Got a Secret? Willing to Bet On It?

Posted on July 29, 2003 in Scoundrels Strange

You don’t love your country enough to report terrorist activity? Maybe we can interest you in a little political poker instead?

Cries went up and jaws slammed on the floor when the Defense Advanced Researchs Project Agency (DARPA) proposed that a “stock market” (more like a casino) be set up as “a tool against terrorism”:

The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

DARPA itself says:

A market that addresses defense-related events may potentially aggregate information from both classified and unclassified sources. This poses the problem of extracting useful data from markets without compromising national security. Markets must also offer compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties. The markets must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation.

In other words, the DARPA believes that good citizens who volunteer information on their own are fools. The next time you see terrorist activity, wait a bit and place your bet is the new name of the game.

Word is out that the Bush Administration has discontinued the program as of this morning. Paul Wolfowitz is claiming that it was all the fault of the Clinton Administration. The question I have is how come, three years into the Bush Administration, this thing was let to fly by high officials? The development and the implementation came during the Bush years. Or is it just a great big hoax?

Jeremy of Frog N’ Blog included a link to the DARPA information page for what it calls “Augmented Cognition“. Is this project a red herring designed to flag attention away from the greater incompetence and/or treachery of the Bush Administration in propelling us into the Iraq Adventure? The project seemed to come right out of the blue: are all the fancy graphics on the site nothing more than a front?

It could be that the Clinton Administration launched this as Wolfowitz contends. It could be that the Bush Administration just wasn’t watching closely enough to see this dead dog of an idea being developed. Which in itself isn’t a great vote of confidence for Wolfowitz or his master. Why, if it is such a bad idea, did they let it go so far? Who let this albatross have it’s one day of flight and for what reason?

Whether the Pentagon released this because market-obsessed ideologues in the Clinton and the Bush administrations wanted to give it a try, whether it got out because they weren’t watching, or whether it is nothing but a deception, we have a good reason to question the competence and the intentions of the man immoraly occupying the White House and those he picked to run the affairs of our free nation.

A deliberate flop that could be tied to Clinton is what I have my money on.

Thanks to Jeremy and Raven for the links.