Submitted by John Stauber on
"The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. ... The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort 'to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.' ... Investors would buy and sell futures contracts -- essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. ... [T]he Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange [and ] ... The Economist magazine. DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. [U.S. Senator Ron] Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal."
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