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[BigLee Haslup <biglee AT haslups.com>]

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