TERROR BOOKIE PLAN ONE FOR THE BOOKS EDITORIAL DAVID SARASOHN - The Oregonian 30 July 2003 The Oregonian C07 It's a shame, really, that the Pentagon's program to set up an Internet casino for betting on terrorist acts -- the Wheel of Misfortune -- was abandoned before anyone could place a bet on how fast its inventors would back away from it. Tuesday, less than 24 hours after Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., revealed that the U.S. government was preparing to take bets on which Middle Eastern leader might be assassinated next -- offering terrorists a chance to make a killing while making a killing -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced it would quit while it was behind. "I think," said Wyden later in the day, "that was pretty close to a Washington land speed record." But before FutureMAP (Futures Markets Applied to Prediction) shuffles off to join New Coke, the Edsel and the administration's forecasts of job recovery, it's worth pausing to check out how the Defense Department's most advanced anti-terrorist thinking works. Not only are these thinkers supposed to be useful in protecting us, but they're spending a lot of our money. The tens of billions of dollars spent on secret intelligence and defense efforts are listed in a document called the Black Book. This plan was to set up a Black Bookie. "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," boasted its Web site. "A market that addresses defense- related events may potentially aggregate information from both classified and unclassified sources." In other words, money talks, nobody walks. Presumably, if a lot of smart money was suddenly bet on a Jerusalem hotel blowing up next Tuesday, the folks running FutureMAP would suspect that something was up. The opportunity to win cash would do what the rest of our intelligence system couldn't, and strengthen our whole security system. Don't think of it as turning terrorism into a horse race; think of it as a putting our defense money on an Air, Land and Seabiscuit. Tuesday, DARPA folded its hand. "FutureMAP was a small program that faced a number of daunting technical and market challenges, such as can the market survive and will people continue to participate when U.S. authorities use it to prevent terrorism attacks?" said the organization in a press release. "Can futures markets be manipulated by adversaries?" The last part, of course, is a question that you'd think might have been imagined before, unless the Department of Defense really thinks al-Qaida's not as smart as Enron. But the most daunting technical challenge facing the program was that the entire Senate turned purple when it heard of the idea. By Tuesday morning, the chairmen of Appropriations, Armed Services and Intelligence were all demanding that the operation be shut down. As anybody wanting to run a national security casino should know, that's three of the wrong kind. Since the operation was shut down before the first payoff, you might think there's no permanent damage -- except to people who made long-shot, long-term bets on Howard Dean to be the next king of Saudi Arabia. But the episode does raise questions about how the highest-level Pentagon minds are working. FutureMAP, after all, was run by Adm. John Poindexter's Terrorist Information Awareness group, which used to be called Total Information Awareness until the Senate voted unanimously not to fund his plan to collect all information available on all Americans. Of course, Poindexter's previous great idea, when he was Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was Iran-Contra. Nobody knows all Poindexter's additional good ideas, but Wyden is especially interested in one called the Next Generation Face Recognition program. This is how we get, as part of an anti-terrorism strategy, a Pentagon Internet casino that's not just Off Track Betting, but way, way off track. This is why it's too bad FutureMAP shut down so fast. You could have placed a big bet that on security planning, the Pentagon is packing a loose cannon. David Sarasohn, associate editor of The Oregonian, can be reached at 503-221-8523 or davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com