Explain to me what the idiots at the Pentagon are doing

The BBQ Pit
21

Poindexter was an admiral in the Navy, the head of the NSA under Reagan, and the architect behind Iran-Contra. Oliver North was his aide. In 1990, he was convicted of multiple felonies stemming from Iran-Contra, including conspiracy, lying to congress and destruction of evidence.

He resurfaced february 2002 when he was appointed director of the Pentagon’s Information Awareness Office (IAO). In December, he was appointed head of the DARPA IAO, the office that gave us this idea. How the hell a convicted felon regained so much power and such a high security clearance is beyond me. He should be flipping burgers in the Pentagon’s cafeteria.

22

It’s an incredibly idiotic idea to floating hope on.

Our government should be able to dig up all the dirt we need on the forces of ee-ville.
The alternative is letting you, me and any idiot with an account bet on it and using that as intel?

And I wouldn’t want to be the guy getting a visit from Field-Marshall Ashcroft and the Homeland Security boys in the middle of the night for buying futures on Bush Chokes On A Pretzel.

23

I’m not sure that it was a stupid idea. I suspect that, since it would be open to outside manipulation, it was certainly a flawed idea.

Some balanced Doper discussion on the topic is in GD at MENA Futures: DoD et al open futures markets on political & econ developments.

24

Well, again, the idea was to have vetted people register and buy/sell anonymously. They were not going after the likes of me or you. Coll maybe, but not us.

25

Ye Gads.

And I thought Death Futures were the ultimate tacky financial concept ever.

Guess I was wrong.

26

Actually, this is not a stupid idea at all. The basic idea is a darn good one.

First, a disclaimer, I haven’t read any of the other threads on this topic so my comments my be redundant.

DARPA stands for “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” Note the words “Advanced Research” DARPA’s job is to do cutting edge and even, occasionally, off the wall research in the hopes of finding a concept that may merit future work.

One of the big problems with intelligence isn’t gathering it, it’s combining it into something useful. The U.S. is bombarded with thousands of pieces of intelligence information that may relate to terrorism every day. Somehow, all this disparate information has to be accurately distilled into a useable form.

Someone noticed that markets do this kind of thing all the time. They take enormously complex and diverse information about the economy, political risk, future interest rates, company performance, weather, etc. and combine it into one number. In the process, they bypass the political and institutional filters that may operate to skew that information out of vested interest. For example, oftentimes, the market will decide a company is on the skids long before the company can bring itself to recognize that fact.

Why not do the same thing with intelligence information? Rather than – or in addition to – preparing lengthy reports that a) might not get processed up the chain of command fast enough and b) might well get ignored) the various analysts and information collectors combine their intelligence by means of a market.

At the very least, a system like this could be a great early warning system. "Wow! August futures on a terrorist attack on Disneyworld tripled in price in the last two days! We’d better pull all that information ASAP and take a close look at what’s going on!

All in all, while there may be feasibility issues and it could certainly be executed poorly, it’s not a stupid idea. Rather, it’s exactly the kind of thing DARPA ought to be looking at.

27

http://www.thismodernworld.com/

Tom Tomorrow has an interesting take on this, excerpted:

"First you corner a large-- if possible a very large-- number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nevertheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves were condemned by EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption in 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks, and statistical returns.

It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while NOBODY knows what’s going on around here, EVERYBODY knows what’s going on around here."

Kind of like, you put a counted number of beans in a big ass jar, and get a group of people to make guesses as to how many beans are in there. No one will be actually close, or no more often than you would expect more or less by chance, but if you take the aggregate, averaged number, you get a remarkably accurate assessment.

For my money, thats a damned interesting phenomenon. Damned interesting!

And if it might be applicable in preventing deaths, hell, give it a shot! Whataya got to lose, except an little money. Sure, its a bit ghoulish, hell, its a lot ghoulish. But this is the Pentagon, people there think about people getting killed all day, every day.

28

A Monkey With a Gun, no, Poindexter wasn’t the architect behind the idea-that would’ve been William Casey, I believe.

I think Iran-Contra and illegal funding of the contras was going on before Poindexter even replaced McFarlane.

29

I think it’s a very interesting notion, and I am as fearful of naked capitalism as any sane person can be . . .woof. While I’m far from clear about the application to terrorism and ‘disaster’ events yet, if it’s possible to maintain the integrity of the marketplace and encourage the very best information, one can imagine variations of this in all manner of environments.

Very interesting approach – I wonder, for example, what the chaos theory bods make of this . . ?

30

Um, no, right back at you. The wikipedia entry for him says:

The guardian (a bit biased, true) descibes him as

If you had bothered to think back to the history of the investigation, you would have realized that these characterizations are not off-base. The three men indicted for conspiracy were Poindexter, North (Poindexter’s aide), and Robert McFarlane. Note the absence of Casey. Though it is true McFarlane preceded Poindexter as National Security Advisor, Poindexter served as his deputy during those years and it was Poindexter that was the main focus of the Independant Council’s investigation.

