Gambling with our security Daryl Lease 04 August 2003 Sarasota Herald-Tribune A9 We may not have to hunt down Osama bin Laden after all. There's a distinct possibility he'll die laughing before we ever get to him. Unless bats were roosting in his satellite dish and interfering with his TV reception, he probably fell into a life-threatening giggling fit last week. How else could he have reacted to the news that red- faced officials at the Pentagon were dropping their pinheaded plans to create an online "futures market" focused on events in the Middle East? The project called for enlisting anonymous traders to bet on the things like terrorist attacks, coups, assassinations and, presumably, the relative growth of Yasser Arafat's perpetual five- o'clock-shadow. The idea was that people who know certain things about certain activities in certain places might place wagers that would help certain people in certain agencies in our government figure out when to take certain actions. As it turned out, the only thing certain was our embarrassment. Apparently, it never occurred to folks at the Pentagon that their betting parlor might actually generate more mayhem -- not to mention turn the world's collective stomach. Criminy, the bats lounging in Osama's satellite dish are probably gasping for air right now. The genius supervising all of this was John Poindexter, who's sort of a cross between Rube Goldberg and Big Brother. More than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since the start of the Bush administration, but this guy -- this guy -- is just now losing his. Poindexter, you'll recall, was the deep thinker in the Reagan years who helped Ollie North carry out a bumbling scheme to sell arms to Iran (yeah, of hostage-taking fame) and use the proceeds to help the Contras (yeah, of death-squad fame.) He later lied to Congress about it but escaped going to jail because he'd been granted immunity to testify. More recently, Poindexter been working at the Pentagon for the Defense Advance Research Project Agency, commonly known as DARPA. DARPA's crowning achievement was the creation of a forerunner to the Internet. I'm beginning to think that all the spam we're getting these days is another DARPA project gone awry. Maybe Poindexter was plotting to trade generic Viagra for terrorists? Among the projects in DARPA's $3 billion annual budget: * Terrorism Information Awareness. The original plans, later scaled back amid protests, called for collecting private information about Americans, such as travel records, credit card receipts and phone bills. Officials figured they could somehow sift through this data to pinpoint a sequence of events, like someone renting a moving van and buying large quantities of fertilizer, that might lead to a terrorist attack. * Facial recognition software. Under this project, video cameras are set up in public places like airports and city streets, then linked to computerized databases containing photos of known terrorists and other criminals. The success rate is abysmally low. * Human ID at a distance. This one would utilize a database containing video images of terrorists walking. The idea is that everyone's gait is different, like a fingerprint. Critics have pointed out that terrorists could thwart the program with a rather low-tech response -- a fake limp. Millions of dollars have been invested in woo-woo projects like these, but Congress and the Bush administration have been slow to bolster security at seaports and address other security flaws identified long before the Sept. 11 attacks. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security even proposed cutting flights for some federal air marshals because of concerns about the cost of putting them up in hotels for overnight stays. The agency quickly reversed its plans amid news of DARPA's troubles and reports that al-Qaida may try to hijack more planes this summer. "You can't protect the country on the cheap," Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said of the cost-cutting proposal. "There's a disconnect here -- a real dangerous disconnect." Of course we can't protect the country on the cheap. But can the Bush administration squander money taking bets on assassinations and analyzing the way terrorists walk? As Curly used to say to Moe, "Certainly." Daryl Lease is an editorial writer for the Herald-Tribune. E- mail: daryl.lease@heraldtribune.com.