[Nick Danger]

Islaw was a hot story once, and I'm sure someone made out in some interesting way, but software tinfoil has a very short shelf-life.

I wish it did have a short life, but alas, this one does not. The word "Promis" has become a Magic Word in the tinfoil community. This is primitive database software written for PDP-11's in the 1970's (and subsequently ported to many other minicomputer-class machines, now all extinct) that supposedly, in the hands of the intelligence agencies, has become a state-of-the-art Knows All Sees All piece of Internet-aware spyware that can peer into foreign banks and track the movements of bad guys.

Horsefeathers. It's a fill-in-the-blanks, field oriented, application generator. It's like Microsoft Access, except with the feature set of a 1970's ASCII-tube interface, and a flat file system instead of a relational database.

My humble opinion is that all articles about PROMIS that allege use after about 1990 belong in the Art Bell Wing of the Interesting Theories Museum.

[Poohbah]

Obviously Hamilton and Inslaw have been releasing upgrades to and new editions of the PROMIS package ever since the software was allegedly stolen and Inslaw went bankrupt.

Right. Sure.

Hanssen got two megabucks for a copy of PROMIS? Damn, I've got some "classified military simulations" (copies of Microprose's Red Storm Rising and F-19 Stealth Fighter for the Commodore 64) to peddle :o)

[general_re]

What the heck was the name of that reporter who was tracking down "the octopus"? Daniel something? The one who killed himself...err, sorry - the one who was murdered by the shadow government....

And why are we suddenly digging up Reagan-era conspiracies? Have we run out of new ones?

[MattAMiller]

Thank you Nick. I was somehow under the impression that this was some sort of data-mining software and that it was of much, much more recent vintage. That made some of this sound plauible.