But Hamilton would never see another federal contract.ĭesigned as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. The eventual market for complete automation of the Federal court system was staggering: as much as $3 billion, according to Bill Hamilton. If successful, the company would install PROMIS in the remaining 74 federal prosecutors' offices around the country. He told an April 1981 gathering of prosecutors that PROMIS was "one of the greatest opportunities for success in the future." In March 1982, Inslaw won a $9.6 million contract from the Justice Department to install the public domain version of PROMIS in 20 US Attorney's offices as a pilot program. free!Įdwin Meese was apparently quite taken with PROMIS. That means the software is public domain. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.Īlong comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. Sound like a conspiracy theorist's dream? Absolutely. This is the case that won't go away, the case that shows how justice and public service gave way to profit and political expediency, how those within the administration's circle of privilege were allowed to violate private property and civil rights for their own profit. But one truth is obvious: What the Inslaw case presents, in its broadest possible implications, is a painfully clear snapshot of how the Justice Department operated during the Reagan-Bush years. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.Įach new set of allegations leads to a new set of possibilities, which makes the story still more difficult to comprehend. That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Brian, Meese's business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese. And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian's 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word "misappropriated"). What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. Ben Orr left the DOJ on May 6, 1983, with a computer tape containing PROMIS tucked under his arm. Department of Justice documents record that one Dr. The Department of Justice sent him over for a look at the property they were about to "misappropriate," and Etian liked what he saw. Orr, it was of Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli defense force's anti-terrorism intelligence unit. But for Hamilton, who has fought the Department of Justice (DOJ) for almost 10 years in an effort to salvage his business, once his co- workers recognized the man in the second photo, it all made perfect sense.įor the second photo was not of the mysterious Dr. Orr never came back, and he never bought anything.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |