Policing Post-War Iraq: Insurgency, Civilian Police, and the Reconstruction of Society

We argue that the Iraqi insurgency is disproportionately targeted at the new Iraqi civilian police, not because of the role police would fulfill as representatives of the state, but because a well-established and regularly functioning police would represent an important and highly visible indicator of a pacified Iraqi society. First and foremost, we maintain, the insurgency is aimed at the Iraqi police forces in order to prevent a normalization of Iraq’s civil society.

The attacks against police typically involve suicide bombings (on the person or by car) and roadside bombings of police convoys or military convoys escorting police. Some of the attacks combine multiple means, such as rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and car bombs. Animals rigged with explosive devices have also been used (Oppel and Schmitt 2005). Some insurgents have disguised themselves as police officers to carry out attacks.

Protest Policing in Trump’s America

The 135-page federal training manual is designed to provide local law enforcement with “the knowledge and skills required to manage and control crowds and demonstrations.” References in the manual to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter Movements indicate that it has been updated recently, although the policing tactics will be familiar to those who have taken part in social movements for the last several decades.

An Activist’s Guide to Police Tactics

The following is a user’s guide to understanding police tactics and capabilities culled mostly from police sources, specifically “ACPO Manual of Guidance on KEEPING THE PEACE” 2010 as well as various police blogs and forums:

Spoiled Onions

While most exit relays are honest and run by well-meaning volunteers, there are exceptions: In the past, some exit relays were documented to have sniffed and tampered with relayed traffic. The exposed attacks included mostly HTTPS man-in-the-middle (MitM) and SSL stripping.

While 65 “spoiled onions” sounds like a large number, it is in fact a rather small number when you consider the size of the set of Tor exit relays: while the Tor network consists of around 1,000 exit relays at any given point in time, the overall number is higher considering the network’s churn rate (see Section 5.7 in our research paper). As a result, the probability of encountering a malicious exit relay is small.

‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse

According to the Collapse OS site, Dupras envisions a world where the global supply chain collapses by 2030. In this possible future—kind of a medium-apocalypse—populations won’t be able to mass produce electronics anymore, but they’ll still be an enormous source of political and social power. Anyone who can scavenge electronics and reprogram them will gain a huge advantage over those who don’t.

The Amateur Radio Operators Preparing for the Worst

The advantages of ham radios in a disaster situation are twofold: They’re free from large infrastructure, and they’re incredibly flexible bits of technology. “An emergency operation system might need a big generator to keep things going, but we can get by with batteries or solar power,” Corey explains. If a natural or man-made disaster takes out power, Internet, or phone lines, “We can do global communications with nothing between the two systems but ether.”