>https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/nsa-surveillance-program-promis/

NSA Surveillance Program: PROMIS (Inslaw)

John Greenewald OCTOBER 29, 2018

Background

PROMIS is believed by some to be the forefunner to the now infamous “Prism” program by the National Security Agency (NSA). The “Prism” program was brought to light by leaker Edward Snowden, yet it is now coming to light, that a program has existed long before this new revelation. It was known as PROMIS.

PROMIS is also the name for a Department of Justice computer software program. In the mid-1970s, Inslaw, Inc., a small Washington D.C. software development company, created for the a highly efficient, people-tracking, computer program known as Prosecutor’s Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw’s principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government (acting as principal to the Department of Justice) for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings.

The following article excerpt is used to best explain the program as connected to the NSA – while the FOIA documents follow below.

PRISM’s Controversial Forerunner

By Richard L. Fricker

Long before Edward Snowden’s claims or revelations that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency were monitoring and tracking the Internet, cell phones, e-mails and any other electronic communication they could get their hands on using a program known as PRISM, there existed PROMIS [Prosecutors Management Information Systems].

PROMIS was designed in the late 1970s and ‘80s to bring Department of Justice criminal case management from the dark ages into the light of the computer age. In the spring of 1981, the Reagan Administration hailed PROMIS as one of law enforcements greatest assets. By 1983, PROMIS had morphed into the behemoth of intelligence gathering. It was not state of the art – it was the art.

Over the ensuing decades PROMIS is reported to have been used by the DOJ, CIA, NSA, and several foreign intelligence agencies including Israel’s Mossad. The ownership of PROMIS has been the subject of federal court hearings and a congressional investigation.

The capabilities of PROMIS as a data collection and tracking program have never been a secret. But the only discussion of PROMIS has been about theft and black-market sales. Neither the courts nor Congress have ever inquired as to privacy issues or the ethics of the program. There has been no rending of political robes as seen with the Snowden case. In fact, the function of PROMIS has been discussed in open court and various public arenas.

PROMIS is a tracking program with enhancements by Washington, DC-based Inslaw Inc., owned by Bill and Nancy Hamilton. PROMIS was developed under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration [LEAA] grant. Bill Hamilton was employed by NSA for six years. He left the agency in 1966.

PROMIS was designed to track the vast amount of criminal cases piling up in DOJ offices across the country. Bill Hamilton, in an interview for this story, recounted, “It was always a tracking program. It was designed to keep track of cases in local U.S. Attorneys’ offices, which means street crimes, keep track of the scheduled events in court, what actually takes place, who’s there, witnesses, police officers, conclusions, convictions, acquittals, whatever.”

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>Isabel Sylvia Margaret Maxwell coming up…

>>15619554

>Isabel Sylvia Margaret Maxwell coming up…

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Maxwell

Isabel Sylvia Margaret Maxwell (born 16 August 1950) is a French-born entrepreneur and the co-founder of Magellan, an early search engine that was acquired by Excite. Maxwell has been listed as a Technology Pioneer of the World Economic Forum,[1] She served as the President of Commtouch, an Israeli internet company that became CYREN.[2] She was a Director of Israel Venture Network and built up their Social Entrepreneur program in Israel from 2004-2010.

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Magellan

Maxwell was a co-founder of the company behind early search engine Magellan. Isabel joined twin sister Christine Maxwell who was leading a small company called Research on Demand that was online in 1993"[1]". The company changed names to McKinley Group (named after North America’s highest mountain)[7] and became a search engine with ratings. Maxwell served as a senior vice president, her second husband, David Hayden, was CEO and her sister Christine was publisher.[5] The Maxwell sisters launched the Magellan web search service in September 1995.[9] In early 1996, the company was poised to IPO, but investment bank Robertson Stephens decided to put Excite on the market first. A few months later, IPOs became difficult and the startup company was running out of money. Magellan wanted to go public with Lehman doing the offering but was unsuccessful. Michael Wolfe's book Burn Rate also describes a failed deal to combine with Wolff New Media, which shortly later went broke itself.[10] With intensifying financial constraints, Maxwell’s husband was pushed out of the company by investors and her sister left. Isabel assumed the responsibility to dispose of the company. After a layoff, the firm was sold for $18 million (of stock) to competitor Excite.[5]

