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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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

No beleives MAGA nuts are trading experts.

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.

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.