Is PROMIS computer program LIFE LOG which is now Facebook

The Prosecutor's Management Information System (Promis) is a database system developed by Inslaw Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based, information technology company.

Promis was first developed by Inslaw during the 1970s under contracts and grants from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). These guarantees gave the government licenses to use the early versions of Promis but not to modify them, or to create derivative works, or to distribute Promis outside the federal government. By 1982, because of strong disagreements over a fee-incentive, Modification 12 Agreement to the original contract, the United States Department of Justice and Inslaw Inc. became involved in a widely-publicized and protracted lawsuit (see: Inslaw Inc. v. United States Government); however, what follows is intended to be an article on What Promis Is and How Promis works.

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What is Promis?

Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."

What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.

But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

—Richard L. Fricker, Wired magazine, 1993, "The INSLAW Octopus".[1]

More from the same article –

PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system.

Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.

Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases

—Fricker, Wired

A different author –

Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today's PCs, PROMIS, from its first "test drive" a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that data base was then currently installed.

—Michael Ruppert, FTW.[2]

References

1. ^ Fricker, Richard L.; (1993). "The INSLAW Octopus". Wired magazine. ppg. 1-8. Retrieved on 2008-08-28.

2. ^ Ruppert, Michael (200-09-01). "PROMIS". From The Wilderness. Retrieved on 2008-09-17.

Inslaw

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Inslaw Inc. v. United States Government)

INSLAW, Incorporated

Type

Private

Founded

Washington, D.C., U.S. (March 3, 1982)

Founder(s)

William Anthony Hamilton

Headquarters

Washington, D.C.

Industry

Information Technology

Products

CJIS, MODULAW, PROMIS

Website

http://www.inslawinc.com

Inslaw, Inc. is a small, Washington, D.C.-based, information technology company that developed for the United States Department of Justice in the mid-1970s a highly-efficient, people-tracking, software 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.

During ensuing investigations, the Department of Justice was accused of deliberately attempting to drive Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation; and of distributing and selling stolen software for covert intelligence operations of foreign governments such as Canada, Israel, Singapore, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan; and of becoming directly involved in murder.

Later developments implied that derivative versions of Enhanced Promis sold on the black market may have become the high-tech tools of worldwide terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden and international money launderers and thieves. Yet, today, nothing conclusive has been shown to support any allegations of wrongdoing on the part of anyone.

Contents [hide]

• 1 Origins

• 2 Enhanced Promis contract

• 2.1 Espionage

• 2.2 Federal investigations into allegations of theft

• 2.3 Inslaw Affair divides into two separate issues

• 3 Later developments

• 3.1 FBI, ACS, and FOIMS

• 4 Deaths allegedly related to the Inslaw case

• 5 Notes

• 6 References

• 7 Further reading

• 8 External links

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Origins

Inslaw, once called the Institute for Law and Social Research[1], was a non-profit business created in 1974 by William Anthony Hamilton, "a former analyst with the National Security Agency and onetime contract employee of the CIA."[2] Inslaw's original software product, Promis, was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. Promis was a people-tracking program which had the power to integrate innumerable databases regardless of their languages, or regardless of their operating platforms. "Every use of Promis in the court system is tracking people," explained Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."[3]

Promis was funded almost entirely by government funds; therefore versions created prior to January 1978 were in the public domain. On January 1, 1978, amendments to the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect, automatically conferring upon Inslaw as the author of Promis five exclusive software copyright rights, none of which could be waived except by explicit, written waiver. The federal government negotiated licenses to use but not to modify or to distribute outside the federal government some but not all versions of Promis created after the January 1978 effective-date of the copyright amendments. In 1981, after Congress liquidated the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) (which had been the primary source of funds for Inslaw's development of Promis), the company became known as Inslaw, Inc., a for-profit corporation created to further develop and market Promis and other Promis-derivative software product(s).

The newly created corporation made significant improvements to the original software. The resulting product came to be known alternately as Promis '82 or Enhanced Promis, a 32-bit architecture VAX 11/780 version.

>>6272918

Prince of Persia

they named video games after it on the Xbox but the X stands for Lucifer also, see sigil of Lucifer

Enhanced Promis contract

In 1981, Councellor to the President Edwin Meese announced an $800 million overhaul of the federal computer system.

