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Did government greed and bureaucratic hubris lead to a wholesale sellout of our national security? The Bush White House's credibility is on the line.

The second sentence may be exaggerated, but the first is fair enough.

See that good looking dude on the left? He's got FAR BETTER THINGS to do than conduct Freepathons! Come on, let's get this thing over with.

One problem with the PROMIS scenario is the allegation that this 1986-vintage software has somehow kept pace with American technological advancements-- an obvious prerequisite if it is to be a threat in any way that benefits bad guys like Saddam.

Think about it: for starters, in the years in which it was formulated and for much of a decade afterwards, there was no public Internet. Now, how valuable would "tracking" software be if it had no knowledge of this fundamental latter-day communications medium? Or ethernet or LANs or client-server architectures or firewalls or routers or RAID arrays or NAT or ISPs or all the other paraphernalia of computerdom that has emerged in recent years and which it would have to grasp and penetrate to be of value to the bad guys. Or email or web pages or ftp sites or instant messengers or any of the other tools that have been built to facilitate the movement of data, commerce and people. Or... well, you get the picture. Just take a quick look around your desk, den or family room: they're stuffed--stuffed!--with gizmos that would seem like sheerest black magic to the programmers of PROMIS.

So this antique, unsupported software is supposed to be a threat through some "back door" that somehow lets its bad-guy users peek at the good-guys' knowledgebase and movements?

And what of the hardware it is supposed to run on? Anyone try running a copy of Wordstar on their PC lately? It plain won't run--you'll be lucky to escape the attempt without a reboot--and even if you could get it running through some miracle of reconfiguration, it probably wouldn't work with printers sold in the last ten years. And while I haven't researched it, presumably PROMIS is minicomputer--not PC--software, running on something like a DEC PDP-11 or VAX. Try to buy a mini nowadays, or get an old one supported. Or even find the 8" floppy disks, Hollerith cards or hulking Winchester disk-packs used as media for such beasts. The last refurb house for big disk-packs that I'm aware of went out of business over a year ago. Its last customer was the U.S. Government and its creaking air-traffic-control system... I'm sure any other customer for such equipment would have raised much curiosity, especially if it involved support for systems in Kabul or Baghdad.

So this whole tale depends on the wild notion of Saddam et fils taking clandestine possession of a piece of antediluvian software with no connectivity, no support of recent hardware, no compatibility with recent operating systems or network architectures, probably no graphics and with an obscure text-oriented user interface, running on obsolete computers whose makers stopped supporting them years ago and may no longer be in existence.

It's a fascinating story, but more fascinating is the credulity of those who perpetuate it as a scandal without questioning these obvious technical potholes.

Saddam and bin Laden huddling in a bunker using PROMIS in hopes of hacking into our intelligence and financial nets? We should be so lucky. The frustration would kill 'em faster than we could.

The House Judiciary Committee also found in 1992 that there was "strong evidence" the Justice Department had conspired to steal the PROMIS program.

PROMIS-Inslaw ping!

The Inslaw/Promise scandal is a blot against Fedgov. The deeper you look at it, the dirtier it gets. It is vivid example of serious corruption in our government.

It will never be admitted to by the government or seriously investigated by the press though, because it would expose the dark side of the finances of both republicans and democrats at the highest levels of our government. The media won't touch it either except very peripherally.