[Image: Photo by Associated Press.]There is something striking about this portrait of recently captured Somali pirates being held at the Kenya Ports Authority Port Police station in Mombasa. How they are all lined up and seated together despite their detention, still as a tightly knit squad of nimble water thugs – only now without their boat, the necessary architecture for their crime. They’re formation appears much the same as I’d expect them to be perched ...

Activists in Tucson, Arizona have been placing life-sized cutouts of Maricopa County’s insidiously regressive anti-immigrant law enforcement officials around town on street corners and at intersections, including one of the chief of armed despicability himself, America’s self-described “toughest sheriff” Joe Arpaio, and another of a Border Patrol agent, presumed to depict Nicholas Corbett, who just recently faced a hung trial for the second time after being charged with the murder of Mexican immigrant Francisco Dominguez ...

[Image: “American soldiers walked past a blast wall at Al Awad on the outskirts of Taji, Iraq, where the word VOTE has been spray painted, the day before the presidential election in the United States.” Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times.]

[Image: Neighborhood Watch, Detroit. Photo by Camilo José Vergara, NYT.]Camilo José Vergara, author of American Ruins, spotted these signs and many others like them popping up all over Detroit’s derelict buildings just before this weekend, and posted them in The New York Times. “Starting in the early 1990s,” he writes, “thousands of these eyes were placed throughout the city in hopes of deterring the arsonists who came out on Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween.” ...

On nights you’re up late in bed, sleepless with incurable headache, just beat down and wondering where the hell exactly all your hard earned income tax dollars have gone, interminably curious and confused about how they’re actually being spent; and, perhaps, more importantly, how they will go on being spent this next year, and the years to follow – well, you might be able to rest a little easier, now, I don’t know. Probably not, ...

BACK TO AFGHANISTAN…Months ago, Archis released an issue with a fascinating insert on Kabul based on one of their recent RSVP events that took a few lucky people there to investigate the security and public space dimensions of the capital city’s urban fabric. Apologetically, I failed to mention this ages ago, but alas point you there now in case you haven’t seen it already. The section was beautifully designed, mimicking a kind of Afghan daily ...

[Image: Via Brick House.]Central to the effectiveness of any form of security is its ability to project power and to exponentialize its apparent sphere of influence beyond the verifiable boundaries of its control; to dupe people, essentially. Territory – as a material of power – succeeds in part not only because it marks its authority with definite radius but also its ability to transcend that same demarcation through a more fluid and illusory expansion of ...

[Image: Defense Meteorological Satellite Program – Operational Linescan System imagery from the F16 satellite. Image and data processing by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center. DMSP data collected by the US Air Force Weather Agency. (John Agnew/Environment and Planning).]Researchers from UCLA are questioning some of the success claimed by the surge in Baghdad based on data they’ve discerned from some satellite images.By comparing the amount of light produced at night in different areas of the capital ...