From today’s Washington Post, "Mideast 'Futures' System Set - Pentagon Project Would Use Market to Seek Information":
The Pentagon is setting up a commodity-market style trading system in which investors would be able to bet on political and economic events in the Middle East -- including the likelihood of assassinations and terrorist attacks.
This is another nasty piece of work brought to us by Bush appointee John Poindexter and his Information Awareness Office in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Here’s how they describe the program, called FutureMAP on their website:
The DARPA FutureMAP program will identify the types of market-based mechanisms that are most suitable to aggregate information in the defense context, will develop information systems to manage the markets, and will measure the effectiveness of markets for several tasks. Open issues that will drive the types of market include information security and participant incentives. 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.
(Markets sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation? Hell, if they can pull that off, let’s move the SEC to the DOD. Maybe a little more fire power will get all those corrupt CEOs and investment banks / brokerage firms in line.)
Net Exchange, the company responsible for the design, development, and operation of the trading system (called PAM - the Policy Analysis Market) describes the concept in more detail on their website, noting in their example of PAM futures and derivatives contracts that the traders "can make a handsome profit".
Oh, well, when they put it like that, it hardly sounds disgusting and reprehensible at all.
