“Pentagon Prepares a Futures Market on Terror Attacks.” The headline in yesterday’s New York Times was unambiguous. So was the follow-up headline in today’s edition: “Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror.” What a difference a day makes.
Yesterday the Pentagon was going to open the equivalent of a Las Vegas sports book for terrorism (link is now dead). You’d be able to place bets on which global hotspot would ignite next, where and when the next coup would take place, or even when the next head of state would be assassinated.
Stranger than fiction, to be sure, but I’m not making this up.
Slated to be run by the same office within the Pentagon that brought us electronic surveillance of the American citizenry without need for formalities like a warrant (boo) and the Internet (hooray), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) scheme was disclosed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota). Congress earlier this year prohibited the use of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program against Americans.
Dorgan, to his credit, thought it was all a hoax. “Can you imagine,” Dorgan said in the first New York Times story, “if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in—and is sponsored by the government itself—people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?” Of course, there’s nothing to say that American political figures wouldn’t have been on the Pentagon’s tote board either.
Cited by the Pentagon as part of the “broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks,” the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, was said to be the brainchild of Iran-Contra convicted felon Admiral John Poindexter, who also was President Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor. Poindexter is also believed to have dreamed up the TIA program.
There’s something plainly discomforting about a government sponsored “terrorist book” but that Poindexter is involved pushes it over the line into the realm of all-time worst ideas. I mean, if we’re going to have terrorist gaming, for Pete’s sake let the professionals run it.
According to the New York Times, the Pentagon defended the program, citing success with similar futures markets in predicting events such as oil prices, elections, and movie ticket sales. The Defense Department, in a statement said, “Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions.”
In a letter to Poindexter, Wyden and Dorgan pointed out that the terrorist futures market “appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities.”
According to today’s story in the New York Times, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the terrorist book project will be dropped.
As my wife says, get three boys together and one of them is bound to get a good idea. In the case of the felon John Poindexter, it only takes one. And this one was even too weird for Wolfowitz.
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