Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

internetworkers - Re: [internetworkers] Re: truly weird, does not appear to be a hoax...

internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Maria Winslow <maria.winslow AT windows-linux.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Re: truly weird, does not appear to be a hoax...
  • Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 08:54:35 -0400

Well, it turns out that "futures market" is not what they meant at all, so
there was no point in ranting about it. The NY Times article was misleading,
and implied that the public at large would be invited, there would be money
involved, and that it would somehow be like a futures market. I heard later
that it was only for people in the intelligence community, and there would be
no actual betting. So it sounds like a distributed self-organizing
information analyzer, which I think is a great and novel way to process all
the small pieces of information into useful analysis.

It looks like the actual reason it was killed was that they slipped it by the
Ways and Means committee who were blindsided by the announcement, and
comparing it to a futures market was stupid.

Ok, back to work ;)

Maria

On Tuesday 29 July 2003 02:56 pm, BigLee Haslup wrote:
> One last whack at the dead horse and I'll stop. I promise.
>
> I guess I am not surprised that the Terrorist Futures game has been
> killed. It was, I still think, a brilliant idea, but one that is hard to
> explain -- and easy to mischaracterize or simply to misunderstand. This
> makes it difficult to defend, politically, and its supporters have done
> themselves no favors by using the "futures market" metaphor to try to
> explain it. Given that I despair that the general public will ever
> understand the idea, I am rather more hopeful about the readership of this
> group. So here goes.
>
> We start with the fundamental problem faced by the intelligence agencies:
> their job is to find out the plans of terrorist organizations, but none of
> the members of the intelligence agencies are terrorists. All of their
> information has to come from the outside. So they snoop, they spy, they
> try to infiltrate, they pay informants and, generally, they ask a lot of
> questions. This nets them a certain amount of information but, resources
> being limited, not all of the information that is out there. On any
> subject of interest to the intelligence community it is an absolute
> certainty that there are hundreds of people outside of the community who
> have better information than they do. There are the terrorists themselves,
> of course, but they can hardly be expected to come forward and volunteer
> information about their plans. But there are also hundreds of perfectly
> innocent people who have contacts that tell them things. A college student
> from Damascus might hear things from his uncle back home who runs a coffee
> shop. A barber in Madrid might understand some Russian. The information
> is diffuse and the people who have the information often have no way of
> evaluating its importance, but it is out there and, if there was some way
> to sort it out it would be a huge asset.
>
> The agencies can, and do invite people with information to volunteer it but
> what this mostly elicits is an endless stream of cranks who have very
> little information but have strong opinions about the little they
> possess. The people who have good information but don't know its value are
> much less likely to come forward and tend to get lost in the flood when
> they do. So, a few people in the intelligence community hit on the idea of
> inviting the public to play a little game...
>
> They invite everyone to come to a web site and make predictions about the
> sort of event that the intelligence agencies tend to be interested in. To
> keep it serious it costs a little money to play. To make it interesting it
> pays a little money if your predictions are right. The opinionated cranks
> are welcome to play the game but they will play it badly. The system will
> not be impressed by their passion. It will merely note their inability to
> make accurate predictions. Players of rather more thought and less passion
> will play better and people who, perhaps unwittingly, have inside
> information will play best of all. The system will keep track of the
> players, tally their winnings and losses, and over time it will be able to
> rank the players, separating those who, for whatever reason, can make
> accurate predictions from those who cannot. By weighting the players
> predictions for future events according to their past performance at making
> such predictions the system should be able to concentrate the useful
> information garnered from a highly dispersed body of opinions.
>
> Intriguingly, this system ought to appeal to civil-libertarians as a way of
> casting the widest possible net for intelligence information with the
> least-possible actual spying on the public. It is voluntary on the part of
> all participants. It doesn't collect any information about the
> participants themselves, it merely allows them to make predictions and
> keeps track of how well they do. It offers a degree of anonymity which, I
> suspect, would not be absolute. Our student from Damascus might come to
> the attention of the spooks but at least they would be able to find him
> without digging through the wastepaper baskets of every student at the
> college with a foreign-sounding last name.
>
> It is a brilliant idea -- innovative, useful, sensible -- and a clear
> example of someone thinking "outside the box."
>
> This makes it an obvious target for politicians, whose reaction to such
> things is to say "Look! They are outside the box. GET THEM!!!"
>
> BigLee
>






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page