PassingNotes.com

well, back from summer fantasy land and immediately hooked into this little conspiracy theory that bubbled up a while ago on socnet, the listserv of insna - comment had to do with the nsa’s foray into sna back in the 70’s through promis (the “prosecutor’s information management system”)…promis was authored and created by inslaw inc, a software co run by bill and nancy hamilton who both (according to legend) worked for the nsa…”In March 1982, the Department of Justice awarded INSLAW Inc., a $10 million, 3-year contract to implement a version of PROMIS to which the government had already obtained a license in the 22 largest United States Attorneys Offices.” (from wikipedia) - if you go to archive.org and plug in this page, http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/inslaw.html, you will find all of the house proceedings and hearings summaries (page went offline in early 2005, ain’t that odd?)

…the story actually got a lot more outlandish before it was all over, “In 2001, the Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement and/or intelligence officials familiar with the debriefing of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that Hanssen had stolen for the Soviet KGB copies of PROMIS-derivative software used within the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to track the intelligence information they produce, and used by U.S. intelligence within banks to track financial transactions. These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought copies of the same PROMIS-derivative software on the Russian black market for $2 million and al Qaeda used the software to penetrate U.S. intelligence database systems“…

…and the mystery of the whole story grew following the death of danny casolaro way back in 1991, a journalist who supposedly got way too close to the secrest surrounding the inslaw/promis scandal and wound up dead in a bathtub (a suicide never accepted by his own family who had been warned by danny himself that he might die mysteriously)…danny began to call this big conspiracy “the octopus” (now does it ring a bell? there was an entire book written about his research and his death by two other writers, the octopus: secret government and the death of danny casolaro ) - bill hamilton chimed in the whole thing back in 1991 (audio transcript of interview is online) and in 1993, wired magazine ran an astounding article about promis, the octopus, danny’s death and other findings which is now in their archives…

why is promis of so much interest, and what the fuck is my point here? well, for starters, promis has the ability to combine far flung databases and track people by their involvement with the legal system…but the legal proceedings revealed suspicion that the doj modified promis to monitor intelligence operations, agents, and other global operations - not legal cases (israel has reportedly used promis, as has oliver north, supposedly) - think dbases from the doj, fbi, and so on, and not plaintiffs (”The software has reportedly been mated in recent years with artificial intelligence. PROMIS has long been known to have been modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data.“) and in the year of potential economic downturns, i suspect that we’ll all be hearing more about “the war on terror” to distract our collectively pessimistic selves, a grinding broadcast distraction from the weltschmerz that might otherwise consume us all and in turn, we’ll begin to all see exactly what it means to use social network analysis on a grand scale, thanks to a lot of open information channels, watchful eyes, boredom with consumer-oriented social networking (not at all similar) and a general interest in understanding exactly what is being done with the amazing billions of dollars being spent on national security…maybe promis is still in heavy use, a fully web based version…maybe an open source project?

…or think again, does a web based promis already exist!? duh. if you’re already connecting online (think myspace), banking online, buying online and using a credit card and a cell phone and have an ‘on-the-grid’ address that ties to your domestic expenses (utilities, rent et al), then i suppose it might be even easier to tie these disparate databases together and pull in requests for information through a promis “permission level access” interface (think gov agency, or better yet, think about recent approval for domestic spying…now are you catching my drift?)…or am i off the wall here? is 2007 or 2008 the year when we start to instill a new virtue in our children, something about privacy, suggesting that it’s as important as not stealing, not lying and all of that other important stuff? seems that divine inspirations and thousands of years of text never saw this kind of information exchange coming, at least not with this type of wanton access privelege provided to a select group of folks…whatever, now i’m just fucking rambling on and on…try reading those complete links up above to get some more insight into what i’m talking about…

…so, do you worry about using so much of elgoog? is it worth thinking about?

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