vice | In 2003, scandal erupted when two US senators went public with word
that the Pentagon was planning to launch a public marketplace that would
encourage investors to bet, anonymously, on the likelihood of acts
of terror occurring in the Middle East. A brainchild of DARPA, the
effort was called Future Markets Applied to Prediction, or FutureMAP. It
was quickly dubbed the "terrorism futures market."
The betting was to be done on a sophisticated
website: PolicyAnalysisMarket.org. Users would peruse the detailed
geopolitical information there—loads of data, graphs, and maps of the
region—and enter bets on, say, if and when the King of Jordan would be
assassinated and the monarchy overthrown. The Pentagon's rationale, it
insisted, was to create a kind of Intrade for the intelligence
community; something that would harness market forces to predict—and,
ostensibly, to prevent—terrorist acts and other calamities.
Today, PolicyAnalysisMarket.org is a Russian language website for downloading children's books. In our own moment of failing government websites and new assassination marketplaces, the story of FutureMAP's rapid decline and subsequent transformation is especially striking.
The New York Times broke the news that
DARPA was ready to start taking bets on assassinations and bombings in
July 2003. The paper reported that the "Pentagon office that proposed
spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a
new experiment."
DARPA was already embattled at the time, due to its advocacy
for pre-NSA-revelation electronic spying operations. This "new
experiment," a collaboration between the then-web company Net Exchange,
DARPA, and The Economist magazine's Intelligence Unit, seemed
designed to stir controversy. "It is an online futures trading market,
disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on
forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups," wrote the Times. It was slated to go live October 1st, 2003.
''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
elections results; they are often better than expert opinions," the
Defense Department wrote in a statement at the time, in an attempt to
explain the project.
