Firm says stolen software helped bin Laden plot 9/11 (PROMIS CHARGES APPARENTLY CORROBORATED)

The Washington Times ^ | January 6, 2003 | Jerry Seper

[aristeides]

There's something else that's strange about the D.C. Circuit reversing the lower courts, since they did it on the basis of a technical interpretation of a provision of the Bankruptcy Code. I'm a tax lawyer, and my experience is that the federal circuit courts seldom reverse the Tax Court on a tax issue, since they figure the judges on the Tax Court have more expertise on tax law than they have. As I've said, I'm no bankruptcy lawyer, but I'd be very surprised if they don't treat bankruptcy judges the same way. It was daring for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the courts below on a technical matter of bankruptcy law.

[aristeides]

There's something fishy about Gray going after his former colleagues.

I suppose it's possible that the conspiracy has assigned Gray the task of keeping tabs on Hamilton and Inslaw.

[Poohbah]

And, of course, no one's ever gone and filed bogus documents with the courts or with Congress.

The problems with this story are legion--media escrows were in use way back in the 1970s (the Navy used them with NTDS/ACDS development). INSLAW would have known about the concept, but they never even recommended doing so. It reads like a badly written Grisham thriller (which is just about any Grisham thriller).

Bottom line: as far as I can tell, this story is, to use a cavalry term of ancient and honorable pedigree, "all horses**t and no gunsmoke."

[Nick Danger]

enough science fiction writing for tonight

Indeed. To someone unfamiliar with computers, that may all sound amazing, but "computer people" would recognize those capabilities as the features of any off-the-shelf DBMS. Hamilton deserves credit for having created such a thing as early as he did. He and Dick Pick might have been the only guys selling such a thing back then; the mainframers were still doing ISAM files in those days.

There is one claim in there that is absolute science fiction:

PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information.

In a word: bullsh*t. Here's a 32-bit integer. What is it? Is it big-endian or little-endian? Is that a value? Is it a date? Is it a categorical? Is it a record number in another table? Which table? PROMIS figures this out by itself? Yeah, sure it does... on Star Trek. But not on Earth, and not now. People who work in data analysis shops have to fight that battle every day. There's no automated anything that does that. It's drudgery, and only humans can do it, because it requires guesses and intution.

[general_re]

The following facts seem to suggest that these are not just lies: (1) Seper and his editor thought the story worth reporting; (2) Boyden Gray is representing Inslaw; and (3) the Bankruptcy Court ruled in INSLAW's favor, In re Inslaw, 88 B.R. 484 (Bankr. D.C. 1988), the District Court affirmed, the D.C. Circuit unusually reversed on a mandamus motion, and Bankruptcy Judge Bason was strangely not reappointed to a new term.

The trouble is, all of those facts can be perfectly true (I did see your corrections), and still not support the particular conclusion being offered - it's not so much a matter of what the facts are, but what the proper interpretation of the facts is.

By way of an analogy, consider the following (intentionally goofy) example that I saw posted once. One, the government owns satellites. Two some of those satellites are controlled by the intelligence community, including the CIA. Three, yesterday my dog bit me. Therefore, CIA-controlled goverment satellites made my dog bite me.

The problem with that argument is not the facts on display - each of them is perfectly true (well, not the part about my dog biting me, but we can easily imagine that to be true). The problem is that they don't really support the conclusion that's being reached - indeed, they don't really support any sort of "conclusion" at all.

Or, to reframe that sort of argument in a composite of several arguments I've seen advanced over the last year or two, consider this one. One, Prince Bandar is a customer of the investment firm of Morgan Stanley. Two, Prince Bandar is a Saudi. Three, Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. Four, some Morgan Stanley competitors were damaged or greatly harmed in the WTC attack. Therefore, Morgan Stanley participated in the planning and execution of the attack on the WTC on 9/11. Well, you're not going to question my facts, are you? ;)

Well, maybe they did conspire to do such a thing - who knows? But the point is that these facts, perfectly true though they are, don't come close to establishing the conclusion that we're asked to accept. Was there a conspiracy regarding Inslaw and PROMIS? Well, there's not much evidence of one so far...

[general_re]

But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code...

Staggering. Well, twenty years ago, anyway - I can think of several software projects off the top of my head that are easily an order of magnitude larger these days ;)

[Poohbah]

570,000? Hell, that's FreeCell or Spider Solitaire.

[Tenega]

DOJ has the source code. So did Jackson Stephens' Beverly Enterprises, which acquired the software from Inslaw as an apparent front buyer for Systematics, the NSA bank software purveyor.

PROMIS was originally developed at taxpayer expense as a public domain system. But when LEAA funds ran out in the early 1980s, Inslaw continued its work on a proprietary basis on the assumption it would retain the rights to its enhancements. Therein is the problem: All subsequent modifiations of PROMIS, if it was wrongly appropriated by DOJ, remain tainted with an ownership claim by Inslaw.

