[wordup] Promis Software - Bin Laden's Magic Carpet

[Adam Shand]

more from that whacky ufo site ...

Via: Dan <daniel at spack.org>
From: http://www.rense.com/general17/maf.htm

Promis Software - Bin Laden's Magic Carpet
By Anita Sands <astrology at earthlink.net>
12-7-1

An October 16 FOX News report by correspondent Carl Cameron indicating
that convicted spy, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, had provided a highly
secret computer software program called Promis to Russian organized crime
figures - who in turn reportedly sold it to Osama bin Laden - may signal a
potential intelligence disaster for the United States. Admissions by the
FBI and Justice in the FOX story that they have discontinued use of the
software are most certainly a legal disaster for a government that has
been engaged in a 16-year battle with the software's creator, William
Hamilton, CEO of the Inslaw Corporation. Over those 16 years, in response
to lawsuits filed by Hamilton charging that the government had stolen the
software from Inslaw, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice have
denied, in court and under oath, ever using the software.

Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis software was clearly reported in
a June 15, 2001 story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper. That story
went unnoticed by the major media. In it Seper wrote, "The software
delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according
to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as
Promis - developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to
give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads. It would give
bin Laden the ability to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal
law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on
specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor
electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for
himself or others, according to sources."

In a series of excellent stories by The Times, and as confirmed by parts
of the FOX broadcast, it appears that Hanssen, who was arrested in
February, in order to escape the death penalty this summer, agreed to
provide the FBI and other intelligence agencies with a full accounting of
his sale of Promis overseas. Reports state that almost until the moment of
his capture, Hanssen was charged with "repairing" and upgrading versions
of the software used by Britain and Germany.

On October 17, two different spokespersons at the FBI's Office of Public
Affairs told FTW, "The FBI has discontinued use of the Promis software."
The spokespersons declined to give their names.

On October 24, Department of Justice spokesperson Loren Pfeifle declined
to answer any questions about where, when or how Promis had been used and
would say only, "I can only confirm that the DoJ has discontinued use of
the program."

Inslaw had two limited contracts to provide Promis to Justice in 1982 and
1983. Neither application had anything to do with tracking terrorist
activities. Hamilton's suits charged that Reagan Administration officials,
including Edwin Meese, pirated the software, modified it for intelligence
and financial uses and made millions by selling it to the governments of
Israel, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and other friendly nations. After
the installation of a CIA-created "back door" into the program, Israel,
using its lifelong Mossad agent Robert Maxwell, reportedly sold the
software to "unfriendly" nations and then secretly retrieved priceless
intelligence data.

The statements of FBI and Justice sources in the FOX story on October 16
have made Hamilton's case. They also give but the barest hint of the
security breaches that may now be helping the most wanted man in the
world. Bin Laden's reported possession of Promis may also explain the
alleged threatening messages that were received by President Bush while
aboard Air Force One on September 11th.

A mild uproar erupted in the days after the WTC attacks when Presidential
aide Carl Rove indicated that threatening calls had been placed to Air
Force One just hours after the attacks while President Bush was onboard.
Some journalists excoriated Rove for suggested that bin Laden might have a
mole in the White House who could have given bin Laden the secure codes to
reach the aircraft in flight.

Bin Laden's possession of Promis would provide a possible explanation.
According to Hamilton, under the right circumstances, Promis could have
enabled the threatening calls to be made. "I have no way of knowing
whether any Promis-related base has dial-up access to Air Force One. But
if that happens, and if you have Promis, it's a straightforward thing to
do. But one would still need to have access to the targeting computer.

"There is a central locator system to track members of the National
Command Authority 24/7. If that is a database created with Promis and if
anyone had access you could do it."

Such a penetration using Promis might also explain why Vice President Dick
Cheney was hurriedly whisked out of sight and reportedly taken to a secure
underground facility, where he reportedly works to this day. Cheney's
prolonged absences from the public eye would also be explained by such a
breach of security.

Numerous news stories, books and investigative reports, including a
September 2000 story in FTW (Vol. III, No.7), spanning nearly two decades,
have established that Promis holds unique abilities to track terrorists.
The software has also, according to numerous sources including Hamilton,
been modified with artificial intelligence and developed in parallel for
the world's banking systems to track money movements, stock trades and
other financial dealings. Systematics - since purchased by Alltel - an
Arkansas financial and technical firm headed by billionaire Jackson
Stephens, has often been reported as the primary developer of Promis for
financial intelligence use. Systematics through its various evolutions had
been a primary supplier of software used in inter-bank and international
money transfers for many years.  Attorneys who have been connected to
Systematics and Promis include Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton and the
late Vince Foster.

If true, and if claims by the FBI and the Department of Justice that they
have "recently" discontinued the use of Promis are accurate, the
likelihood than bin Laden may have compromised the systems the U.S.
government and its allies use to track him is high. Additional information
in the FOX broadcast indicating that Britain stopped using the software
just three months ago and that Germany stopped using the software just
weeks ago are equally disturbing. These are mission-critical systems
requiring years of development. What has replaced them? And even if the
U.S. government has replaced the software given to its allies with newer
programs - several of which FTW knows to be in existence - the FOX report
clearly implies that bin Laden and Associates have had ample time to get
highly secret intelligence data from both Britain and Germany. Those
systems might, in turn, have compromised U.S. systems. The WTC attacks had
- by all reckoning - been in the works for years, and bin Laden would
certainly have known that the U.S. would be looking for him afterwards.

What is Promis and what does it do?

Promis stands for Prosecutor's Management Information System.

