dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

>>6964648

Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems).

Why #1:

The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early ’80s.

Why #2:

Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

By late November, 1992 the nation had turned its attention from the election-weary capital to Little Rock, Ark., where a new generation of leaders conferred about the future. But in a small Washington D.C. office, Bill Hamilton, president and founder of Inslaw Inc., and Dean Merrill, a former Inslaw vice president, were still very much concerned about the past.

The two men studied six photographs laid out before them. “Have you ever seen any of these men?” Merrill was asked. Immediately he singled out the second photo. In a separate line up, Hamilton’s secretary singled out the same photo.

Both said the man had visited Inslaw in February 1983 for a presentation of PROMIS, Inslaw’s bread-and-butter legal software. Hamilton, who knew the purpose of the line-up, identified the visitor as Dr. Ben Orr. At the time of his visit, Orr claimed to be a public prosecutor from Israel.

Orr was impressed with the power of PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems), which had recently been updated by Inslaw to run on powerful 32-bit VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corp. “He fell in love with the VAX version,” Hamilton recalled.

Dr. Orr never came back, and he never bought anything. No one knew why at the time. But for Hamilton, who has fought the Department of Justice (DOJ) for almost 10 years in an effort to salvage his business, once his co- workers recognized the man in the second photo, it all made perfect sense.

For the second photo was not of the mysterious Dr. Orr, it was of Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli defense force’s anti-terrorism intelligence unit. The Department of Justice sent him over for a look at the property they were about to “misappropriate,” and Etian liked what he saw. Department of Justice documents record that one Dr. Ben Orr left the DOJ on May 6, 1983, with a computer tape containing PROMIS tucked under his arm.

What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian’s 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word “misappropriated”). And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese.

A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising “serious concerns” that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee’s call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently “lost” by the Department of Justice.

https://archive.org/details/RobertMaxwellIsraelsSuperspy