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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

"A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".

"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.

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did anyone have any reason to believe that was classified information that was leaked, instead of just a random person speculating? if not, then he had no intent to leak that information. If a random soldier told you, "iran will be nuked tomorrow" do you believe them? especially on a speculation platform, for all you know he's also guessing based on the same activites and events the public is observing. laws are all about intent and state of mind, what actually happened is irrelevant, what was intended is what matters. For example, killing a person is not a crime in and of itself, if it was all soldiers who kill someone in combat would be in prison, as would people who kill in self-defense. Matter of fact, if no classified information was actually leaked, but it could be proved that he intended to do something to leak classified info (which requires others to believe it is truthful information, instead of speculation) then that in itself is a crime.

Saying anything at all on a speculation platform, especially if others don't even know your identity (or you have no reason to believe they do), can only be treated as speculative intent, not intent to disclose classified information.

If a random soldier bet me $32,000 that iran would be nuked tomorrow, I would believe them a lot more.

If you are a potential assassination target and you notice that a prediction market about your assassination has a sudden weird spike on a specific week, then you would likely take extra precautions in that week. After this incident, surely other world leaders and public figures are watching the prediction markets for exactly this.

The stated point of prediction markets is to aggregate private opinions into public predictions of the future. If you participate using classified information and influence those public predictions, then that's leaking that classified information. This is more true if the bets you make are large and the market is relatively small, then you will send a much more clear signal.

Yes, it seems in this case an adversary who was paying attention could have learned something very, very valuable.

Yes. Especially if the casino (or "prediction market") has access to the identities of players via id verification, fingerprinting, or other means.

You mean any non crypto payment system? :)

Going to guess that anyone in the U.S. military has their crypto wallet aggresively profiled by various spy agencies.

And literally every other thing they do on the internet.. remember that Strava shit? You have relatively technically unsophisticated people with high level access and not a lot of adult supervision. That seems like a juicy target. I assume there are a lot of well funded and staffed outifts around the world who have noticed the same thing.

There have been some cases where fitness tracker data shows where some military installations are located. Or when they're jogging on a ship that's taking them to deployment somewhere.

The Ukraine war has shown that cheap intelligence tricks can be used against the average recruit, like pretending to be a dating website and getting the GPS locations of horny enemy soldiers so your drones can drop grenades on them.

It doesn't need to be crypto wallet tracking. The amount of spyware being built into phone apps is where those agencies would be putting some effort into obtaining access to.

> "A military operation is being planned" is very different from "Maduro will be kidnapped in the next x hours".

IIRC, the bet was on "Nicolas Maduro out?":

> If Nicolás Maduro leaves office before February 1, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes.

So the bet wasn't specifically "Nicolas Maduro kidnapped?" or even "Nicolas Maduro out by January 3rd?" And IIRC there was a lot of Trump saber rattling about Venezuela in the days before, hence the creation of the bet. I could absolutely see a plausible way to link these publicly-available pieces of information into a winning bet:

* Trump talking tough about Venezuela

* Spike in DC pizza activity on January 2nd

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