobody can turn off your water supply – unless they want to turn the Egyptians into the world’s most extremist people. Imagine what this people would do if its water were turned off – what all 80 million of us would do to Israel and America if our water were turned off,” Hussein concluded [emphasis added].

According to the New York Times, someone afterwards could be heard off camera saying, “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

Morsi later appeared to try to send a calming message to Ethiopia, even though other participants in the parliamentary session were openly discussing sabotaging their southern neighbor, including via covert operations, supporting rebel groups or destroying the dam altogether.

“We have a lot of respect for the Sudanese people in the north and the south, and we respect their decisions, and the same is true with regard to the Ethiopian people. We are not about to start any aggression against anyone whatsoever, or affront anyone whatsoever,” Morsi said.

“But we have very serious measures to protect every single drop of Nile water – every single drop of water,” Morsi added.

Middle East analyst Barry Rubin of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) tells TheBlaze, “Here we have possibly the most embarrassing open microphone scandal in history.”

In an article which discussed the scene, Rubin wrote: “Egyptian leaders discussed covert operations to destroy the dam or giving covert support to rebel groups. This gives some hints of what longer-term policy toward Israel might well be. Advocates of aggressive action included moderate politicians.”

Before it was revealed that they were on camera, liberal politician Ayman Nour, chairman of the Ghad Al-Thawra Party suggested leaking a false story to the media suggesting Egypt might be preparing for war. He said:

The Ethiopian newspapers say that Egypt has no military option. They say that Egypt does not possess the capabilities – no airplanes, no missiles – and that Sudan would not allow this… Indeed, Sudan’s position is nauseating. It is much weaker than it should be. But we could leak intelligence information. We could leak that Egypt is trying to buy planes for aerial refueling, and so on. Even if this is unrealistic, it would bring results on the diplomatic track.

The water issue is so sensitive in Egypt, because the country’s agriculture is completely dependent on the Nile River. According to the New York Times, Ethiopian officials say the dam will not be used for agriculture, just for the production of electricity and therefore it should not substantially decrease the amount of water flowing to Egypt.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/12/im-very-fond-of-battles-egyptian-cabinet-minister-caught-on-hot-mic-discussing-war-with-enemies-israel-and-america/

Mali manual suggests al-Qaida has feared weapon

The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class.

Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.

The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

"The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to MANPADS' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles," said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the United States' military command in Africa and an instructor to U.S. Special Forces. "Why else bother to write the guide if you don't have the weapons? ... If AQIM not only has the MANPADS, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively," he added, "then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond."

This is not the first al-Qaida-linked group thought to have MANPADS - they were circulating in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a terror cell in Somalia recently claimed to have the SA-7 in a video. But the U.S. desperately wanted to keep the weapons out of the hands of al-Qaida's largest affiliate on the continent, based in Mali. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a U.S. team flew to Libya to secure Gadhafi's stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.

By the time they got there, many had already been looted.

"The MANPADS were specifically being sought out," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, who catalogued missing weapons at dozens of munitions depots and often found nothing in the boxes labeled with the code for surface-to-air missiles.

The manual is believed to be an excerpt from a terrorist encyclopedia edited by Osama bin Laden. It adds to evidence for the weapon found by French forces during their land assault in Mali earlier this year, including the discovery of the SA-7's battery pack and launch tube, according to military statements and an aviation official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to comment.

The knowledge that the terrorists have the weapon has already changed the way the French are carrying out their five-month-old offensive in Mali. They are using more fighter jets rather than helicopters to fly above its range of 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) from the ground, even though that makes it harder to attack the jihadists. They are also making cargo planes land and take off more steeply to limit how long they are exposed, in line with similar practices in Iraq after an SA-14 hit the wing of a DHL cargo plane in 2003.

And they have added their own surveillance at Mali's international airport in Bamako, according to two French aviation officials and an officer in the Operation Serval force. All three spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.

"There are patrols every day," said the French officer. "It's one of the things we have not entrusted to the Malians, because the stakes are too high."
...
An SA-7 tracks a plane by directing itself toward the source of the heat, the engine. It takes time and practice, however, to fire it within range. The failure of the jihadists in Mali so far to hit a plane could mean that they cannot position themselves near airports with commercial flights, or that they are not yet fully trained to use the missile.

"This is not a 'Fire and forget' weapon," said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. "There's a paradox here. One the one hand it's not easy to use, but against any commercial aircraft there would be no defenses against them. It's impossible to protect against it. ... If terrorists start training and learn how to use them, we'll be in a lot of trouble."
...
Neighbors say they saw foreign fighters running laps each day, carrying out target practice and inhaling and holding their breath with a pipe-like object on their shoulder. The drill is standard practice for shoulder-held missiles, including the SA-7.

As the jihadists fled ahead of the arrival of French troops who liberated Timbuktu on Jan. 28, they left the manual behind, along with other instructional material, including a spiral-bound pamphlet showing how to use the KPV-14.5 anti-aircraft machine gun and another on how to make a bomb out of ammonium nitrate, among other documents retrieved by the AP. Residents said the jihadists grabbed reams of paper from inside the building, doused them in fuel and set them alight. The black, feathery ash lay on top of the sand in a ditch just outside the building's gate.

However, numerous buildings were still full of scattered papers.

"They just couldn't destroy everything," said neighbor Mohamed Alassane. "They appeared to be in a panic when the French came. They left in a state of disorder."

The manual is illustrated with grainy images of Soviet-looking soldiers firing the weapon. Point-by-point instructions explain how to insert the battery, focus on the target and fire.

The manual also explains that the missile will malfunction above 45 degrees Celsius, the temperature in the deserts north of Timbuktu. And it advises the shooter to change immediately into a second set of clothes after firing to avoid detection.

Its pages are numbered 313 through 338, suggesting they came from elsewhere. Mathieu Guidere, an expert on Islamic extremists at the University of Toulouse, believes the excerpts are lifted from the Encyclopedia of Jihad, an 11-volume survey on the craft of war first compiled by the Taliban in the 1990s and later codified by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, who led a contingent of Arab fighters in Afghanistan at the time, paid to have the encyclopedia translated into Arabic, according to Guidere, author of a book on al-Qaida's North African branch.

However, the cover page of the manual boasts the name of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

"It's a way to make it their own," said Guidere. "It's like putting a logo on something. ... It shows the historic as well as the present link between al-Qaida core and AQIM."

Bin Laden later assembled a team of editors to update the manual, put it on CD-ROMs and eventually place it on the Internet, in a move that lay the groundwork for the globalization of jihad, according to terrorism expert Jarret Brachman, who was the director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center when the al-Qaida encyclopedia was first found.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms expert in Australia, confirmed that the information in the manual in Timbuktu on the missile's engagement range, altitude and weight appeared largely correct. He cautions though that the history of the SA-7 is one of near-misses, specifically because it takes training to use.

"Even if you get your hands on an SA-7, it's no guarantee of success," he said. "However, if someone manages to take down a civilian aircraft, it's hundreds of dead instantly. It's a high impact, low-frequency event, and it sows a lot of fear."

http://www.wtop.com/289/3354224/Mali-manual-suggests-al-Qaida-has-feared-weapon