In 1981, Edwin Meese, then an advisor to President Ronald Reagan, announced an $800 million budget in an effort to overhaul the computer systems of the Justice Department, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies.[4] The following year, the Department of Justice awarded Inslaw a $9.6 million, three-year, cost-plus-incentive-fee contract to implement a pilot program in 22 of the largest Offices of the United States Attorneys using the older 16-bit architecture Prime version (as in Wang, or IBM), which the government had a license to use.[5]

While Promis could have gone a long way toward correcting the Department's longstanding need for a standardized case-management system, the contract between Inslaw and Justice quickly became embroiled for over two decades in bitter controversy.[6] The conflict centered on whether or not the Justice Department owed Inslaw license fees for the new, 32-bit architecture VAX version if the government substituted that version for the old 16-bit Prime version which had been the subject of the original contract.

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Espionage

In February 1983, an Israeli government official scheduled a meeting with Inslaw through the Justice Department's contract agent, Peter Videnieks.[nb 1] The purpose of that meeting was for a Promis briefing and demonstation; the Israeli Ministry of Justice intended to computerize its own prosecution offices. Although it was believed that the Israeli government official was a prosecuting attorney, it was later discovered upon closer examination that the official was really Rafi Eitan, "Director of LAKAM, a super-secret agency [within] the Israeli Ministry of Defense responsible for collecting scientific and technical intelligence information from other countries through espionage."[7][8] Herein is where Inslaw's case becomes convoluted.[nb 2]

Following the Israeli meeting, the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's new, 32-bit, Enhanced Promis from Inslaw at the start of the second year of their Implementation Contract by modifying that contract and by promising to negotiate the payment of license fees.[6][5] One month later, the U.S. government began to find fault with some of Inslaw's services, and with negotiated billing rates. The government then began to withhold unilaterally each month increasing amounts of payments due Inslaw for implementation services.[9] The Justice Department agent responsible for making payments was a former, fired Inslaw employee, C. Madison Brewer.[3] Brewer would later claim in federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen.[nb 3] "Brewer was aided in his new DoJ job by Peter Videnieks," wrote Wired (magazine), "Videnieks was fresh from the Customs Service where he oversaw contracts between that agency and Hadron, Inc., a company controlled by [Edwin] Meese and Reagan-crony Earl Brian. Hadron, a closely held government systems consulting firm, was to figure prominently in the forthcoming scandal."[3] Both Brewer and Videnieks had obtained their positions under suspicious circumstances, according to the Chicago-based weekly, In These Times.[10][nb 4] Furthermore, "Before moving over to the Justice Department and taking charge of the Promis program in September 1981," wrote In These Times, "Videnieks had administered three contracts between the Customs Service and Hadron…[Hadron] was in the business of integrating information-managing systems such as Promis into federal agencies."[10][nb 5]

Simultaneously with the withholding of payments in the 1983 Modification 12 agreement, the government then substituted the enhanced VAX version of Promis for the old Prime version originally specified in the contract. However, the government failed to negotiate the payment of license fees as promised, claiming that Inslaw had failed to prove to the government's satisfaction that Inslaw had developed the enhanced version with private, non-government funds and that the enhanced version was not otherwise required to be delivered to the government under any of its contracts with Inslaw—that is, Inslaw had provided it voluntarily.[6]

Yet beneath the surface of this background was a belief that the primary focus of certain top-level individuals within the DoJ was to perpetuate international, covert intelligence operations—for example, to enable Israeli signal intelligence to "surreptitiously access the computerized Jordanian dossiers on Palestinians."[7]

Enhanced Promis was eventually installed in a total of forty-four federal prosecutors' offices following the Modification 12 agreement.[nb 6]

Elliot Richardson alluded to Earl Brian's alleged involvement in an op-ed opinion in the New York Times.[15] Brian later sued, but lost.[16]

According to affidavits filed by William Hamilton, as the contract details were modified, Hamilton then received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chief executive of Hadron. Laiti wanted to buy Inslaw. Hamilton refused. According to Hamilton's affidavits, Laiti then warned him that Hadron had friends in government and if Inslaw did not want to sell willingly, Inslaw could be coerced.[3][6]

By February 1985, the government had withheld payment of almost $1.8 million for Inslaw's implementation services, plus millions of dollars in Old Promis license fees. Inslaw filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.[17] Meanwhile, the government began highly suspicious activities to force Inslaw into Chapter 7 liquidation.[11][6]