Since PROMIS became a key element of FOIMS and COINS, it has become embedded in legacy government computer systems that keep on being upgraded. As long as the government refuses to settle up with Inslaw (which would require admitting it stole proprietary work), the meter keeps ticking. Hence, the US Government, through AT&T, effectively drove Inslaw into bankruptcy after Hamilton refused to take a cheesey buyout offer from Earl Brian's Hadron, which would have used funds essentially laundered through Herb Allen's Allen & Co at the behest of guess who: Web Hubble. You see how complex this is and what a who's who of corruption has blood on its hands from this one.

The great outrage is that politically-connected private individuals and companies feeding at the public trough were able somehow to sell copies of PROMIS to foreign companies, banks and intelligence agencies for their own huge profit. In some cases, this appears to have been a payoff for other dirty work these people were doing, such as Robert Maxwell. And to the extent this much-hyped software was bugged with "back doors," it served as a Trojan horse for our side. If Hanssen was indeed guilty of such profiteering, he joins a stellar cast of others who have preceeded him.

[Plummz]

duh

[Nick Danger]

since PROMIS only ran on DEC hardware, everything was big-endian

Actually, PROMIS ran on a lot of different hardware. But it doesn't matter what hardware it's on, the claim was that PROMIS could import "blind data" from someplace else. That 'someplace else' might have been little-endian. It might have been using EBCDIC, or Unicode. The character strings might be Chinese ideographs, or Cyrillic, or Arabic. To make the claim that this is the Amazing Software that "turns blind data into information" is ludicrous.

BTW, most of the Spook agencies I know about use Oracle for this kind of stuff. Things have moved on since the 1970's. But that's OK, maybe now we can have articles from the Tinfoil Press about how Oracle is 'spyware' that 'tracks people.'

[Uncle Bill]

Who is Janis Sposato? - by Michelle Malkin
"The Clinton administration appreciated Sposato's creative management so much that it awarded her a total of $82,700 in cash bonuses.

Sposato's other claim to fame is far more troubling. In 1987, a federal judge blasted the Justice Department for stealing a private software system called PROMIS used by prosecutors to manage their cases. PROMIS was developed and enhanced by a tiny company called Inslaw, Inc. Sposato, then top ethics cop at the Justice Management Division, was singled out by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge George F. Bason Jr. He lambasted Sposato for dealing "so casually with the repeated serious allegations of outrageous conduct" by a senior Justice official who oversaw contract issues involving PROMIS. That official, C. Madison Brewer, was a disgruntled ex-employee of Inslaw with a huge conflict of interest in the matter.

The government, Judge Bason said, stole Inslaw's software through "trickery, fraud, and deceit" with "contempt for both the law and any principle of fair dealing." Sposato's involvement, the judge said, "can be charitably described as willful blindness to the obvious." Yet, Sposato suffered no reprisal.

"As for PROMIS, Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper reported in June 2001 that former FBI agent and convicted spy Robert Hanssen sold an enhanced version to Russian crime figures, who in turn are suspected of selling it to Osama bin Laden, who could be using it to monitor financial transactions and intelligence-gathering efforts.

"Perfect. This game-playing career bureaucrat, faulted by a judge for looking the other way while the government allegedly pirated software that may be in the hands of murderous al Qaeda operatives, has now been promoted as a symbol of the INS's commitment to accountability in the war on terrorism.

"Quandaries": It's more than just a Justice Department video game. It's a living national security nightmare.

---

Meow

[tang-soo]

According to Jim Norman (who was fired from Forbes Magazine as editor when he tried to publish some of this info), PROMIS may very well have laid at the foot of all the mysterious number of resignations from the House and Senate during the mid 90s. i.e. as further described by Orlin Grabbe, intel community hackers had used PROMIS to uncover evidence of massive bribes made to these members. They were asked to "make more time available to spend with their families or pursue other career opportunities, or run the risk of being exposed. Grabbe described the person behind all this as The Angel of Death aka as revealed a few years later as former CIA agent Charles Hayes.

Also, according to James Keith (who died of 'complications' while recovery from ankle surgey) author of "Octopus" (the story of Danny Casolaro whos notes he used) Michael Riconosciuto helped make the enhanced modifications to PROMIS. His name also pops up in the Ok City story.

Some key words that come to mind that encircle the PROMIS story include ... Vince Foster, Systematics, Altel, Stephens Brothers, Earl Brian, Ed Meese, Michael Riconosciuto, J. Orlin Grabbe, James Norman, Casper Weinberger, Cabazon Indian Reservation, Wackenhut Security, Terry Reed, BCCI, Nuga Hand Bank, Elliot Richardson, Mena, Seth Ward, Webb Hubbell. Do a google search on some of these terms and you will be quite busy.

[Eroteme]

Thanks for the ping.

[aristeides]

Inslaw appears still to be in business and working on software.

[LayoutGuru2]

PROMIS exists, download a copy here:

http://www.csrd.uiuc.edu/promis/home.html

/smirk/

[aristeides]

Thanks for the link. How did it happen that PROMIS was taken over by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign?

[Uncle Bill]

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Bill Hamilton, President

INSLAW 1125 15th Street,
NW Washington, DC
20005-2707

Telephone: 202-828-8600
Fax: 202-659-0755