[Buttons840]

It's a national security issue too.

Somebody poor grunt who chose to earn a living by laboring (which has proven to be much less effective than being born with money) will be putting fuel in the bombers and thinking "I could just make an anonymous bet..."

It's a national security issue.

We saw this with the Venezuela attack. A flurry of trading and someone made $400,000 for placing a bet mere hours before the "surprise" attack. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-400000-payout-after-ma...

[mhb]

Wouldn't the counterargument to this be that if the poor grunt is willing to betray his country for money in the prediction market, he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing?

With the prediction market, there is a financial incentive for people on the opposite side of the bet being motivated to uncover the malfeasance.

[milanhbs]

A good general rule is to make it hard for people to do bad things, and to not create incentives to do so. This seems to do the opposite.

[throwaway85825]

If you're a grunt trying to contact Russia or china you're much more likely to end up talking to an FBI agent posing as a foreigner. Prediction markets make it easy and anonymous.

[pinkmuffinere]

Are they really anonymous? I’m not meaning to disagree, that just surprises me. I would have thought they need to follow KYC requirements.

[throwaway85825]

There are crypto prediction markets that cater to the anonymous.

[anigbrowl]

I think doing war crimes is the real betrayal of the country. But we have a president who think his personal morality is superior to international law, ratified treaties (despite the supremacy clause) and so on. This is overtly and explicitly unconstitutional.

[Buttons840]

> he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing?

The prediction market is the mechanism by which this happens.

[mlinhares]

Nobody is going to uncover anything on bets when they're done an hour before the event happens. This isn't the stock market and trying to connect it to what happens on the stock market makes no sense.

[NickC25]

With the venezuela attack, the real trade wasn't on Polymarket or Kalshi.

The trade was going long the 3x Oil&Gas ETFs the trading day beforehand. There was huge buying for absolutely zero perceived reason...then boom we just straight up kidnapped Maduro.

[dist-epoch]

It's not necessarily illegal use of secret information.

There exists "alternate data", some companies monitor all kinds of stuff, satellite pictures, etc, some of these companies surely saw the inevitable asset positioning just before such a big attack (150 planes).

Just like the Ukraine invasion was first visible on Google Maps as traffic jams !!! at the border at midnight

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/google-...

[HNisCIS]

Counting cars in Best Buy parking lots on black friday used to almost be a meme in the GIS community until ai models became reliable enough.

You can also do entertaining things like determine if a factory/data-center is running at full capacity by looking at the fans in the cooling stacks. Satellites take the red, green, and blue channels separately at different times so you can see if a fan is spinning through the apparent chromatic aberration of the blades, same deal with anything else that spins or moves. If you know the satellite you're buying imagery from, its TLE and a little information about the sensor you can work out all sorts of fun details.

[asdff]

You could see USAF and navy air power operating in venezuela on ads-b. I was shocked seeing F15s. You'd think there'd be no way the military would have ads-b activated while performing military operations.

[jrjeksjd8d]

When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, what choice do you have? There are civilian aircraft up in the sky. Having a fighter jet run into one and kill a bunch of civilians is a bad PR situation.

[hrimfaxi]

When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, do you really care about PR?

[treis]

Yes? Nobody cares that they killed a bunch of Cuban body guards. Taking down a civilian airliner would have been a big deal.

[asdff]

Didn't they already clear the airspace?

[robcohen]

How would this happen? Jets are significantly more maneuverable than anything else in the sky. The military could, you know, pilot the plane so it does not hit anything.

[eru]

That's neat. Though I'd say it was the first public sign. The US had been telling anyone willing to listen for weeks beforehand that an invasion was coming.

[HNisCIS]

Disbelief and normalcy are a hell of a drug. Unless someone fully expects something terrible to happen and they are deliberately trying to find out when it'll happen, most people will happily ignore all of the signs until it's too late.

Just look at the lead up to the Ukraine invasion, the US intelligence services were practically screaming from the rooftops that it was happening. Russians were obviously stacking up on two borders. Meanwhile, reporters were on the street asking people how they felt about the oncoming invasion and they all said some variation of "they've been threatening that forever, it's all talk, it won't happen".

[rdtsc]

> Meanwhile, reporters were on the street asking people how they felt about the oncoming invasion and they all said some variation of "they've been threatening that forever, it's all talk, it won't happen".

The Ukrainian government took the approach of not starting a full on panic. They thought maybe there was still some chance of stopping it. And not knowing 100% the day and time meant stopping the economy, people fleeing and such. It could even play into the hands of the enemy as they could react and postpone as well.

