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

[joey AT odoherty.net]

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
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