PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) was a case management software developed by

Inslaw Inslaw, Inc. is a Washington, D.C. based information technology company that markets case management software for corporate and government users. Inslaw is known for developing PROMIS, an early case management software system. It is also known ...

(formerly the Institute for Law and Social Research), a non-profit organization established in 1973 by Bill and Nancy Hamilton.Steve Ditlea
In New French Best-Seller, Software Meets Espionage
''New York Times'' (June 20, 1997). The software program was developed with aid from the

Law Enforcement Assistance Administration The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) was a U.S. federal agency within the United States Department of Justice. It administered federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies and funded educational programs, research, s ...

to aid prosecutors' offices in tracking; in 1982 (by which time Inslaw became a for-profit entity) Inslaw received a $10 million contract by the Justice Department to develop an improved PROMIS application for U.S. attorneys' offices. Having previously developed a

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mo ...

version of PROMIS, Inslaw developed a 32-bit version, for various operating systems, specifically

VAX/VMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

, OS/400, and (in the 1990s)

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

. The Hamiltons and the Justice Department engaged in an "unusually bitter contract dispute" over the software, and Inslaw entered bankruptcy. The Hamiltons sued the federal government, alleging that the Justice Department had dishonestly conspired to "drive Inslaw out of business 'through trickery, fraud and deceit'" by withholding payments to Inslaw and then pirating the software.Jeffrey A. Frank
The Inslaw File
''Washington Post'' (June 14, 1992). A

bankruptcy court United States bankruptcy courts are courts created under Article I of the United States Constitution. The current system of bankruptcy courts was created by the United States Congress in 1978, effective April 1, 1984. United States bankruptcy c ...

and

federal district court The United States district courts are the trial courts of the U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each federal judicial district, which each cover one U.S. state or, in some cases, a portion of a state. Each district cou ...

agreed with the Hamiltons, although these rulings were later vacated by a court of appeals for jurisdictional reasons. Hamilton and others asserted that the Justice Department had done so in order to modify PROMIS, originally created to manage legal cases, to become a monitoring software for intelligence operations. Affidavits created over the course of the Inslaw affair stated that "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 Edwin Meese III (born December 2, 1931) is an American attorney, law professor, author and member of the Republican Party who served in official capacities within the Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial administration (1967–1974), the Reagan pre ...

."Richard L. Fricker
The INSLAW Octopus
''Wired'' (January 1, 1993). In September 1992, a House Judiciary Committee report raised "serious concerns" that Justice Department officials had schemed "to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software" and had misappropriated the software. The report was the outgrowth of a three-year investigation led by Jack Brooks, the committee's chairman, who had launched in investigation in 1989. The report faulted the Justice Department for a lack of cooperation in the investigation and found that "There appears to be strong evidence, as indicated by the findings in two Federal Court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice 'acted willfully and fraudulently,' and 'took, converted and stole,' Inslaw's Enhanced PROMIS by 'trickery fraud and deceit.'" A book written in 1997 by Fabrizio Calvi and Thierry Pfister claimed that the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collect ...

(NSA) had been "seeding computers abroad with PROMIS-embedded SMART (Systems Management Automated Reasoning Tools) chips, code-named Petrie, capable of covertly downloading data and transmitting it, using electrical wiring as an antenna, to U.S. intelligence satellites" as part of an espionage operation. In the early 1980s,

Manucher Ghorbanifar Manucher Ghorbanifar ( fa, منوچهر قربانی‌فر; nicknamed Gorba, born May 9, 1945) is an expatriate Iranian arms dealer and former SAVAK agent. According to the ''Washington Report on Middle East Affairs'', Ghorbanifar was a double a ...

and

Adnan Khashoggi Adnan Khashoggi ( ar, عدنان خاشقجي, ‘Adnān Khāshuqjī; 25 July 1935 – 6 June 2017) was a Saudi businessman and arms dealer known for his lavish business deals and lifestyle. He was estimated to have had a peak net worth of ...

both had facilitated the transaction of PROMIS software to Khalid bin Mahfouz, a prominent Saudi billionaire. The media mogul and alleged Israeli spy

Robert Maxwell Ian Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor, member of parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster. Early in his life, Maxwell escaped from ...

was involved in selling the PROMIS software.

References

{{Reflist National Security Agency 1970s software Computer surveillance Reagan administration controversies Robert Maxwell

Further reading

See also

References