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  • From: joey AT odoherty.net
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [internetworkers] Re: Terror Market Closes
  • Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 19:15:07 -0400

This website may be of interest:

https://www.tradesports.com/jsp/intrade/contractSearch/xml/ContractSearchInner.jsp?eventclassinput=3&eventgroupid=&viewMode=current&expand=false#

You can get pretty good odds if you think WMD will be found in Iraq by
July 31. ;)

/joeyo

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 03:29:53PM -0400, Paul Jones wrote:
> this just in to NYTimes
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29WIRE-PENT.html
>
> July 29, 2003
> Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror
> By CARL HULSE
>
> ASHINGTON, July 29 ??? The Pentagon office that proposed spying
> electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly
> abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on
> forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online
> futures market.
>
> Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign
> Relations Committee today that program was being "terminated."
>
> And Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate
> Armed Services Committee, said today that he had conferred with the
> program's director at the Pentagon, "and we mutually agreed that this
> thing should be stopped."
>
> Those statements signaled the end of a program that was met with
> astonishment and derision almost from the moment it was disclosed.
>
> Under the discarded plan, traders bullish on a biological attack on
> Israel, say, or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike
> would have had the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on
> a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
> Agency.
>
> The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and
> part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent
> terrorist attacks." But two Democratic senators who disclosed the plan on
> Monday called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the
> program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President
> Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.
>
> One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea
> seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a
> hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "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?"
>
> After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke out,
> the Pentagon sought to play down the importance of a program for which the
> Bush administration has sought $8 million through 2005. The White House
> also altered the Web site so that the potential events to be considered by
> the market that were visible earlier in the day at
> www.policyanalysismarket.org could no longer be seen.
> But by that time, Republican officials in the Senate were privately
> shaking their heads over the planned trading. One top aide said he hoped
> that the Pentagon had a good explanation for it.
>
> But it seemed obvious today that no explanation would suffice politically.
> Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican majority leader, said as
> much in a letter to Senators Warner and Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican
> who heads the Appropriations Committee.
>
> "I cannot conceive of any reason why the United States should be involved
> in a project of this nature," Mr. Frist wrote.
> The Pentagon, in initially defending the program, said such futures
> trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices,
> elections and movie ticket sales.
> "Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and
> timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense
> Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to
> be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often
> better than expert opinions."
>
> But it became abundantly clear this morning, at the hearing of Senator
> Warner's committee, that whatever the logic of the Pentagon's position it
> had no chance of surviving politically.
>
> "I must say this is perhaps the most irresponsible, outrageous and poorly
> thought-out of anything that I have heard the administration propose to
> date," said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader.
>
> According to descriptions given to Congress, available at the Web site and
> provided by the two senators, traders who register would have deposited
> money into an account similar to a stock account and win or lose money
> based on predicting events.
> "For instance," Mr. Wyden said, "you may think early on that Prime
> Minister X is going to be assassinated. So you buy the futures contracts
> for 5 cents each. As more people begin to think the person's going to be
> assassinated, the cost of the contract could go up, to 50 cents.
> "The payoff if he's assassinated is $1 per future. So if it comes to pass,
> and those who bought at 5 cents make 95 cents. Those who bought at 50
> cents make 50 cents."
> The senators also suggested that terrorists could participate because the
> traders' identities will be unknown.
>
> "This 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," they said in a letter to Admiral
> Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office,
> which the opponents said had developed the idea.
>
> The program, called the Policy Analysis Market, had intended to begin
> registering up to 1,000 traders on Friday. It instead became the latest
> problem for the advanced projects agency, or Darpa, a Pentagon unit that
> has run into controversy for the Terrorism Information Office. Admiral
> Poindexter once described a sweeping electronic surveillance plan as a way
> of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect
> medical, travel, credit and financial records.
>
> Worried about the reach of the program, Congress this year prohibited what
> was called the Total Information Awareness program from being used against
> Americans. Its name was changed to the Terrorism Information Awareness
> program.
> This month, the Senate agreed to block all spending on the program. The
> House did not. Mr. Wyden said he hoped that the new disclosure about the
> trading program would be the death blow for Admiral Poindexter's plan.
> The Pentagon did not provide details of the Policy Analysis Market, like
> how much money participants would have had to deposit in accounts to
> participate. Until today, trading had been scheduled to begin on Oct. 1,
> with the number of participants initially limited to 1,000 and possibly
> expanding to 10,000 by Jan. 1.
>
> "Involvement in this group prediction process should prove engaging and
> may prove profitable," the market's Web site said.
>
> The overview of the plan said the market was planning to focus on the
> economic, civil and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel,
> Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey and the consequences of United States
> involvement with those nations. The creators of the market envisioned
> other trappings of existing markets like derivatives.
> In a statement, Darpa said the trading idea was "currently a small
> research program that faces a number of major technical challenges and
> uncertainties."
>
> "Chief among these," the agency said, "are: Can the market survive and
> will people continue to participate when U.S. authorities use it to
> prevent terrorist attacks? Can futures markets be manipulated by
> adversaries?"
> Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wyden called for an immediate end to the project and
> said they would use its existence to justify cutting off financial support
> for the overall effort. In the letter to Admiral Poindexter, they called
> the initiative a "wasteful and absurd" use of tax dollars.
>
> "The American people want the federal government to use its resources
> enhancing our security, not gambling on it," the letter said.
> The two lawmakers said the program needed to adhere to a high standard
> because of the involvement of Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted of
> lying to Congress about weapons sales to Iran and illegal aid to
> Nicaraguan rebels. His conviction was later reversed on the ground that he
> had been given immunity for testimony in which he lied.
>
> In their letter, the senators cited the example from the Pentagon of a
> bioterror attack on Israel.
>
> "Surely, such a threat should be met with intelligence gathering of the
> highest quality ??? not by putting the question to individuals betting on
> an Internet Web site," they wrote.
>
> ==========================================================================
> Paul Jones
> "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/
> pjones AT ibiblio.org voice: (919) 962-7600 fax: (919) 962-8071
> ===========================================================================
>
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--
Joseph E. O'Doherty 136 Hudson Hall
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering P.O. Box 90281
Duke University Duke University
joseph.odoherty AT duke.edu Durham. NC 27708-0281
phone: (919)660-5167 gpg fingerprint: B663781B




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