In the late 1970s the legal system of the United States Department of
Justice (DoJ) was comprised of more than thirty semi-autonomous regional
U.S. Attorneys (USA) offices. Each had a computer system to track case
management for prosecutions, investigations, and civil litigations. The
problem was that they used as many as seven different programming
languages. This made the transmission and sharing of information between
offices virtually impossible. The computers in the USA's office in San
Francisco could not read files sent from the USA in New York.

The genius of Hamilton and Inslaw was to create a software program that
could access files in any number of databases and programming languages
and translate and then unify them into one consistent file. Promis was the
Rosetta stone of computer languages.

Inslaw won a $10 million, three-year contract in March 1982 to install a
16-bit architecture version of Promis, which the government had the right
to use but not the right to modify without paying license fees to Inslaw,
on government computers in the 22 largest U.S. Attorneys' Offices. In
April 1983, the second year of the three-year contract, the government
modified Inslaw's contract in order to obtain delivery of a 32-bit
architecture version of Promis, which the government could not even use
without paying license fees. In modifying the contract, the government
promised to pay license fees if it decided to substitute the 32-bit
version for the 16-bit version. In May 1983, the month following Inslaw's
delivery of the 32-bit version of Promis, the government reneged on its
contractual agreement to pay license fees and simultaneously began to find
fault with Inslaw's implementation services as justification for
withholding services payments.

The Justice Department thereafter withheld $1.77 million in services
payments forcing Inslaw to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in
February 1985.

In January 1988, following several weeks of trial in 1987, the U.S.
Bankruptcy Court issued fully litigated findings of fact that the Justice
Department "took, converted, stole" the 32-bit version of Promis "through
trickery, fraud and deceit," implemented the 32-bit version of Promis in
the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices, and then tried to force INSLAW out
of business in order to incapacitate INSLAW from litigating the Justice
Department's theft of Promis. The Bankruptcy Court imposed a compulsory
license on the 44 largest U.S. Attorneys Offices for the perpetual use of
the 32-bit version of Promis and issued a permanent injunction against any
further dissemination of Promis by the government except under license
from Inslaw.

Subsequent appeals by the government saw the original rulings overturned
on legal, not factual, grounds. Legal actions in the case continue to this
day. Hamilton told FTW that none of the uses described above had anything
to do with any licensing agreements for the software's use to track
terrorists, intelligence matters or worldwide financial transactions.

The paper tracking of the refinements in Promis after the legal dispute
erupted between INSLAW and the Reagan administration, verifies that at
least one version of Promis was given to Martin Marietta, now
Lockheed-Martin, which is now the nation's second largest defense
contractor. Until late 2000, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick
Cheney sat on Lockheed's board of directors. Research conducted by many
investigative journalists has indicated that Promis has spread widely
throughout the defense contractor network. FTW has received multiple
reports of Promis use by companies and institutions like DynCorp,
Raytheon, Boeing, SAIC and the Harvard Endowment as well as by government
agencies such as the Financial Criminal Enforcement Network (FINCEN) and
the U.S. Treasury.

Here's how powerful the software is.

Approximately two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled
"The History of Terrorism." In that documentary, a law enforcement officer
described some of the methods used to track terrorist movements. He stated
that "computers" were able to track such things as credit card purchases,
entry and exits visas, telephone and utility usage etc. It was implied
that these diverse data base files could be integrated into one unified
table. He gave an example that through the use of such a system it would
be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country
and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical
consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible
to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility
use increased.

Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the
move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns
were interrupted. Aren't those "club" cards from your supermarket handy?

This is but the barest glimpse of what Promis can do. Mated with
artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an
individual's, but also a community's entire life, in real time. It is also
capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting
future movements based upon past behavior.

In the financial arena Promis is even more formidable. Not only is it
capable of predicting movements in financial markets and tracking trades
in real time. It has been reported, on a number of occasions, to have been
used, via the "back door" to enter secret bank accounts, including
accounts in Switzerland and then remove the money in those accounts
without being traced. Court documents filed in the various INSLAW trials
include documentation of this ability as well as affidavits and
declarations from Israeli intelligence officers and assets.

The one essential weakness of Promis is that it must be physically
installed on a targeted computer for it to be effective. Hence, if Osama
bin Laden is able to penetrate a U.S. Government system it must mean that
Promis is there.

FTW has previously reported that the CIA uses Promis to track stock trades
in real time. Thus, as described in FTW stories on insider trading
directly connected to the September 11 attacks, the Agency had the ability
to determine that immediate impending attacks were planned against both
American and United Air Lines. The Israeli Herzliyya Institute for
Counterterrorism was able to publish a detailed accounting of the trades
within days of the attacks and their report underscores the connection
between counterterrorist efforts and the monitoring of financial markets.
[See FTW Vol. IV, No 7 - Oct. 15, 2001] Suspicions of CIA advance
knowledge of the attacks were heightened when FTW disclosed that the
current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy"  Krongard was, until
1998, the CEO of A.B. Brown, the company which handled many of the
suspicious trades.

All of these abilities were a given when this writer met with members of
the RCMP National Security Investigation Section in the summer of 2000.
Our meetings were reported in the Toronto Star and are described in the
previously referenced issue of FTW. A key question that lingered after the
meetings with the RCMP was how many versions of the software had the CIA
and the U.S. government given out and might they not have been also using
a back door against "friendly" nations for economic motives to give
advantage to U.S. companies. It was not a question that the RCMP dismissed
as unlikely.

FOX news reported that Osama bin Laden once boasted that his youth "knew
the wrinkles of the world's financial markets like the back of their hands
and that his money would never be frozen." He may be right. And an
administration so lost in covering up criminal conduct - no less than the
conduct of the ones which preceded it -- while trying to fight a war at
the same time -- might find itself doubly wounded by the software of Bill
Hamilton and Inslaw.