Alex Goldenberg

This wouldn't replace traditional asset recruitment, obviously.

That's still valuable for different reasons.

But in additional intelligence streams, it's just sitting out in the open and it's essentially free.

The bigger concern I have is using these markets for active measures or what we call psychological warfare.

Here's a scenario that worries me.

A state actor places a $5 million bet that China will invade Taiwan in 30 days.

That's pocket change for a nation state, but it could move a prediction market pretty significantly.

Market odds could spike.

Media coverage follows.

Prediction markets show a 70% chance of Taiwan invasion.

Does someone know something?

You get public anxiety, potential diplomatic tensions, potential military posturing.

all triggered by a bet that costs less than their defense budget's rounding error.

This is information warfare on the cheap.

Traditional influence operations that I've studied for years, like troll farms, media buys, cost millions and take months to build.

This is instant, global, and quite deniable.

And here's the operational problem for our intelligence community.

When these markets move, analysts have to assess is this legitimate information or is it manipulation because we can't just ignore the markets because some of those bets might actually reflect insider knowledge.

Adversaries could use these markets to inject noise into our information environment that we can't easily filter out and that should worry us all.

Most critically, there's a categorical difference between revealing information and