Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Where Do Failed DARPA And Pentagon Web Projects Go?


The Pentagon's Failed "Terrorism Futures Market" Is Now a Ukranian Bookstore -- Motherboard

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.

Read more ....

My Comment: This DARPA/Pentagon project was ahead of it's time because it is actually a very smart concept .... and one that can probably play a role in today's social media universe.

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