XPost: ny.politics, nyc.politics, nyc.general 
 From: gamma@nyc.rr.com 
  
 Hill hits gambling program on terror 
  
  
 By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES 
  
  
  
 The latest brainchild of a contentious Pentagon program € an online 
 gambling 
 parlor that allows anonymous investors to make money predicting 
 assassinations and terrorist attacks € is drawing fire from Capitol 
 Hill. 
 The Terrorist Information Awareness office will open the waging scheme 
 Friday and begin signing up 1,000 traders to deposit funds for 
 transactions. 
 In a report to Congress, TIA said the program will provide the Defense 
 Department "with market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and 
 predicting future events." Online trading begins Oct. 1, and by Jan. 1, 
 at 
 least 10,000 traders will be able to participate in the Policy Analysis 
 Market. Investors who successfully predict, for example, a missile 
 attack by 
 North Korea, the assassination of Palestinian Authority chief Yasser 
 Arafat 
 or the overthrow of the king of Jordan would profit financially, said 
 the 
 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency oversees the TIA 
 program. Critics on Capitol Hill sent a letter to TIA Director John 
 Poindexter yesterday demanding that the trading scheme end immediately. 
 They 
 also are taking legislative action to kill funding for the entire TIA 
 program. "The federal government is encouraging people to bet on and 
 make 
 money from atrocities and terrorist attacks," said Sen. Ron Wyden, 
 Oregon 
 Democrat, during a press conference disclosing the program's activities. 
 Mr. 
 Wyden called the terrorist market "grotesque" and "bizarre." "Betting on 
 terrorism is morally wrong," he said. "It's a harebrained scheme," said 
 Sen. 
 Byron L. Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. "I think this is an unbelievably 
 stupid program that is so devoid of value. It is offensive to almost 
 everyone." A spokesman for DARPA issued a written statement that the 
 agency 
 has "undertaken this research as part of its effort to investigate the 
 broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks and will 
 continue to reevaluate the technical promise of the program before 
 committing additional funds beyond Fiscal Year 2003." The program will 
 explore new ways "to help analysts predict and thereby prevent terrorist 
 attacks through the use of future market mechanisms," the statement 
 said. 
 "Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and 
 timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information. Futures 
 markets 
 have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as election 
 results; they are often better than expert opinions," the statement 
 said. 
 DARPA will not have access to investors' identities or their funds. "We 
 call 
 on you to put an immediate end to a project being pursued by your office 
 that would allow anyone € even terrorists € to profit by placing 
 anonymous 
 bets on future terrorist attacks," the senators said in the letter. "We 
 think that this wasteful and absurd use of taxpayer dollars should be 
 stopped. We will also advocate against appropriating the $8 million that 
 your office has requested for the Futures Markets Applied to Prediction 
 (FutureMAP) program that expands this scheme to promote betting on 
 terrorism," the letter said. More than $800,000 has been spent to 
 develop 
 the market. Failure to identify traders would "encourage terrorists to 
 participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet 
 against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities," the 
 letter 
 said. Any winnings are expected to be paid from the pool of bets. 
 "FutureMAP's innovation is to use markets to replace today's approach of 
 discussion and consensus among experts. The new approach is to set up, 
 as it 
 were, a 'market' in two kinds of future contracts: One pays $1 if an 
 attack 
 takes place; the other pays $1 if there is no attack," the report said. 
 "Market participants trade the issued contracts freely. Prices and 
 spreads 
 signal probabilities and confidence. Since the markets provide 
 incentives 
 for good judgment and self-selection, the market will effectively 
 aggregate 
 information among knowledgeable participants," the report said. Mr. 
 Wyden is 
 the leading legislative critic of the TIA program and has succeeded in 
 including language in the Senate Defense spending bill to zero out 
 funding 
 for the project. He and Mr. Dorgan said they hope their House colleagues 
 will kill the program when the spending bill goes to conference. Mr. 
 Wyden 
 said he has spoken to TIA officials about numerous concerns, including 
 the 
 program's plans to create a supercomputer data-mining base to track 
 terrorists, but to no avail. "I've told them they have to get out of 
 never-never land. We believe they aren't getting the message, and we 
 want to 
 close this program," Mr. Wyden said. 
 -- 
  
  
 "We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would 
 instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab 
 world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter- 
 day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless 
 hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning 
 them to fight in what would be an unwinable urban guerilla 
 war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever 
 greater instability." 
 -George H. W. Bush in his 1998 book  "A World Transformed", 
  
  
 http://minime.de/bush/ 
 http://www.911pi.com/ 
 http://www.warprofiteers.com/ 
 http://www.mindprod.com/bush911.html 
 http://www.rise4news.net/Saddam-CIA.html 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)