To be completely fair, the whole thing was probably cooked up by three people: Poindexter, MacFarlane, and Casey (CIA Director); Though Casey wasn’t charged, we would have to be fools to believe he wasn’t involved. Anyhow, Poindexter may have not been the architect, but he was sure as hell an architect.

31

Wasn’t Casey dying when the charges were being brought up?

32

So it’s sort of Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s “Ask The Audience” lifeline on a large scale?

33

Well, yeah, except the audience knows a thing or two about what you’re asking them, and they get money if they’re right.

34

I like this part:

Didn’t I see this on a South Park episode?

STEP 1: Collect underpants.

STEP 2: ???

STEP 3: Profit!

Please tell me my tax money isn’t paying for this.:smack:

35

I agree and I was chagrined and disgusted to read today’s newspaper reports on both Dems and Repubs attacking the idea.

Bloody empty minded kneejerking.

The idea, in gross, is beautiful. As I said, when I saw it I got little tears of joy.

Now we have a key observation:

Precisely, although much of our information collected is said to be electronic, and htere is a deep need in some areas (ahem Mid East) for triangulation with human intelligence.

Now, again the process of discerning the interesting from the rubbish from the irrelevant is super human, and in fact analysts buried in the stuff, even very good and brilliant ones, may well lose perspective.

A market of information, while not inherently superior in my opinion, allows another means of triangulation.

On the other hand we also have market bubbles and other inanities - while I am a great believer in markets and the above is largely correct, there are skews and inefficiencies.

Damned pity this got killed out of knee jerking – of course damned pity their site was live with moronic examples sure to set people off. Someone needed to check those P gon idjits sense of … PR I guess.

36

You know, Collounsbury, having read more about the idea, I’m tempted to agree with you. If you weren’t such a patronizing bastard that wrote things like:

Triangulation? What the Hell are you talking about? The internet isn’t radio. It can’t be a metaphor 'cause you need three points to triangulate. The educated would know the prefix “tri”. Your “smarter than thou” schtick doesn’t work if you use your rather large vocabuary wrong.

The rest of that quote could of also done without your usual touch. Allow me to paraphrase it for you: “Analysts tend lose the forest for the trees”. Cliche? YES! But that’s your meaning, even though you tried to mask it. You have a remarkable ability to state cliches and mask it in semi-clever language.

The fact is, I kind of agree with you here. I could admit that I was hasty in my earlier judgement if I didn’t have to listen to your patronizing prattle.

Learn to write with a decent style ; not one that talks down to your audience. In short, don’t patronize, ya’ twit.

37

Now I’ve read the proper explanation (thank you, A Monkey With a Gun - great post), I reckon it’s an interesting (if bizarre and ghoulish) idea.

But it is simply terrible PR. Doesn’t the Pentagon have a press officer*?
*Do you want one? The UK government’s got one to spare at the moment…

38

The idea of some middle-management spook buying a new gas grill for the backyard, using the proceeds from a nail bomb going off on a Cleveland bus - obviously unacceptable.

The program sounds so totally absurd on its face that I feel it is likely to be a red herring for some other DARPA shenanigans we aren’t hearing about. A way to make a few million dollars disappear into some other, more offensive black program, while making it appear that the Pentagon is up to their old “$600 toilet seat” foolishness.

Naturally “the Pentagon” is being blamed, rather than laying blame at the feet of Rumsfeld, Poindexter, et al., whose fingerprints are all over that cynical ridiculousness.

39

WEll, I’m getting writting advice from somene with the username Monkey with A Gun. That’s rich.

As a general rule, one should always agree with me, then the chance of being right are better than even.

I wasn’t speaking to the internet my moronic sub-human primate, I was speaking to data analysis.

It’s a fairly typical usage among those of us who do such things, that is manipulate large amounts of data from highly heterogenous sources, to refer to getting to a point from multiple sources as ‘triangulation.’

I suppose if you rubbed a few neurons together you might have discerned the meaning.

But supposing this may be a trifle too challenging for you, let me be more explicit:
The intel analyst has multiple kinds of data, humintel, signit, other analyses. My usage indicated that this added form of analysis - a sort of market analysis helps triangulate, that is get to an interesting point using signals from multiple directions.

Well, I didn’t use my vocabulary “wrong” as you put it, rather one of my readers apparently has some challenges following along. I’m not paid to make things easy for sub-literates here, so you shall have to keep up as best you can.

Cliche? It was an observation of fact – when faced with overwhelming amounts of data one often loses sight of the big picture objective. Period. Not sure how this is “masking” anything, although insofar as I am speaking to a monkey I suppose I shouldn’t be overly concerned.

This would have some vague relevance had you not shown you’re not particularly up on your reading skills. Some, fuck off my moron monkey.

40

I suppose yachting futures traders making money on the suffering of Columbian peasants is more acceptable? Besides the idea is to identify in advance the attack. If they miss it, well it was going to happen anyway.
My idea was to keep going with prototype plan but do it internally. Perhaps you could do it with goodwill but money and prestige tends to focus the mind.

Keep up. Rumsfeld and Poindexter are being roundly condemned for this. Poindexter more so than anyone else. Hell I haven’t heard the name Poindexter since the 80’s and now it’s everywhere.