February 26, 2026 | The Wall Street Journal
Gambling Is an Intelligence Asset
Prediction markets can telegraph valuable classified information to U.S. adversaries.
February 26, 2026 | The Wall Street Journal
Gambling Is an Intelligence Asset
Prediction markets can telegraph valuable classified information to U.S. adversaries.
Excerpt
America’s adversaries are always searching for an edge—advance warning of a military strike, a window into classified decision-making, a tool to sow panic in financial markets. They may have found all three in the same place: prediction markets.
Israeli authorities this month indicted a reservist and a civilian with charges related to using classified intelligence to place bets on Polymarket, a leading prediction market. The suspects allegedly had advance knowledge of Israel’s June 2025 strikes on Iran, with one account collecting more than $150,000 in winnings.
An anonymous trader in January turned roughly $34,000 into more than $400,000 by betting on the removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro hours before the U.S. raid to capture him.
Mr. Meizlish is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former sanctions enforcement officer in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Mr. Goldenberg is a fellow at Rutgers University and an affiliate with the New York University Institute for the Study of Emerging Threats.