Prosecutor's Management Information System
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The Prosecutor's Management Information System, or PROMIS, is a database system developed by American IT company Inslaw. Inslaw developed the earliest versions of PROMIS during the 1970s under contracts and grants from the United States Department of Justice that granted the government licenses to use those particular versions but not to modify them to create derivative works or to distribute them outside the federal government.
1980s
In March 1982, Inslaw won a competitive contract from the U.S. Justice Department to install, in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, a version of PROMIS to which the government already had a license. In April 1983, however, the Justice Department modified Inslaw's three-year PROMIS Implementation Contract to obtain delivery of a new version of PROMIS for which the government had never obtained a license. Under the modification, the government promised to pay license fees for the new version if it decided to substitute it for the version specified in the original contract.
In May 1983, the month after Inslaw delivered the new version to the government,the government began to find fault with some of Inslaw's services and negotiated billing rates and unilaterally to withhold each month increasing amounts of the payments due Inslaw for implementation services. At the same time, the government decided to substitute the new version of PROMIS for the version originally specified in the contract but refused to pay Inslaw for it, claiming that Inslaw had failed to prove to the government's satisfaction that Inslaw had developed the version with private, non-government funds and that the new version was not otherwise required to be delivered to the government under the contract.
By February 1985, the government had withheld payment of almost $1.8 million for Inslaw's implementation services, plus millions of dollars in PROMIS license fees, and Inslaw filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
In the late 1980s, two different federal courts issued fully litigated findings of fact that the April 1983 contract modification constituted a government fraud against Inslaw whereby the government "took, converted, stole" PROMIS from Inslaw "through trickery, fraud, and deceit," and then attempted "unlawfully and without justification" to force Inslaw out of business so it would be unable to seek restitution through the courts.
1990s
In September 1992, after the government had convinced a federal appellate court to set aside the decisions of the first two federal courts on a jurisdictional technicality but without reaching the merits of the dispute, the House Judiciary Committee published an Investigative Report. The Committee confirmed the government's theft of PROMIS and supplemented the earlier judicial finding with investigative leads indicating that friends of the Reagan White House had been allowed to sell and distribute the stolen PROMIS software domestically and overseas for their personal financial gain and in support of the intelligence and foreign policy objectives of the United States. The Committee called upon the Attorney General immediately to compensate Inslaw for the harm that the government had "egregiously" inflicted on Inslaw. The government ignored the recommendation.
In May 1995, the Senate ordered the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to determine if the United States owes Inslaw compensation for the government's use of PROMIS. In August 1998, the Chief Judge of the court sent an Advisory Report to the Senate stating that Inslaw owns the copyright to PROMIS and never granted the government a license to modify PROMIS to create derivative software. The Advisory Report further stated that the United States would be liable to Inslaw for copyright infringement damages if the government had created any unauthorized derivatives from PROMIS. That court has exclusive jurisdiction over copyright infringement claims against the government.
The government denied during the proceedings that it had ever modified PROMIS for applications in U.S. and foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies and banks, as Inslaw had been told.
In early 1999, Gordon Thomas, a British journalist and author, published an authorized history of the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency. The book, entitled Gideon's Spies: the Secret History of the Mossad, included extensive admissions about the theft and re-sale of PROMIS by the long-time former deputy director of the Mossad. He claimed that Israeli intelligence had collaborated with the U.S. Justice Department on the theft of PROMIS from Inslaw, that the FBI and CIA were among the agencies of the U.S. intelligence community that adapted PROMIS to track the intelligence information they produce, that U.S. intelligence also adapted PROMIS to track financial transactions in the banking sector, and that U.S. and Israeli intelligenec created a Trojan horse version of PROMIS and sold in excess of $500 million worth of that version to foreign intelligence agencies to spy on them.
In 2001,the The Washington Times and Fox News each published reports about PROMIS which they attributed to federal law enforcement and/or intelligence officials familiar with the debriefing of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, whom the FBI had arrested for espionage for the Soviet Union and Russia in February 2001. Each of these news reports stated that Hanssen had stolen for the Soviet KGB copies of the PROMIS-derivative software used in the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to keep track of the intelligence information they produce and copies of the PROMIS-derivative software that U.S. intelligence installed in banks to track the financial transactions of terrorists and others. Both news reports also stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of these software systems on the Russian black market for $2 million and that al Qaeda used the software to penetrate U.S. intelligence database systems so that it could move its funds through the banking system and so that it could evade detection and monitoring by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The government has never paid Inslaw for any of these unauthorized, copyright-infringing derivatives of PROMIS.
External links
- Inslaw/PROMIS
- The Inslaw Affair
- The INSLAW Octopus — an article on wired.com
- "The PROMIS software, used by police, is bugged"