Some have criticized the government for that tactic science. Some might say they should have listened to the US intelligence instead, but that presumes people should trust the US intelligence more than their own government.

[eru]

Well, one problem is that the US intelligence services might have a credibility problem with the general public.

[HNisCIS]

This was in the Before Times when we were mostly being helpful up them

[chrisss395]

This - the electronic warfare assets moved to this region months before were a huge sign of what was going to happen.

[ironbound]

Pizza orders are also an indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_pizza_theory

[dv_dt]

The irony that operational national security would be greatly improved if only they maintained a well staffed and resourced government kitchen for the Pentagon, but won't for many silly reasons. Oh no, lots of people would have to sit on idle standby many times, or gov't employees would get free meals.

[kibwen]

The Pentagon has a ton of restaurants inside. There's literally an official mall-style map of all of them right here, I count almost 30: https://www.whs.mil/Services-and-Information/DoDCC/

The pizza index is specifically about late-night pizza orders, when presumably most of those restaurants are closed (though some do appear to be open 24/7).

[dv_dt]

If the pizza-indicator is still observable, then there is insufficient internal capacity (or perhaps it would be more correct to say insufficient at the right times) to mask the signal

[bandrami]

There are several restaurants there. The Domino's thing is back from the first Gulf War and wasn't even really true then

[silisili]

I believe that orders probably do go up. I don't believe the sites/accounts using Google's 'how busy' have any relevance at all. As I understand it, these just use GPS/location data of phones.

It only takes one person to pick up 40 pizzas, after all. Perhaps they could look at time estimates for a new order as a better indicator, if such an API exists prior to ordering.

[nostromo]

That person is reportedly in jail and facing serious time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-jails-venezuela-leaker-...

Anyone with a security clearance making bets like this is not a smart person.

[teknopaul]

Stats on politicians trading habits, indicates insider trading like this is standard practice in the USofA.

No beleives MAGA nuts are trading experts.

[tsimionescu]

Politicians don't have anything to lose from this. There is (shockingly!) nothing illegal about politicians making trades based on decisions that they know they are about to take that have a significant and easily predictable impact on the market.

By contrast, making public bets based on classified information that you are not authorized to publicize is a simple and relatively direct breach of laws regarding the handling of classified documents and state secrets.

[graemep]

A number of Trump's cabinet advisors have strong backgrounds in finance. At least two former hedge fund managers and one VC that I know of in prominent positions and I do not know much about American politics.

[edmundsauto]

Is this confirmed by a trustworthy source? This article only reports on what president Trump stated. Given the source and the lack of any details, this isn’t verifiable which I think is a minimum requirement.

[eru]

No worse than existing financial markets, and we already deal with those.

[TheDong]

The big difference here is that if you buy short-dated out-of-the-money options and make it big, the SEC comes knocking on your door and reads your text messages to find out what you knew and when.

It's both easy to track down stock traders due to KYC, and easy to prosecute due to laws.

Polymarket and friends make it both much harder to find the trader, and also it's less clear if there's a legal theory that lets you prosecute someone dealing in these new markets.

Sure, congress and the president can insider trade a bit here and there, but the everyday joe is rightfully afraid to.

[eru]

It seems like the difference is all due to historical accidents in the US and laws that should arguably be changed. Nothing to do with prediction markets by itself.

[TZubiri]

I'd just like to make the distinction between:

1- Making a bet with privileged information. 2- Creating the event and making the bet.

2 would be a war crime, 1 would be a probabilistic leak.

Trump claimed they didn't want to pass through congress because they leak, and there were no leaks about the event. But if any personnel made a polymarket bet, that would constitute a leak. It wasn't acted upon, but if personnel continues to leak information in this manner, it is possible that an adversary will eventually listen to this signal, and that it was just ignored because it is too fresh.

This analysis would also make it clear why it would be immoral to participate in such markets as a civilian. Because if it is your country you might be compensating an insider for information, benefitting the enemy. And if you are not, you might be harming the enemy, but you would be an unlawful belligerent.

[jacobedawson]

Of course the next step beyond that is "leaking" false information as a decoy by placing large bets on certain events. If that happens enough times it seems like it should wash away the value for agencies hoping to act on "privileged" information.

[TZubiri]

Sure, it's an information warfare, but at its core, you can mask a signal, but you will never be able to eliminate the signal, just dilute it, and at a cost.

[ncr100]

This is fascinating.