IARPA, CIA Looks To Forecast Future Major World Events

Nine years ago, Congress blocked a Pentagon agency from setting up a website that would have allowed anyone with a credit card to bet on the likelihood of foreign assassinations, coups and terrorist attacks.

The idea was to take advantage of the “wisdom of crowds,” a social science maxim that contends the average of a group of forecasters, under certain circumstances, tends to be more accurate than even the most knowledgeable single forecaster.

But lawmakers worried the proposed predictions market could allow terrorists to profit from their own misdeeds. Congress forced the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the military’s cutting-edge research arm, known as DARPA — to scuttle the program.
Now terrorism futures are back.

DARPA’s sister agency — the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which funds experimental projects for the U.S. intelligence community — is running a four-year, $50-million program that pays people willing to predict major world events, including wars and terrorist strikes. Unlike the earlier scheme, participants can’t profit from their predictions.

Read more here: http://stratrisks.com/geostrat/7712