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Pentagon Lets You Bid on Terrorism?
Elysdir writes "DARPA is creating an idea futures market, the Policy Analysis Market, to try to predict events in the Middle East. See Bloomberg article for more info." Read this article. I mean it. This is amazing.
Update: 07/29 14:45 GMT by J : The
NYT story
claims "The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events ... that were visible earlier in the day ... could no longer be seen," but those example images are still being served:
Jordanian overthrow,
bidding on assassinations,
cool graphics... Update: 07/29 16:44 GMT by M : Looks like the publicity was too much.
Omigod! Predictive tool, my ass! How desperate have we gotten to keep our economies stable in times of despair? A way to instantly give people an economic boost when tragedy strikes? I thought the balanced budget was a lot to be sacrificing for a stable economy, with these refund checks, but now, we're staking our relations with the world? Like the article points out, ``How would you feel if you were the king of Jordan and learned that the U.S. Department of Defense was creating a futures market in whether you're going to be overthrown." I really, really hope this is a joke...
perhaps the /. paranoia bug has rubbed off me a bit too much, but what are the chances that your "bets" could be used against you in the war on terrorism?
you hit three or four correct terrorist acts and the next thing you know you're in an orange jumpsuit overlooking guantanamo bay.
Mike
Holy Crap.
That's disgusting.
And, on a lighter note: Think of the money you can make taking exotic vacations and causing havok! Insider trading laws be damned, this could be a wonderfully abusable system.
God, I hope this is a joke.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
there is a similar idea already running online:
http://www.tradesports.com
you can buy/sell futures for most current events- for example, you can buy saddam futures based on when/if you think saddam will be captured, or you can bet on what kobe bryant will be charged with. this is a real site where you can make lose money- crazy stuff.
This is an interesting idea, and it should stay that way.
I'd be afraid that if I were to bet on a longshot terrorist strike and it paid off for me, that the FBI might come knocking on my door (with a battering ram).
This creates an incentive for terrorism by insane individuals.
Remember the case where someone tried to manipulate the stock market by putting cyanide in Tylenol?
I might not have the facts exactly right, but the idea is the same. The potential exists for someone to use this to make money, by finding a way to encourage the terrorist acts to come true.
You just nailed one of a major benefits of this system.
.
At the very least, this system would provide statisticians with a massive, currently relevant pool of opinions on the likelihood of any particular kind of terrorist attack occurring. The statisticians may not find anything, but honestly, for the price of running a single secure website, they're gathering an insane amount of valuable data.
That's at the very least. If it does just what it is intended to, and no more. At best . .
At best, it is a honeypot. If something major is in the works, like 9/11, what are the odds that someone, somewhere along the line wouldn't have placed some serious bets? Maybe not the terrorist himself, but what about his family? The people he stayed with in the US? Not everyone involved is going to be a Q'ran-thumping martyr. This scheme plays the self-interest of individual terrorists against the greater secrecy of terrorist proceedings, and it has the potential to be extremely revealing in that respect, simply as a massive, relatively cheap method of adding to ordinary intelligence information.
I mean, honestly, I know it sucks that they might tap your phone because of a $1,000 bet, but if you were just some guy exercising free speech, and proclaimed to the world that you would bet anyone $1,000 that there would be a major biological attack in Israel within the next week, and it got bandied about in a newspaper, your phone would be fuckin' tapped. Nothing happens, they intrude your life a little, and realize you're a crank or a nut or just a weirdo, and they leave you alone. It sucks, but at least this is something you can avoid and expect -- I mean, you do know who is running this thing, right?
Check out this site (german only, sorry). It describes a similar system, Wahlstreet, which was used to predict voter opinion during the 2002 Bundestag elections in Germany. People traded shares of the parties taking part in elections.
The idea of these types of markets is that stock trading does in fact give a really good image of people's opinion. After all, it is about YOUR money if you voice your opinion.
The results of the Wahlstreet project support this theory: The final poll results were consistent with the election results. In fact, Wahlstreet scored second place in a comparison of the difference between election and survey results of this and some other (conventional) survey institutions.
I'm guessing that the parent post got marked "flamebait" because it's a vicious satire of the intelligence, personality, and decision-making style of the people currently running the US government. But guess what? It's also dead-on accurate. This is pretty much a true-to-life portrayal of how Rumsfeld at al. have dealt with the intelligence community since 9/11, if not before.
Sometimes, pointing out the foibles of those in power isn't just flamebait. Sometimes, it's called telling the truth.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So here's my problem: If I invest and the government uses my "vote" that something will happen to prevent it from happening, I lose my money, because the event didn't occur.
If the event actually happens and I have predicted it, I get my phones tapped, a visit from the FBI, probable interrogation and possible imprisionment for having "terrorist ties." What exactly is the incentive for an investor to enter this market?
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
When the futures fluctuate dramatically due to the new 'interest,' the Pentagon won't be the only one who knows. This system essentially lets terrorists know the probability of success of a given terrorist action before they launch it. They can see which of their plans have leaks and which do not, and use that data to organize more effectively.
This is an idea which Has Not Been Thought Out.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
But that's exactly where this hare brained scheme fails...someone puts up "japan subway bombing", but do they do that on the basis of knowing such a plot exists? No! It's sucked right out of their ass! It's pure conjecture....and the DoD is hoping pure conjecture will somehow magically change into fact!
/and actually thinks it will work!/ doesn't deserve your confidence.
And their mechanism for that is a bunch of idiots betting on randomly selected plots. Not actual intelligence, ears on the ground, but pure fiction mixed in with some intel and voted on by people who think they can make some money!
I mean, how dumb can you get? The poor programmers working on this must either be laughing or crying...and I'd hope the latter.
This is wrong on so many levels I'm struck into incoherence just trying to organise all the points which are wrong/dumb...so many are forming in my mind that I can hardly put them into order.
And this was voted through! Shit, just run a plane into the whole DoD/Darpa/Pentagon and the House (of Representatives?) and restart the whole system from scratch...a system which brings forth something like this
And as an aside, I wonder how long it will take until the first 'bet realisation contracts' [=pay us and we'll make it happen] are up on ebay...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I'm only going to say this once, but I'm going to say it loudly.
You sure as fuck weren't watching the implied volatility and put/call ratios on airlines the week before 9/11.
If you don't know what that sentence means, you need to do some research. A lot more research. The story has since been picked up by conspiracy theorists, and the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty much nil. Dig back to September and October 2001, and read the financial press instead. You can find a lot of good starting points in the comments of this Slashdot article.
For the record, I believe (on circumstancial evidence - namely the rapidity with which the story was buried, leaving only conspiracy theorists to increase the noise-to-signal ratio,) that the SEC did the Right Thing - turned their conclusions over to other organizations who could ensure that the Right Thing (namely, outside of SEC jurisdiction) would eventually get done.
Also for the record, as I don't have a need to know, I can only hope that my speculation outlined above is correct. I do look forward to finding out when it's all declassified some decades hence. Gonna make for some damn interesting reading.