The Pentagon's unsafe bet EDITORIAL 30 July 2003 The Star-Ledger 14 EDITORIAL True believers are not distressing to the average thinking person because they are insincere. They are distressing because they are completely sincere and believe so deeply in their basic idea that they will follow it all the way into madness. Take the latest $8 million idea out of the Bush administration's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It is the totally logical extension of two beliefs sacred to Republicans: free markets and securitization of risk. It is also totally nuts. The way it would have worked (if you bet that this idiotic idea would disappear as soon as it became public, you won) is simple. Take an event like an assassination of a world leader. You would call the Pentagon bookie at the policy analysis market and put your money on the prime minister of some country being whacked. If he was, you would win, at odds dependent on how many people also bet on his demise, just like picking a winner at the track. Somehow, those who protect us would gather valuable information by the pattern of betting. Presumably, they found a way to account for people who are planning to kill that unfortunate prime minister investing in the probability of their success to make a few bucks or investing in some other horrific act to throw us off. The explanation from the Pentagon is blather about how "markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information." Perhaps so. But this market's disadvantage was not its mere repugnant creepiness. It was the ease with which it could be manipulated, along with the startling lack of detail on just how this was expected to be helpful. If betting is heavy on North Korea tossing a nuclear warhead at Kyoto or someone mounting a biological attack on Israel, what does it mean? Having the American government dispensing market profits on disaster befalling other nations would seem at the very least to be bad public relations. Thankfully, reaction to this bulls-and-bears approach to nuclear war was so quick and negative that the idea seems to have died aborning, even more quickly than the last big idea from the same shop: Total Information Awareness, the electronic gathering of every scrap of information about everyone from databases containing credit, medical, travel and financial records. Even renaming that monster Terrorism Information Awareness did not still the outrage, although the House of Representatives has yet to block spending on the program as the Senate has. This new idea should serve as a reminder of unfinished business. The man heading the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is Adm. John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, once convicted of lying to Congress, a verdict reversed on a technicality. With a budget wildly out of balance, it would seem to be a better idea than anything that has so far come out of Poindexter's shop to stop spending tax money on ideas that a 10-year-old would dismiss instantly. The money would be better used investing in security rather than betting on it.