Page 130 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

for-profit status. His intention was to keep the upgraded version of PROMIS that Inslaw had paid
for and earmark a public domain version funded by a Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA) grant for the government. With 570,000 lines of code, PROMIS was
able to integrate innumerable databases without any reprogramming and thus turn mere data into
information.
With Reagan in the White House, his California cronies at the DOJ offered Inslaw a $9.6
million contract to install public-domain PROMIS in prosecutors’ offices, though it was really
the enhanced PROMIS that the good-old-boy network had set its sights on.
In February 1983, the chief of Israeli antiterrorism intelligence was sent to Inslaw under an
alias to see for himself the DEC VAX enhanced version. He recognized immediately that this
software would revolutionize Israeli intelligence and crush the Palestine Intifada. Enhanced
PROMIS could extrapolate nuclear submarine routes and destinations, track assets, trustees, and
judges. Not only that, but the conspirators had a CIA genius named Michael Riconosciuto who
could enhance the enhanced version one step further, once it was in their possession.
To install public domain PROMIS in ninety-four U.S. Attorney offices as per contract,
Inslaw had to utilize its enhanced PROMIS. The DOJ made its move, demanding temporary
possession of enhanced PROMIS as collateral to ensure that all installations were completed and
that only Inslaw money had gone into the enhancements. Naïvely, Hamilton agreed. The rest is
history: the DOJ delayed payments on the $9.6 million and drove Inslaw into bankruptcy. With
Edwin Meese III as Attorney General, the bankruptcy system was little more than a political
patronage system, anyway.
The enhanced PROMIS was then passed to the brilliant multivalent computer and chemical
5
genius Riconosciuto, son of CIA Agent Marshall Riconosciuto. Recruited at sixteen, Michael
had studied with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and co-inventor of the laser Arthur Shallo.
Michael was moved from Indio to Silver Springs to Miami as he worked to insert a chip that
would broadcast the contents of whatever database was present to collection satellites and
monitoring vans like the Google Street View van, using a digital spread spectrum to make the
signal look like computer noise. This Trojan horse would grant key-club access to the backdoor
of any person or institution that purchased PROMIS software—as long as the backdoor could be
kept secret.
Meanwhile, the drama between Hamilton and the conspirators at DOJ continued. A quiet
offer to buy out Inslaw was proffered by the investment banking firm Allen & Co., British
publisher (Daily Mirror) Robert Maxwell, the Arkansas corporation Systematics, and Arkansas
lawyer (and Clinton family friend) Webb Hubbell. Hamilton refused and filed a $50 million
lawsuit in bankruptcy court against the DOJ on June 9, 1986.
Bankruptcy Judge George F. Bason, Jr. ruled that the DOJ had indeed stolen PROMIS
through trickery, fraud, and deceit, and awarded Inslaw $6.8 million. He was unable to bring
perjury charges against government officials but recommended to the House Judiciary
Committee that it conduct a full investigation of the DOJ. The DOJ’s appeal failed, but the
Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed everything on a technicality.
Under then-President George H.W. Bush (1989–1993), Inslaw’s petition to the Supreme
Court in October 1991 was scorned. When the IRS lawyer requested that Inslaw be liquidated in
such a way that the U.S. Trustee program (AG Meese’s feeding trough between the DOJ and
IRS) could name the trustee who would convert the assets, oversee the auction, and retain the
appraisers, Judge Bason refused.
Under then-President William Jefferson Clinton (1993–2001), the Court of Federal Claims