Later technology leadership

Maxwell was the president of Commtouch, Inc., an Israeli-American e-mail messaging and security company,[2] from 1997 to 2001. The company went public on NASDAQ in 1999.[11] In 2014, the company changed its name to CYREN.[12]

From 2003 to 2004, Maxwell was invited by Blumberg capital to become CEO of iCognito,[13] renamed Puresight, an Israeli web content filtering software company. She turned the company around, and it was sold in 2005 to Boston Communications.[14][6]

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>Connect to Excite_(web_portal)

>>15619570

>Connect to Excite_(web_portal) (Maxwell)

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)

Excite (stylised as eXcite) is an American web portal operated by IAC that provides a variety of outsourced content including news and weather, a metasearch engine, and a user homepage. In the United States, the main Excite homepage had long been a personal start page called My Excite. Excite once operated a webmail service commonly known as Excite Mail until August 31, 2021.

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History

Excite originally started as Architext in June 1993 at a garage in Cupertino, California,[1] created by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University.[2] The goal was to create software to manage the vast information on the World Wide Web.[3] In July 1994, International Data Group paid them US$80,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers arranged a US$250,000 "first round" backing for the project, with US$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period. Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an additional US$1.5 million in financing and Excite was formally launched in October 1995.[3]

In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its chief executive officer (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. Jim Bellows, then 72, was hired by Excite in 1994 to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner.[4] He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites. However, users wanted to get directly to the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in 1998. Excite's original website design was mostly based on the orange color. In 1997 it was redesigned with a black and yellow theme, which mostly continues to this day.

On April 4, 1996, Excite went public with an initial offering of two million shares. Its offering was however overshadowed by its biggest rival, Yahoo!, which also went public at the same time. Excite's six founders became millionaires after the offering.[5] In November 1996, America Online (AOL) agreed to make Excite its exclusive search and directory service, in return of a larger 20 percent share in Excite and sale of WebCrawler.[6] In June 1997, Intuit, maker of Quicken and TurboTax, purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalised a seven-year partnership deal. On October 16, 1997, Excite purchased Netbot, a comparison shopping agent. At the same time Intuit announced the launch of Excite Business & Investing. Later that year a deal was finalised with Ticketmaster to provide direct online ticketing. On March 31, 1998, Excite reported a net loss of approximately $30.2 million and according to its first quarter report it had only enough available capital to meet obligations through December.[7] Content from Excite's portal was collated from over 100 different sources.[8] Excite was the first portal to start offering free e-mail, and this step was followed by rivals Yahoo! and Lycos.[9][10]

A November 1997 press release showed that there were about 11.8 million unique visitors to the Excite "network" during a 28-day period from September to October.[11]

In December 1998, Yahoo! was in negotiations to purchase Excite for $5.5 billion to $6 billion. However, prompted by Kleiner Perkins, @Home Network's Chairman and CEO, Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite's chairman and CEO George Bell on December 19, and Excite was subsequently acquired by @Home Network, on January 19, 1999. At this time, Excite was the sixth largest Internet portal by traffic.[12] At one point, Microsoft was also interested in Excite, and had plans to merge it into its own MSN portal.[13]

According to Steven Levy in his book In The Plex,[14] in early 1997 two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that BackRub, the name of their research project that later became the search engine Google, was taking up time they should have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. [15][16][17] In a 2014 podcast and later again to CNBC, then-CEO of Excite, George Bell, said that the deal fell apart because Larry Page wanted Excite's search technologies to be replaced by Google's, to which Bell did not agree on.[18][19]

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>much more at the links, lots here to dig into

>15619655

>Board is glitching like an epileptic being tortured with a disco ball.

>15619471

>Spoofiness happening now, here.

>504’d 404’d etc